Trump Says He Has No Idea What ‘Continuity of Government’ Mission Is — Comically BSs His Way Through Answer Anyway
President Donald Trump told reporters he didn’t know what a “continuity of government mission was” seconds before comically improvising his way through an answer anyway.
Trump held a press briefing on Thursday morning to discuss the air crash in which an American Airlines flight collided with a Black Hawk Army Helicopter near Ronald Reagan National Airport at 8:48 pm Wednesday night. All 67 souls on the two aircraft were lost.
At that press conference, he blamed former President Joe Biden and DEI for the disaster. When pressed by ABC’s Mary Bruce and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Trump went on the attack but admitted he had no evidence to support his claims. Trump was widely criticized for the comments and the aggressively political tone of the presser.
But in a less widely-reported exchange, Trump was asked about something Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said earlier in the presser. In describing the activities of the helicopter, he said they were “on a routine annual re-training of night flights on a standard corridor for a continuity of government mission.”
“The military does dangerous things, it does routine things on the regular basis. Tragically, last night, a mistake was made,” Hegseth said.
The phrase “continuity of government mission” refers to the execution of a plan for “the mass evacuation and relocation of every federal government agency including The White House and the military in response to an exceptional catastrophic event within the National Capital Region.”
A reporter later asked Trump for more detail on Hegseth’s comment. Trump began by saying “I don’t know what that refers to” before launching into an inarticulate response — which included the revelation that when the military practices something “They call it practicing”:
PHILIP WEGMANN: What is your message, then, to the American public in the weeks and months ahead? Should they feel hesitant to fly? And if you could clarify perhaps something that the defense secretary said, when he said that this helicopter was on a continuity-of-government mission?
TRUMP: I don’t know what that — what that refers to.
But I — they were practicing, they were — they do that. They call it practicing, and they were — and that’s something that should be done. It’s only continuity in the sense that we want to have very good people, and that has to be in continuity, and that’s what they referred to.
But it was a — basically practice, and it was a practice that worked out very, very badly, OK?
Watch above via The White House.
