When a passenger jet and an Army helicopter collided above the Potomac on Wednesday night, dozens of souls plummeted to an untimely death. 

“Sadly, there are no survivors. This was a dark and excruciating night in our nation’s capitol and in our nation’s history and a tragedy of terrible proportions,” President Donald Trump said in a Thursday morning press conference. 

Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance spoke to reporters this morning about the disastrous crash last night between an American Airlines jet and an Army Blackhawk helicopter — killing 67 people total near the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. 

“You had a helicopter that had the ability to stop. … And the turn it made was not the correct turn, obviously, and it did somewhat the opposite of what it was told,” Trump said. “You had a confluence of bad decisions that were made, and you have people that lost their lives — violently lost their lives.”

Trump signed a presidential memorandum Thursday afternoon “ordering an immediate assessment of aviation safety” to undo “the damage resulting from the Biden administration’s obsession with DEI.” In his morning press conference, Trump mentioned last week’s executive order on “Keeping Americans Safe In Aviation” by sweeping DEI from the Federal Aviation Administration. He explained the FAA had adopted lower standards in the name of “diversity,” putting Americans’ lives at risk.

“We have to have our smartest people. It doesn’t matter what they look like, how they speak. … They have to be talented, naturally talented geniuses,” Trump said. He then said that prior to his taking office there had been “a big push to put diversity into the FAA’s program.”

A reporter asked Trump how he could “come to the conclusion” that DEI may have contributed to the crash.

“Because I have common sense,” Trump replied.

Another reporter asked if Trump was saying the crash was “somehow caused and the result of diversity hiring.”

“It just could have been. … There are things where you just have to go by brainpower,” Trump said. “Biden went by a standard that’s the exact opposite. So we don’t know, but … we’re going to look into that and we’re going to see.” 

The Army launched a program called “Project Inclusion” in 2020 and even required its Green Berets to take DEI training, as The Free Press reported. According to The Heritage Foundation, cadets at the Air Force Academy have been forced through sessions on things like “White privilege, internal bias and systemic racism.”

Meanwhile, the FAA has had a diversity push of its own. The agency’s emphasis on “diversity” led the agency to recruit people with “severe intellectual” and “psychiatric” disabilities, as Fox News reported in January of last year. Months later, a nonprofit sued the FAA for rejecting more than 1,000 air traffic control applicants based on their race. 

“You have many hundreds of people suing the government because they would like to be air traffic controllers, but they were turned away because of the color of their skin,” Vance said. “That policy ends under Donald Trump’s leadership, because safety is the first priority of our aviation industry.”

Vance echoed Trump’s points about the necessity of hiring qualified aviation employees.

“We want to hire the best people,” Vance said. “We want to make sure we have enough people at air traffic control who are actually competent to do the job.”

Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He is a spring 2025 fellow of The College Fix. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.