Politics

The Day Trump Became Un-President

“We’re so back,” one reporter whispered to another.

All of the chairs in the White House briefing room were filled, and reporters and photographers were crammed into every available nook and cranny. I was standing in the back, squeezed in between a window and a none-too-pleased Secret Service agent.

The sight was reminiscent of the COVID briefings of 2020: President Donald Trump gripping the sides of the lectern in the White House briefing room, pursing his lips as he looked out at the journalists yelling and jockeying for his attention.

And just like in 2020, Trump used a national calamity to try to score political points and denigrate his foes. Fourteen hours after a midair collision between an American Airlines jet and a military helicopter outside Washington last night—the first crisis of the young administration, a moment to console a stunned and grieving nation—Trump repeatedly implied that the crash was the fault of his Democratic predecessors and of DEI policies.

[Read: He could have talked about anything else]

Trump offered no evidence to support his claims but repeatedly cast the blame on others, even as bodies were still being pulled from the frigid waters of the Potomac River just a few miles away.

“Because I have common sense, okay?” Trump said, when asked how he had concluded that diversity programs—programs that Trump claimed were put in place by the Biden and Obama administrations—were to blame. “Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.”

The crash near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport killed 67 people and was the first major crash in the United States involving an airline in more than 15 years. Trump’s instinct after the tragedy was yet again to choose divisiveness. On social media, within hours of the collision, he offered not condolences but conspiracy theories: “It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane.” As he did so often in his first term, he was reacting to a crisis as an observer and not as the president, who has the resources of the federal government at his disposal and the responsibility of getting answers.

And then, in his briefing-room appearance today—the first of his 10-day-old second term—Trump offered a few initial notes of sympathy, and then turned almost immediately toward castigating DEI, leaving several correspondents to turn and shake their heads in disbelief.

“I put safety first,” Trump said. “Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen, because this was the lowest level. Their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse.”

[Read: Donald Trump is just watching this crisis unfold]

Trump showcased his instinct to immediately frame tragedies through his own ideological or political lens, facts be damned. And it’s a pattern: Earlier this month, he blamed the Southern California wildfires on Democratic politicians and suggested that illegal immigration was the cause of a terrorist attack in New Orleans, even though the attacker was a U.S. citizen born in Texas.

When pressed today, he snapped at reporters (“I think that’s not a very smart question—I’m surprised, coming from you”) and called on friendlier faces from conservative-leaning outlets, who tossed him softballs. He admitted that the crash was still under investigation and that the cause was not yet known. But he was quick to claim that the Federal Aviation Administration had lowered its standards under President Barack Obama (“They actually came out with a directive: ‘too white’”) and that his administration was restoring them, despite the hiring and spending freezes his team has aimed to put in place.

But summarizing Trump’s remarks on air-traffic controllers doesn’t quite capture the experience of sitting through them:

Can you imagine, these are people that are, I mean, actually, their lives are shortened because of the stress that they have. Brilliant people have to be in those positions, and their lives are actually shortened, very substantially shortened, because of the stress when you have many, many planes coming into one target, and you need a very special talent and a very special genius to be able to do it.

Seated to the right of Trump was a phalanx of supportive aides—including Vice President J. D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy—who would all get brief turns at the microphone to weigh in on the tragedy and praise Trump’s leadership.

Trump’s eyes darted around the room. His hand, with its index figure outstretched, would move in little circles as he considered which reporter to call on. Then it would steady, and he would point deliberately, selecting one person in a sea of outstretched hands, gesturing that he or she was being granted the privilege of asking the president the next question.

Similarly freewheeling question-and-answer sessions became the hallmark of Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, with Trump performing for the cameras—often for more than an hour at a time—and exuding the bravado of someone who believed that he alone could steer the nation through the greatest public-health crisis in a century. Trump couldn’t get enough of those press conferences. He pushed to hold them as close to the 6 p.m. evening news as possible to increase viewership; he used them to take swipes at his political opponents, including then–New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who tended to hold his own COVID briefings earlier in the day.

But instead of being reassuring, fact-based public-service announcements, the briefings were defined by falsehoods, politicization, and outlandish recommendations to inject disinfectant. Those nightly battles, Trump’s closest aides believe, helped seal his defeat in the 2020 election. He came across as incompetent, desperate, eager to shift the blame. He ignored suggestions to turn the briefings over to then–Vice President Mike Pence, the head of his COVID task force, or to a team of doctors and scientists. He kept going to the podium day after day. By the time he finally abandoned the briefings, he trailed Joe Biden by six points in the polls.

Both Hegseth, a former Fox News host, and Duffy, once a reality-TV star, have significant experience in front of the cameras. But a White House official told me that there was never a question that Trump himself would brief the press after the crash.

And when the news conference ended after 36 minutes, the reporters, some with dazed expressions, filed out of the briefing room. As I navigated the crowd, I caught a glimpse of a fellow journalist’s phone and the text message he had just sent:

“WTF.”