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It’s clear why Trump blames DEI for everything | Judith Levine

It took fewer than 12 hours after Wednesday’s disastrous plane collision at DC’s Reagan National airport for Donald Trump to display his most powerful instinct: blaming others, whether the real guilty party is himself, one of his cronies, unknown, or no one at all.

In a press conference on Thursday morning, the president moved quickly through the scripted “bonds of affection and loyalty that unite us all”, the heartbreak and “solace in the knowledge that their journey ended not in the cold waters of the Potomac, but in the warm embrace of a loving God”. Then he got down to business, naming his always-prime suspect, after “illegal aliens”: diversity, equity and inclusion.

“We must have only the highest standards for those who work in our aviation system,” Trump proclaimed. Obama’s standards were “very mediocre”; Biden’s, “lower than ever before”. Whereas Trump “put safety first, Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first”. Which policies exactly? “They put a big push to put diversity into the [Federal Aviation Administration’s] program.”

“They like to do things, and they like to take them too far,” he went on, “and this is sometimes what ends up happening.”

DEI is a capacious euphemism. In the right’s parlance, it stands not for the policy or program but for the Americans the policy serves: people of color, queer people, women and people with disabilities. It stands for the people it did not serve, those unqualified “DEI hires” whisked to high places through government-endowed privilege: VP Kamala Harris, the supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and – we can infer from Trump’s current philippic – the gay former transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg. In Trumpian terms, DEI stands for those who deserve retribution for perpetrating the crises he invents in order to justify retribution against those he claims to have perpetrated them: border invasion, energy shortages, military unreadiness, and, now, aviation disasters.

So when Trump indicts a thing called DEI for the deaths of 67 people, a deaf dog could hear the whistle. But the mainstream press, having decided to go easier on DJT this time around, played along.

“Trump Blames DEI and Biden for Crash Under His Watch,” said the New York Times.

“Trump sparks outcry with implication that DEI policies are at fault in DC midair collision,” NBC News put it.

The Washington Post went a courageous step further: “Trump baselessly blames diversity program for fatal air collision.”

And Reuters: “Trump takes aim, without evidence, at diversity policies over midair collision.”

At the press conference, reporters crafted their own euphemisms, dignifying the whole nasty diatribe as if it contained a plausible theory of culpability. “Mr President,” asked one, “you have today blamed the diversity elements, but then told us that you weren’t sure that the controllers made any mistake. You then said perhaps the helicopter pilots were the ones who made the mistake.”

Trump: “Yeah. It’s all under investigation.”

This, and other obfuscations, diversions and self-contradictions, triggered the next round of revelation: “Trump Acknowledges He Doesn’t Have Evidence DEI Caused DC Plane Crash,” pronounced Newsweek.

Factcheckers set about seeking substantiation or refutation of Trump’s “facts”. No, the FAA does not hire blind and deaf air traffic controllers, the factcheckers found. No, DEI does not cause aircraft to collide midair. “Experts could not cite a known instance of a plane crash in which diversity efforts had been cited as the sole cause,” the Times reassured.

It’s worth noting that Trump is not targeting all DEI hires this time. He’s going after crips. It’s not the first time, or the first time the press has given him the benefit of the doubt. “Trump appears to mock disabled reporter,” NBC reported on his mimicry of the reporter Serge Kovaleski’s chronic joint condition at a campaign rally in 2015 – a performance, recorded on video, that the candidate subsequently denied.

At the post-crash briefing on Thursday, the president took pains to recite the list of disabilities named on the FAA’s website, which federal anti-discrimination law calls “targeted disabilities”, a subcategory of protected classes. “‘Targeted disabilities are those disabilities at the federal government as a matter of policy, as identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” Trump read in his characteristic mafia extortionist’s drone, emphasizing each disability with a note of astonished distaste. “They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”

He continued: “The initiative is part of the FAA’s diversity and inclusion hiring plan. Think of that.” He gazed sideways, thoughtfully. “The initiative is part of the FAA’s diversity and inclusion hiring plan, which says diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think it’s just the opposite.”

That evening, the Fox News host Jesse Watters clarified what Trump was getting at. “A lot of people hear ‘DEI’, you think Black,” he said. “No.” The FAA was “trying to set quotas for people who are deaf to get jobs, people who are dwarves to get jobs, people with transgender issues to get jobs”.

Ever decorous, the Times commented: “Mr Trump’s instant focus on diversity reflected his instinct to frame major events through his political or ideological lens.”

Trump has no ideology. Ideology contains ideas, and Trump does not traffic in ideas. He mobilizes feelings. The feelings he is mobilizing after 67 bodies fell into the Potomac River go beyond resentment and anxiety among those putatively more qualified white, able-bodied men who believe they have lost jobs to the blind and deviant. Normalizing vilification, making bigotry chic and fun, Trump has disinhibited even his critics to dip their toes in the slime. Publications from the Irish Star to the Daily Beast picked up on the “dwarves” thing. Because, you know, little people – the term people with dwarfism prefer – are funny.

Both exaggerating the power and diminishing the humanity of his chosen scapegoats and pariahs, Donald Trump renders the vulnerable more vulnerable not just to exclusion, but more and more, to violence. The press can’t let that slide.