Trump’s ‘common sense’ about DEI and government workers is rank bigotry and racism, pure and simple

Most of the bodies of the 67 people killed when their plane plunged into the frigid, murky waters of the Potomac River had not yet been recovered when President Trump decided to turn a press conference into a despicably racist attack on more than 60 years of gains made in hiring practices since the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Trump, fittingly, had opened the press conference by asking reporters to honor the crash victims with a moment of silence. 

Things quickly degenerated after that.

“We must have only the highest standards for those who work in our aviation system,” Trump said. 

Fair enough. It’s what came next that Arizonans — and every American — should find deeply disturbing.

“I changed the Obama standards [at the Federal Aviation Administration] from very mediocre at best to extraordinary,” Trump boasted, claiming that, unlike President Barack Obama, his FAA wanted people who are “psychologically superior” to work as air traffic controllers. “And then when I left office and [President Joe] Biden took over, he changed [the standards] back to lower than ever before.”

There is no evidence to support Trump’s claim that Obama or Biden hired “mediocre” employees at the FAA, much less as air traffic controllers, but Trump rarely lets the facts get in the way of self-serving political attack.

“The FAA’s diversity push includes a focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities,” Trump said. “That is amazing… They can be air traffic controllers.”

It would be amazing — if it was true. But it’s not. 

Documents about FAA hiring, according reporting by the Daily Mail, “reveal that last year the agency was recruiting people with targeted disabilities, including ‘hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism,’ “

The FAA policy did not specify which jobs it wanted to fill through its targeted recruitment push, but a former administrator for the agency, which has 45,000 employees, told NewsNation the FAA “hires a lot of people, not all of them can be controllers.”

And just in case his baseless allegation wasn’t clear, Trump added that the FAA “says people with severe disabilities are the most underrepresented segment of the workforce, and they want them in.”

For the record, people with disabilities, including people with serious intellectual and physical disabilities, have some of the highest unemployment rates and highest rates of poverty in the nation — but Trump could care less about any of that. 

He said only “brilliant” people should be hired as air traffic controllers, “not regular people.” In Trump’s view, people with disabilities are about as irregular as you get and do not deserve to be seen or heard, much less work alongside us. This is the same president who once openly mocked a disabled reporter at a campaign rally and told Gen. Mark Milley no one wants to see a wounded war veteran at a military ceremony.

After finishing his remarks, a reporter asked: “Mr. President…are you saying this crash was somehow caused as the result of diversity hiring?”

“It just could have been,” Trump said, “…you have to go by psychological quality…and Biden went by a standard that’s the exact opposite. So, we don’t know.”

It’s worth noting here that a Washington Post report discovered FAA posts from Trump’s first term listed the same ‘targeted disabilities’ for hiring.

Challenging the president, another reporter noted, “Mr. President, you have today blamed the diversity elements, but then told us that you weren’t sure that the controllers made any mistake…. I’m trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash.”

“Because I have common sense,” Trump said, “and, unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.” 

That’s not common sense. It’s utter nonsense and just the sort of racist and ableist assertion only an ignorant bigot would make.

Make no mistake, the president’s attack on diverse hiring practices at the FAA — and across the federal workforce, which numbers about 3 million people nationwide and includes more than 34,000 people in Arizona — will not lead to hiring more “brilliant” employees. It will lead to a wave of discrimination by this administration aimed at anyone who isn’t a straight, white man — with women, people of color and people with disabilities cast as the chief villains who must be ousted from working in the government.

In a statement, a cohort of disability rights groups led by the National Disability Rights Network said Trump’s baseless claims that the deadly crash of Flight 5342 was because of public servants with disabilities was “irresponsible, disparaging, and wrong.” 

“The implication that people are being hired to do a job for which they are unqualified is an unfounded lie that further reinforces harmful stereotypes against disabled people,” the groups added.

Maria Town, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, called Trump’s remarks “part of a broader coordinated attack on civil rights and equal opportunity across government.”

Listening to Trump, I couldn’t help but wonder how disheartened the plane crash victims’ families must have felt as they watched the president use his press conference not to console the nation but to bully people with disabilities and others who have gained from decades of diverse hiring practices just to score points against his political enemies.

On one of the worst days of their lives, Trump instead did what he does best: He used the media spotlight to boast about himself, spread lies, and attack anyone he doesn’t think deserves to be full and equal participants in our society.

That’s not “common sense.” It’s just plain bigotry.