OPINION:
At about 8:50 p.m. on Wednesday above Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, a commercial airliner collided with a military helicopter, killing everyone on both aircraft.
Not an hour later, as emergency crews were still desperately trying to rescue a small number of survivors among dead bodies in the Potomac River, a handful of Democrat partisans in government and media had seen enough and began to draw a conclusion.
It was President Trump’s fault, they insanely decided.
Remember that details of the catastrophe were still coming in at the time, and very little was known about what led American Airlines Flight 5342, inbound from Wichita, Kansas, with 60 passengers and four crew, to meet midair with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter, which reportedly carried three soldiers.
That didn’t stop a few disgusting partisan vultures from deciding that their main political opponent was personally responsible for the crash. They followed their intense hatred of the man who had been president for all nine days, and they outright lied about what might have led to the calamity.
Much of their focus was on one of Mr. Trump’s executive orders, which froze hiring in the federal workforce. Some shared images of a congressional Democratic press release ludicrously criticizing the hiring freeze as “dangerous.” They alleged it blocked the hiring of new air traffic controllers, even though the record clearly shows that it did not.
One of the first out of the gate was David Freedlander, of New York and Politico magazines, who posted the press release on X just 55 minutes after the disaster. He wrote ominously, “Eight days ago Trump issued an executive order freezing the hiring of air traffic controllers.”
CNN commentator Bakari Sellers did the same not long afterward, saying simply, “8 days ago,” above a screenshot of the release. (He deleted the post after a tidal wave of criticism.)
Rep. Norma Torres, California Democrat, posted something similar above the press release, saying, “Praying for families and demanding answers.”
Except the president had not done what they were claiming. He had issued an executive order instituting a hiring freeze of civilian employees across the executive branch while specifically exempting certain areas.
“This order does not apply to military personnel of the armed forces or to positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety,” the order stated in the first sentence of the second paragraph. The White House has confirmed to me directly that air traffic controllers are, of course, in the public safety category and were, therefore, not subject to the freeze.
Let’s imagine for a minute that they were and that the federal government is not hiring air traffic controllers. Do these partisans truly believe someone can be hired, trained and on the job at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in just a week and a day?
The lie is obvious; anyone who pushed it should never be taken seriously again.
The nonsense didn’t stop there.
Serial disinformationist Aaron Rupar, whose name has become an entry in the Urban Dictionary (look it up — it means “to purposely mislead”), usually clips Republicans out of context and posts videos on X as ammunition for bad-faith Democrats to use. On this night, he posted a completely unrelated and irrelevant Associated Press story from more than a week earlier to fan anti-Trump sentiment just an hour and seven minutes after the incident.
The ridiculous insinuation intended by posting the story was that replacing the head of the Transportation Security Administration — which has nothing to do with air traffic control — and dissolving something called the Aviation Security Advisory Committee somehow caused the helicopter to fly into the passenger jet just over a week later.
It’s nonsense, heartless and irresponsible, especially coming from the side of the ideological spectrum that proclaims to be a defender of the truth.
Not to be outdone, CNN anchor Abby Phillip concluded a segment less than two hours after the crash by somberly implicating the new administration.
“Look, it’s January 29th. We are just nine days out from a presidential transition, an administrative transition,” she said. “The [Federal Aviation Administration] administrator resigned at the end of the Biden administration, so there is no permanent confirmed FAA administrator right now.”
Is that clear enough? The name on the door says Trump, so everything bad must be his fault.
Lost on all of them was that while they were busy assigning blame where it didn’t belong, untold numbers of people were fearing that someone dear to them had inexplicably been taken away forever. That’s the tragedy these partisans failed to see because their brains are fogged by searing political hatred.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and the founder and principal of Line Drive Public Affairs. He served as a senior adviser on the 2024 Trump campaign and as communications director on the 2020 Trump campaign.
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