The Guardian view on the Washington DC plane crash: Trump’s warped priorities | Editorial

Few stretches of airspace on the planet are as busy or as carefully monitored as the skies above Washington DC. Commercial and military aircraft are on the move there at all times. The greatest concentration is around Reagan National airport, the city’s principal domestic hub, which sits on the west bank of the Potomac River within sight of the Capitol dome.

No one yet knows how a Black Hawk military helicopter collided with an American Eagle flight from Wichita above the Potomac on Wednesday evening. But the destruction was total. No survivors have been found from among the 64 people on board the flight from Kansas or among the three-strong crew of the helicopter. By early Thursday, the rescue effort was already a recovery operation. Bodies were being lifted from the river’s icy waters through the day.

Mass-fatality airplane crashes are mercifully rare. The last one in the US was in 2009. But a crash in such a sensitive location, where aircraft congestion has been an ongoing controversy, will always attract unusual attention. It was also all too probable that the human tragedy would become a pawn in the jarring politics of the second Donald Trump administration, which has already turned its vengeful beam on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which regulates civil aviation, airports and air traffic control systems.

That probability duly became a certainty within hours of Wednesday’s disaster, when Mr Trump posted his own provocative version of the questions he believes are posed by the crash. “Why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn?” he asked. “Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane?” The crash “looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!”

By any normal standards, this would have been an extraordinary intervention. But this is a president who, in his first week in the White House, had already picked an inflammatory fight with the FAA over safety. Last week, in an executive order, he ordered it to end the diversity, equity and inclusion rules in its hiring policy. He also ordered the agency to review the performance and standards of all FAA employees in “critical safety positions”. Tasteless and inappropriate though it is, Mr Trump’s post signals his readiness – which he did nothing at all to dispel in Thursday’s press conference – to blame the FAA for the Potomac tragedy.

But it may also highlight a certain vulnerability. There is no direct connection between Mr Trump’s determination to slash the federal workforce, truncating its regulatory functions, and this week’s midair crash. But his ambitious assault on the role and power of government, conducted behind a smokescreen of anti-diversity propaganda, sits uneasily alongside tendentious attacks on a trusted air traffic control system on which the public has just been forcefully reminded that it depends.

If so, it may align with other signs that Mr Trump’s administration will not have things quite its own way. This week, the president tried to freeze all government grants and loans, putting at risk programmes ranging from disaster relief to cancer research. The move caused chaos for claimants and employees. But a judge has now stayed that effort, and Republican lawmakers are facing a political backlash. It would be some consolation if this terrible loss of life, underscoring the uncompromisable importance of public safety, prompted a similar public and political reaction against Mr Trump’s shameless attempt to wreck the FAA.