NBC’s Peter Alexander Pushes Back on Trump After He Blames D.C. Air Crash on DEI: ‘Why Didn’t You Change the Policy Under Your Administration?’
NBC’s Peter Alexander confronted President Donald Trump at a press conference on Thursday over his blaming of a Washington, D.C. air crash on the Biden administration’s DEI initiatives.
Gruesome details have emerged following Wednesday night’s tragic air crash between an American Airlines passenger jet and a Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River in Washington. While the emergency rescue efforts are ongoing, the likelihood of there being any survivors has waned. Sixty-seven people are believed to have died in the tragic disaster.
Trump took to the White House briefing room shortly after 11 a.m. for his first public address on the tragedy and wasted no time in painting the disaster in an entirely political framing, blaming past FAA initiatives for hiring air traffic controllers for the deadly crash. While Trump admitted that authorities don’t yet know what caused the air collision, he’s nevertheless blamed it on the Obama and Biden administrations.
“The initiative is part of the FAA diversity and inclusion hiring plan. Think of that. The initiative is part of the FAA diversity and inclusion hiring plan,” he said, before attacking Biden’s secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg.
Trump repeatedly mocked passed diversity hiring complaints that insisted that the staff was “too white.”
“The cited FAA text that you read is real, but the implication that this policy is new or that it stems from efforts that began under President Biden or the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, is demonstrably false,” Alexander said to Trump.
“Who said that, you?” Trump skeptically pushed back.
“No, it’s on the website, the FAA website — It was there in 2013. It was there for the entirety of your administration, too.,” Alexander pressed. “So my question is, why didn’t you change the policy during your first administration?”
“I did change it – I changed the Obama policy and we had a very good policy,” Trump replied, “And then Biden came in and he changed it. And then when I came in two days, three days ago, I signed a new order bringing it to the highest level of intelligence.”
Fact-checking source Snopes concurred with Alexander’s assessment in a post published January 15 under the headline: “FAA Policy About Hiring People with Intellectual Disabilities Has Existed for Over a Decade,” which pushes back on the assertion, made by Elon Musk and others, that “that a long-standing policy was the result of a recent emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.”
Watch above via CNN.
