Elisabeth Bumiller has returned to the reporting beat after a long stint as the paper’s Washington bureau chief, and her seething, even paranoid hostility toward Republican presidents remains intact. The front page of Friday’s New York Times, “Blaming Diversity Hiring, Trump Turns Accident Into Grievance.” The text box read: “Recalling the Extremes of His First Term.”
Predictably, Bumiller’s prominently placed screed went beyond any justified criticism of Trump leaping to conclusions immediately after the D.C. airplane tragedy:
On the morning after a devastating midair collision of an American Airlines plane and an Army helicopter that sent 67 people, not one of whom survived, into the icy waters of the Potomac River, President Trump stood behind the White House lectern and for a brief moment did what presidents do....But then, as Navy divers continued their search for bodies in the Potomac, the president transitioned into some of the most extraordinary public statements he has ever made, among them equating diversity with incompetence.
“We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas,” Mr. Trump began, his tone moving from solace to irritation. “And I think we’ll probably state those opinions now.”
Meanwhile, the “No evidence!” canard continues its comeback in the press:
And so he did. For the next 30 minutes, citing no evidence, Mr. Trump blamed diversity efforts at the Federal Aviation Administration for lowering standards for air traffic controllers. He blamed the Obama administration, claiming it had determined that the F.A.A. work force was “too white.”
He blamed the Biden administration, too, and its secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg.
“That guy is a real winner,” Mr. Trump said, sarcastically. “He’s a disaster.”
But mostly the president of the United States, who was consulting prepared remarks, blamed diversity. Washington was in mourning, chaplains were at the scene of the crash, but Mr. Trump plowed ahead. His remarks were the latest offensive in the White House war to root out “woke” elements and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the federal government.
For the record, Trump wasn’t blaming “diversity” per se, but the aggressive, federally mandated moves of D.E.I. (diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives).
Of course, she tried to spin the racism of DEI and spit it back at those who noticed:
The F.A.A. has not identified any of the controllers responsible for monitoring flights around the airport. The Pentagon has not named the helicopter pilots, or their race. But Mr. Trump, seeming as if he knew something, asserted that the pilots had failed.
(...)
...it was Vice President JD Vance, who was next up, who got to the point -- the view that white people had lost out because of diversity hiring, and that nonwhite hires had put travelers at risk.
“If you go back to just some of the headlines over the past 10 years, you have many hundreds of people suing the government because they would like to be air traffic controllers, but they were turned away because of the color of their skin,” he said….
Fact-check: True.
She also perpetuated the debunked Trump-told-people-to-inject-bleach hoax as an example of the "extreme remarks" he made in his first term:
Then came the questions from a White House press corps that had lived through some of Mr. Trump’s most extreme remarks from the first term, like his suggestion that an injection of a disinfectant could battle Covid. But many reporters were nonetheless dumbfounded by what was unfolding.
After that unfair throwback to a rambling, COVID-era Trump press conference, Bumiller approvingly quoted another reporter deep in the tank for Democrats, Mary Bruce of ABC News.
Was Mr. Trump saying that the crash was the result of diversity hiring, Mary Bruce of ABC News asked, and what evidence had he seen to support that claim?
