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It’s easy to forget as we wade through all the controversy, crimes, rape accusations, and racism… Donald Trump is, primarily, a reality star.
He inherited his money. He’s actually not very good at business, if you look at the numbers over the years. Where he’s found the most success is on reality TV, where he only played a super successful billionaire. That’s the peak of his resume.
Well, it turns out his Secretary of Transportation is ALSO from the world of reality TV! Yes, Sean Duffy — whom, like most of America, we’re just now hearing about because of the tragic DC plane crash — is Sean from The Real World: Boston. On Season 6 of the MTV hit, during the dawn of reality TV back in 1997, he was the spiky conservative guy who did lumberjack competitions. He also did stints on 1998’s Road Rules: All Stars and 2002’s Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Battle of the Seasons. But he did actually become a lawyer through all that — and eventually a district attorney and a Congressman.
But he got Trump’s attention back where he started — on TV. After his time in the House (of Representatives, we mean, not “the house” as in Real World), he became a Fox Business host. Trump, as we know, watches a LOT of TV. And he picked this guy to lead the Department of Transportation. Another Fox News personality, Pete Hegseth, just became Secretary of Defense. Now both are being questioned about the shocking crash of a US Army helicopter into a commercial airplane, causing the deaths of 67 people, including multiple children.
Video: Final Winning Routine Of Young Ice Skating Duo Killed In DC Plane Crash
What does Sean from the Real World have to say? In his first press conference, he said — no joke:
“Obviously, it is not standard to have aircraft collide. I want to be clear on that.”
It’s… not standard… to have aircraft collide. That’s… Wow, it’s hard to process what an idiotic thing that is to say. What could be dumber than that?
Well, we guess the President blaming DEI for it. Yeah, you may have heard Trump’s immediate response was to exploit the tragedy to once again attack DEI policies — you know, diversity and inclusive hiring practices. In other words, he and some of his like-minded friends doing totally normal salutes don’t like it when the government hires Black and other minority employees. It’s a constant attack point for right-wingers — the idea if minorities are hired, it must be to meet quotas but that it fills positions with under-qualified staffers. It implies there’s no way there wasn’t a straight, white, cis man who was the most qualified for the job. It’s truly the most blatantly racist, sexist, homophobic BS…
Just to be clear, the whole point of DEI policy is to keep racists from only hiring straight white men — because that’s been proven to have happened historically. That’s a practice that does fill roles with unqualified stooges. If only we had some really recent examples of that…
Never mind the fact all the pilots in the crash were white men. 93% of pilots are still white, btw, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But sure, blame diversity. VP JD Vance chimed in that even if all the pilots were white, the “stresses” from working with all the unqualified (i.e. nonwhite) staffers is the problem.
In addition to minorities, Trump blamed Obama, Biden, and previous Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. One thing he didn’t mention? The fact he fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Coast Guard and all the members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, all on his first full day in office. That’s a lot of safety people gone. Nine days before the crash. Oh, plus he put that hiring freeze on air traffic controllers and was apparently trying to get a bunch to resign. Early reports say staffing at Ronald Reagan National Airport was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic” and the one air traffic controller on duty was “doing a job usually handled by two people.”
Trump also didn’t mention there’s no Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) director right now. Apparently Elon Musk called on him to resign because they previously fined SpaceX, and that made him mad. Yes, really. Musk also called for “radical reform” at the FAA — but he did it in agreement with someone saying the FAA shouldn’t exist, so it’s likely that’s what he means. He’d rather privatize the whole thing. So instead of a government body making sure there are a minimum number of air traffic controllers, picture how grocery stores never seem to have enough cashiers, just a bunch of self-checkout. Only instead of that blinking light because the price is wrong on your Cheerios, it’s because you and everyone around you is about to die in a fiery crash.
Damn, it almost seems like there’s a REALLY OBVIOUS thing to blame for the worst US aviation disaster in years. And it’s not Black people OR Montana‘s long-distance boyfriend Vaj.
[Image via WFAA/MSNBC/MTV/YouTube.]
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