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The White House has tripped over its response on whether it was still safe to fly in American skies following two tragic plane crashes last week.
Fox’s Senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy probed White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on air traffic controllers supposedly being manned by underqualified staff and DEI hires. “It’s not safe to fly commercially, is it?” he asked.
Last week, the U.S. grappled with two devastating plane crashes, one in Washington D.C. that left 67 dead after a U.S. Army helicopter collided with a passenger jet, and a second in Philadelphia involving a medical jet carrying a young girl back to Mexico bursting into flames – which claimed the lives of seven.
In D.C. Thursday, President Trump baselessly blamed diversity hiring practices in the Federal Aviation Administration for the devastating events that unfolded midair Wednesday night, falsely claiming that the organization previously sought out “people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities”.
Since making the unfounded claims, Leavitt, Vice President JD Vance, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy have sought to reiterate Trump’s wild DEI claims to the press.
Speaking on Friday, Leavitt said: “He [Trump] believes that it is still indeed and Americans should feel safe traveling our skies.”
But she quickly switched back and stated: “With that said, two things can be true at the same time, and we certainly have seen the deterioration of federal hiring standards in aviation administration and the president wants to increase those standards.”
Doocy pushed by asking Leavitt whether the air traffic controller on duty on the day of the DC tragedy was hired or fired because of their race – a probe she declined to comment on citing privacy.
In his speech Thursday, Trump falsely stated that the FAA had hired candidates with “hearing, vision, missing, extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism”, incorrectly citing that they were “all qualified for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country”.
