Against Rushing to Judgment
Politicizing tragedies right in the aftermath is immoral. Try waiting for the facts to come out.
Who’s to blame for the tragic D.C. plane crash, resulting in the deaths of 67 souls? Trump or DEI?
Maybe it’s neither.
A lot has been floating around in the ether of late about the horror that has been described as the nation’s deadliest air collision since 9/11. Far too many families have been bereaved of their loved ones. Precious lives are lost. But against this backdrop of sorrows, people who should know better are playing a despicable round of the blame game.
Right away, the gut reaction of so many of President Trump’s critics on the Left was to insinuate Trump was responsible for the crash. Former Biden Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg took to X (formerly Twitter) to respond to Trump’s “lying” (more on that below) to boast, “We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch.” Then he went on with this doozy, “President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration]. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe.”
Aha! There’s your problem. “Some of the key personnel” got fired and suspended. Never mind that there’s no evidence that shows Trump’s executive order freezing the hiring of all federal employees (with exceptions) or his dismantling of aviation safety committees had anything to do with the D.C. crash. Never mind that the very airport where this tragedy originated has had a history of near crashes and collisions, according to a 2023 report from The New York Times.
Buttigieg ought to be ashamed of rushing to judgment and politicizing a tragedy.
Of course, it’s not just haters of Trump who are guilty of politicizing a deadly air collision. Trump’s been doing a lot of politicizing and wild speculation himself too.
“We do not know what led to this crash,” Trump said, “but we have some very strong opinions.” Those opinions? Some random conjecturing about the now-deceased pilot of the helicopter the plane collided with, but the meat of his musings was about his opinions on blaming Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. He started with blaming the Obama and Biden administrations, accusing them of hiring people for the FAA “who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative.” Never mind that according to former FAA officials, “DEI and any similar programs do not apply to air traffic control hiring,” which seemingly failed to prevent the collision from happening.
Personally, I’m all for gutting DEI initiatives. They are counterproductive in how they serve to correct the sins of past racism by focusing on everyone’s race. If the reason you’re hiring someone is more because of their race than the skills they bring to the table, that is immoral and can lead to serious consequences. But I have zero interest in blaming a recent tragedy on DEI if DEI had nothing to do with it.
You’ll see reports from all the big media outlets noting that Trump did X, Y, Z a week ago before this collision happened or that such and such was previously going on with the FAA, and that’s fine. But you can’t connect any dots yet. It’s way too early to pin the blame on anyone or anything yet. What we do know about the causes of the crash is that we don’t know.
Therefore, we need to stop rushing to judgment all the time. The world and the events thereof are complicated with complicated causes. Maybe DEI did have something to do with the crash. Maybe Trump’s policies do bear some blame. Maybe they both were contributing factors or perhaps neither one was. You can’t narrow it down to one simple cause. And with information still being gathered, we can’t know what the explanation for this all is.
We would all like to know the answers right away. Heck, it’s just human nature to want to know things sooner rather than later. But it’s okay not to know the answers immediately. It takes time to assess all the possibilities and discern the plausible causes, and we need to be patient and wait for the information to come out.
Besides, jumping to hasty conclusions in the aftermath of tragedies is immoral, frankly. Think about the real-life human beings impacted by the disaster. Are we showing any respect to them or their departed loved ones when we quickly and boldly assert that we have the answers when we don’t? And then what about when our pet theories get debunked? How do these families feel when they are given reasons by outside commentators that are just wrong?
It’s time to quit it with jumping to hasty conclusions. So, if someone asks you what you think about the D.C. crash, by all means, share the verifiable facts on the ground. But you should be willing to say—and say frequently—, “I don’t know.”
Because none of us know yet.