CNN’s Jake Tapper Torches Trump’s Crash ‘Blame Game’ By Showing Past Presidents’ ‘Words Of Comfort’

CNN anchor Jake Tapper torched President Donald Trump’s “blame game” in the wake of the deadly air collision in Washington DC by showcasing the unifying “words of comfort” spoken by past presidents – both Republican and Democrat – in the wake of historic tragedies.

Trump had suggested during a press conference late Thursday that diversity initiatives at the Federal Aviation Authority (FCC) “could have” caused the deadly in-flight collision between an American Airlines flight and a military helicopter near Reagan National Airport.

Closing out The Lead with Jake Tapper on Thursday from outside the airport, the host noted the crash was reminiscent of past air disasters but more pointedly compared Trump’s finger-pointing with the response of past presidents to similar national incidents.

Tapper began by outlining how the crash, which killed 67 people, ranks among the most deadly in the country’s history.

That collision does bring back some awful memories. January 1982, to be precise, an air Florida jet taking off in icy conditions stalled and crashed into the Potomac River just north of here, hitting a bridge that’s a major traffic corridor in and out of Washington. Seventy passengers and four crew members, as well as four people in cars on that bridge, were killed. Only five people from the plane survived.

Last night’s crash is the deadliest U.S. air disaster since February 2009, when a propeller driven passenger plane crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York. All 49 people on the plane and one person on the ground died. Before that, the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks involving four hijacked airliners killed nearly 3000 people. Two months later, an American airlines jet heading to the Dominican Republic crashed after taking off from New York’s John F. Kennedy international Airport, killing all 260 people on the plane and five people on the ground. And now, last night’s accident joins that horrible list. May the victims lives be remembered as a blessing, and not just as numbers.

Pivoting to Trump, the anchor payed back his response in the immediate aftermath of tha attack and highlighted his attacks on DEI practices.

In the immediate aftermath of a tragedy like this, the American people often look to the president of the United States for leadership, for direction, for explanation, for some sort of comfort and reassurance, such as what we saw from President Ronald Reagan in 1986 after the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Instead of giving his state of the union address, Reagan consoled the nation from the oval office.

Cutting to a clip of Reagan praising the astronauts who died that day, Tapper then pointed to President Bill Clinton.

In 1995, after the Oklahoma City bombing, a terrorist attack by far right terrorists, President Bill Clinton addressed the nation from the briefing room, vowing to investigate.

Again, the anchor rolled back footage from the time, in which Clinton said he would not allow American citizens “to be intimidated by evil cowards.”

Signing off, Tapper said: “Words of reassurance. Words of comfort. Words of respect. Words trying to bring us together, trying to unite us. That is what the American people expect from their president.”

Watch above via CNN.