The day following the first fatal US commercial airline crash in 16 years, President Trump appeared on-camera at the White House. After offering appropriate condolences and uplifting words, he shifted to the offensive, assailing Obama- and Biden-era policies, ripping into DEI within the federal aviation realm, and blasting recently-departed Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for having "a good line of bullish*t," while lacking competence. Many observers -- even including some of Trump's own voters and supporters -- saw the latter part of Trump's comments as unseemly in tone, premature on substance, and far too partisan under the circumstances. Bodies were still being pulled out of the water. Those critiques aren't unfounded. Yes, some online Trump critics had instantly rushed to find angles to blame Trump and his administration for the deadly collision near Washington's DCA airport. They were ghoulish to do so, not to mention embarrassingly short on the facts.
Trump and his coterie pride themselves on being aggressive 'counter-punchers,' but part of being president involves at least occasionally transcending the muck and mire of bare-knuckled politics when the moment calls for such leadership. Trump, however, did what he generally does, dousing the partisan bonfire of blame in gasoline. Critics recoiled in horror, including Buttigieg, who pronounced himself appalled by such a grotesque politicizing of a tragedy. In case his point wasn't clear, he deployed the word "despicable" in expressing his umbrage. But in doing so, he decided to indulge in the blame game himself, accusing Trump of acting to "fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe.” There was and is absolutely no evidence that any of the personnel changes Trump's administration had ordered had one iota of impact on last week's disaster, despite Buttigieg's implication. A few short days later, it seemed as though the Indianan's distaste for such ugliness had lapsed entirely. He posted this message on Twitter/X:
Oh, how interesting. Let's first note that the new administration has also made clear that air traffic controllers were exempt from the recent, controversial freezes, and also ineligible for said buyouts. If some initial emails were sent in error, that’s on them. I'll happily concede that. But Buttigieg's unmistakable suggestion is that those emails—which did not result in buyouts for any controllers—had something to do with the terrible accident that occurred just days after the new administration took office. The entire purpose raising this charge is to leave that impression. It's baseless, and it's precisely the sort of political cheap shot that had just given Saint Buttigieg the vapors. The controllers weren't eligible, weren't bought out, and weren't off the job. There has been a well-established and longstanding shortage of these critical personnel, dating back years, however. There are allegations that some of the shortage was worsened by diversity-fixated hiring practices. Buttigieg knows all of this, yet hit 'publish' on that tweet anyway. Remind us: Who ran the Department of Transportation over the last four years, as these staffing problems festered and a crisis of airborne near-misses metastasized? Setting aside the various pieces and documentaries in conservative-leaning and right-wing media about these issues (which people like Buttigieg and his staff would likely never see or would reflexively dismiss), here is some New York Times reporting on these matters:
The incidents — highlighted in preliminary F.A.A. safety reports but not publicly disclosed — were among a flurry of at least 46 close calls involving commercial airlines last month alone. They were part of an alarming pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on the runways of the United States, a Times investigation found. While there have been no major U.S. plane crashes in more than a decade, potentially dangerous incidents are occurring far more frequently than almost anyone realizes — a sign of what many insiders describe as a safety net under mounting stress. So far this year, close calls involving commercial airlines have been happening, on average, multiple times a week, according to a Times analysis of internal F.A.A. records, as well as thousands of pages of federal safety reports and interviews with more than 50 current and former pilots, air traffic controllers and federal officials. The incidents often occur at or near airports and are the result of human error, the agency’s internal records show. Mistakes by air traffic controllers — stretched thin by a nationwide staffing shortage — have been one major factor. The close calls have involved all major U.S. airlines and have happened nationwide.
When was that investigative article published? Mid-2023, smack in the middle of the Biden administration and Buttigieg's tenure as Transportation Secretary (his successor, Sean Duffy, was sworn in hours prior to the terrible incident at DCA). Importantly, this wasn't a minor piece. It was a series of long, deeply-reported investigative stories about understaffed control collisions and narrowly-averted disasters. The Transportation Secretary and his top staff were absolutely well aware of the reports. Since Buttigieg has now chosen to traverse the very rhetorical and political road he was piously decrying about six minutes ago, this timeline raises some questions, such as the ones somewhat indelicately posed here (language warning):
Indeed, we learned a few days ago that the disaster at Reagan may have been partially caused by an air traffic controller trying to do the jobs of two people:
The collision happened on Wednesday night as the plane approached Reagan National Airport, where staffing at the air traffic control tower was “not normal,” according to a preliminary report from the Federal Aviation Administration...The internal F.A.A. report, which was reviewed by The New York Times, said the controller who was handling helicopters in the airport’s vicinity on Wednesday night was also instructing planes that were landing and departing from its runways — jobs typically assigned to two different controllers. A supervisor combined those duties sometime before 9:30 p.m. and allowed one controller to leave...
So, to revisit the question embedded above, what did Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg do about this growing threat? He served up some base-covering expressions of concern, of course -- which his defenders will point, as if to say, see? he was so wise -- but the issues manifestly persisted. I'm sure Buttigieg has a glossy one-pager of 'accomplishments' at the ready for any challenges to his record, but the simple fact is that he was made acutely aware of a massive safety threat in his realm and on his watch, and he handed that problem off to the next guy. His former job was to do things and implement policies, not just speak words, formed in smooth, almost AI-generated paragraphs. But he often didn't seem to understand that. In fact, given the amount of time he spent on television offering analyses and pronouncements on a wide array of subjects unrelated to his supposed day job, one might have reasonably assumed he was a full-time pundit and campaign surrogate with a cabinet-level side hobby. A cynic might further suspect that his ubiquitous media presence was motivated by a desire to remain top-of-mind ahead of his next campaign for political office. Boring gigs like Transportation Secretary aren't really high profile or sexy enough, you see. One of the less appealing characteristics of Buttigieg is that he seems to have been plotting a path to power from the womb.
Speaking of which, you may recall that we referred to him as an Indianan above. That's because he's from Indiana, has run for multiple offices in the state of Indiana, and often invoked the dark specter of serving as a mayor in "Mike Pence's Indiana" -- terrifying, if you ignore their cordial, respectful relationship -- as a means of ingratiating himself with progressives. But at some point, Mayor Pete realized he could not become Governor Pete or Senator Pete from Indiana. He attempted a statewide race once, actually, and it ended like this. So [Honorific TBD] Pete decided to become a Michigan man. Thus, while he served as a part-time Transportation Secretary and full-time pontificator and partisan operative, his family up and moved to a more blue-tinted Midwestern state. At the time, nearly every single political observer with even a modest observational capacity saw this as a transparent tee-up for future ambitions. His plan, with no little subtlety about it, was to wait for a major vacancy in Michigan Democratic politics to arise (only for a role befitting his stature, of course), then go for it. And wouldn't you know it?
Gosh, who could the "source familiar" be? Perhaps Democrats who are actually from Michigan will decide to clear the field for a celebrity politician who very recently moved to their state for the sole purpose of occupying important seats they've been pursuing their whole careers. Perhaps not. But Buttigieg undoubtedly views his Biden administration tenure as something of a liability with a general electorate that just rejected Kamala Harris. He knows attacks on his time in the cabinet could have resonance, so he's firing back, hard. Having already dutifully changed his social media bios to reflect how very Michigan he is now, Buttigieg made an additional, noteworthy edit days ago:
Maybe (He/Him) is a fabulous look for a job in Washington where cartoonish virtue signaling is practically expected. But Trump-won Michigan -- while far bluer than Indiana -- has been deemed by the algorithm to be a bit too purple for certain performative flourishes. So, sacrifices must be made for the Greater Good:
Sharing pronouns was merely a "very, very simple" gesture to make folx feel "included," in his husband's telling...until it was deemed to be a real, if minor, threat to Pete's next pursuit of power. Alas, some inclusive gestures aren't so "very, very simple" after all, depending on the pandering calculation du jour. Based on a series of maneuvers, Buttigieg evidently feels confident that, contra his tweet about Trump, he can spin quite a lot away. We'll see if genuine Michiganders are in a mood to acquiesce to his latest project.