A local news outlet in Wichita, the Kansas city reeling from the Washington, D.C., midair collision, has lobbed a scathing attack on Donald Trump for glossing over the loss of 67 lives and talking about “DEI and dwarfs.”
The Wichita Eagle’s opinion page hit out after the president’s press conference the morning after the tragedy.
The publication, the biggest in the area and owned by the McClatchy Company, slammed Trump for displaying a lack of empathy over the American Airlines flight that departed Wichita’s Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport on Wednesday night and never arrived at its destination.
Opinion Editor Dion Lefler wrote: “President Donald Trump started his presentation on the Flight 5342 tragedy with a moment of silence. It would have been so much immeasurably better if he’d left it at that.
“I don’t know how Trump’s remarks are being received in the rest of the country, but Wichita is a city in mourning.”
He called Trump’s briefing “one of his patented raving rants about how great he is, how it’s Joe Biden’s fault anyway, and how everything would be so much better if only all those pesky minority and disabled people knew their place.
“I have scoured the pages of his staunchest supporters in and around Wichita and can’t find a single expression of support for what the president said at his whatever-that-was at the White House.” He added that those lost in the crash “include local folks, visiting hunters, and skaters and their families who were on the way home after delighting Wichita in last week’s U.S. Figure Skating national championships.”
Lefler took particular exception to Trump’s attack on former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for failing to maintain standards in employing air traffic controllers.
“His so-called evidence was a couple of stories from right-wing media sources objecting to a Federal Aviation Administration policy seeking to recruit and accommodate Americans with disabilities,” continued the columnist.
Lefler went on to quote Trump as saying: “The FAA’s website states they include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism; all qualify for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country, pouring into a little spot, a little dot on the map, little runway.”
The opinion writer claimed Trump sought to “leverage the plane crash to gin up support for his crusade to eradicate diversity, equity and inclusion programs in government and business, programs that benefit women, minorities, veterans and people with disabilities.”
He maintained that the FAA showed no evidence of any policy changes going back to 2013 and said he spent hours listening to recordings of the air traffic communications and “came away deeply impressed by the professionalism on display.”
“Faced with the most horrifying scenario that can happen to an airport operations staff, they calmly ordered planes to hold in place while they coordinated a search and rescue mission using every asset they could muster,” he continued.
“So 67 people have died horrible deaths, thousands are mourning them here and elsewhere, and Trump’s talking points are DEI and dwarfs.
“Mr. President, with all due respect, people are grieving here. And you’re not helping anybody, even yourself,” he concluded.
