A few hours before a Black Hawk helicopter and a passenger jet collided over the Potomac, I had a text conversation with a Democrat friend who was so distraught and fearful about President Donald Trump’s barrage of executive orders that she was meeting with her adult kids “to support each other as a family.”
“Are rational conservatives starting to step away?” she asked. I told her no, not from what I am seeing and hearing — rather, there is a sense of euphoria among some, and for others, at least genuine interest about how this “shock and awe” approach to governance will play out. Trump is fulfilling his promises to voters.
Then the plane and the helicopter fell into the icy Potomac, and Trump’s team went into action. It was from Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox, that we first learned that it wasn’t a “police helicopter” as people on social media were saying, but a Black Hawk involved. This morning, we were told that the president had been in the situation room late into the night. Hearing this, even Trump haters might have felt some grudging respect, the sense that the president’s famous energies were going to do some good in the first tragedy to happen under his second administration’s watch.
Then came the press conference.
It started well enough, with a moment of silence and the somber delivery of prepared remarks, which included the words, “In moments like this, the differences between Americans fade to nothing compared to the bonds of affection and loyalty that united us all, both as Americans and even as nations. We are one family, and today we are all heartbroken.”
Reading from a script, Trump went on to say, “Together we take 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.”
There. That was the speech. Full stop.
Unfortunately, it was not.
Trump went on, apparently not understanding that rambling about whatever anecdote or grievance comes to mind does not play well during a disaster. Within five minutes of stepping up to the podium, he was bashing his predecessors Barack Obama and Joe Biden. “I put safety first. Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level nobody’s ever seen.”
And with that, there was a great groaning across the land, even in Republican circles, as everyone braced for what was coming: a bitterly partisan speech. Biden changed standards for air traffic controllers to “lower than ever before,” Trump said, suggesting that DEI policies could have played into the crash, and tearing into Democrats.
While DEI standards are likely part of the discussion that will take place in the coming months, it was a shockingly tone-deaf thing for the president to say as first responders were saluting human remains in flag-draped coffins three miles away.
Even a Fox News correspondent reporting on Trump’s remarks said the president suggested DEI was to blame “without offering evidence.”
Trader and author Peter Brandt wrote on X, “I voted for and support Trump in general. But his press conference today about the D.C. plane crash was offensively political. He needs to rise above the political gutter on a time like this. Disgusting. Time for compassion.”
On the social media platform X, author Ann Bauer wrote, “Make him stop. Is there no speechwriter involved?” She went on to say that she recently watched Ronald Reagan’s speech after the Challenger explosion, and that it should have served as a framework for Trump’s remarks today. “There is no excuse for this,” she concluded.
That Reagan speech, also delivered on the last week of January, was written by Peggy Noonan, who went on to become a celebrated columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Noonan later said, while describing that day, “Reagan did not feel that the speech had met the moment. ... There’s nothing you can say that could meet a moment that was that painful to the American people and to you.”
But it turns out, there was. The beautiful excerpt from the John Gillespie Magee Jr. poem “High Flight” that Noonan included — saying the astronauts “slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God” — resounded with both Reagan and the American people.
It was a speech that people were talking about on social media this week, on the 39th anniversary of that terrible event.
Donald Trump has promised all of us — Democrats and Republicans and independents and those who don’t care enough about politics to vote — that he will be a unifying president and that we, as a nation, are going to win so much that we are going to get tired of winning. That’s a great message on the campaign trail, but today something else was needed.
What we needed was a mourner-in-chief.