On the heels of the catastrophic air crash between an American Airlines flight and a Black Hawk Army Helicopter last night, newly installed President Donald Trump held a press briefing today, in which he was quick to spread the blame across various people and policies, despite no hard evidence or facts having yet been discovered regarding the tragedy.
This apparently includes the United States Army soldier who was piloting the helicopter.
Trump wasted no time in pointing the finger at his presidential predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, as well as disabled air traffic employees who were part of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
He went on to speculate on the cause of the crash that saw no survivors, going so far as to openly suggest that the US Army pilot of the helicopter could be to blame for the loss of 67 lives.
“You had a situation where you had a helicopter that had the ability to stop,” Trump said. “I have helicopters, you can stop a helicopter very quickly. It had the ability to go up or down, it had the ability to turn, and the turn it made was not the correct turn, obviously, and it did somewhat the opposite of what it was told. So don’t know that that would have been the difference, because the timing was so tight. It was so, it was so little, there was so little time to think. But what you did have is you had vision, the helicopter had vision of the plane because you had vision of it all the way – perfect vision of it all the way from Kennedy Center, where the tape was taken, and for some reason, there weren’t adjustments made.”
“Again, you could have slowed down the helicopter substantially, you could have stopped the helicopter,” Donald went on to add. “You could have gone up, you could have gone down. You could have gone straight up, straight down, you could have turned – you could have done a million different maneuvers. For some reason, it just kept going and then made a slight turn at the very end, and there was by that time it was too late. They shouldn’t have been at the same height, because if it wasn’t the same height, you could have gone under it or over it, and nobody realized or they didn’t say that it’s at the same height. It would still wouldn’t have been great, but you would have missed it by quite a bit. It could have been 1,000 feet higher, it could have been 200 feet lower, but it was exactly at the same height, and somebody should have been able to point that out.”
Trump didn’t stop there, of course, going on to justify his outlandish speculations by stating that his opinions and assumptions were simple “common sense” and completely valid, even well before investigators have had the time to collect and review the evidence of the incident.
“So all of this is going to be studied, but it just seems to me from a couple of words that I like to use, the words ‘common sense,'” he continued to rant. “Some really bad things happened and some things happened that shouldn’t have happened, so you had a helicopter going in an identical direction. You had a helicopter that was at the exact same height as somebody going in essentially the opposite direction. You had a plane that was following a track, which is a track that every other plane followed, and I don’t imagine, I know I’ve heard today that they might have been following the preceding plane, which was pretty close, but not that close, the preceding plane. But you wouldn’t have even been able to see that because of the direction that the helicopter was coming in at, so you had a confluence of bad decisions that were made.”
Watch the clip here: