After watching Donald Trump try to pin Wednesday’s awful air collision over the Potomac on the diversity of our air traffic controllers, I am going to retire the word “unbelievable” from my vocabulary.

We do not know what caused this national tragedy, and Trump said that. But he also suggested that 67 people lost their lives because Joe Biden lowered the standards for air traffic controllers, though there is not even a wisp of evidence behind that claim.

“It just could have been” caused by too much diversity in the ranks, he said. Or not.

We now know that air traffic control received no response from a military Black Hawk helicopter seconds before it collided with the American Airlines flight from Wichita to Washington, D.C.

But Trump didn’t wait to hear that. Instead, he put the air in air safety, carelessly summoning, based on nothing but his own prejudice, the idea that the FAA’s supposed roster of people with “severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities” were to blame.

One reporter asked the president how, in the absence of any facts about what caused the crash, he could possibly know that. How, she wanted to know, could he both blame DEI for what happened and also say, “We don’t know that it was the controllers’ fault.”

Because unlike so many others, he answered, “I have common sense.”

“We want brilliant people doing this. … They have to be at the highest level of genius.”

Which, he strongly implied, diverse hires cannot be. No, for that lapidary level of using the old noodle, you have to have had a famous uncle who attended MIT, or so he keeps saying.

Air traffic control is the ultimate merit-based job, and those who work under intense, insane, increasing pressure at Reagan National, my home airport for 20 years, are already the best of the best. A preliminary report said that one air traffic controller was doing the job of two people when the crash happened, as allowed under FAA rules. But that has nothing to do with DEI.

If anything, this crash is a heartbreaking reminder of the importance of government workers like air traffic controllers, and of regulation itself.

How were these wild statements from our president in a time of mourning supposed to comfort the grieving? Instead, they seemed designed to prickle, perturb, and place an extra burden on the air traffic controllers who had to get right back to work on Thursday.

The hiring policies Trump was talking about have actually been in place since 2013, and when a reporter asked him why, if they let such slouches in the door, he hadn’t done anything about them during his first term, Trump disputed that and later said the reporter had asked “totally irrelevant and not very good questions.”

Trump also said the public should feel perfectly safe flying, though that doesn’t square with his slur that Biden lowered the bar for air traffic controllers. If that were true, then it wouldn’t be safe to fly. Which is it?

Former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg rightly called the president’s remarks “despicable.”

“As families grieve,” he said, “Trump should be leading, not lying.” The Biden administration “put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch. President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe. Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again.”

Since taking office, Trump has started pushing out those federal workers who lack the brilliance to agree with him no matter what. He’s signed an executive order to immediately end DEI programs, never mind all the research – I guess not by Trump-approved masterminds – that tells us diversity improves productivity.

On Tuesday, he fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration – someone he himself had originally appointed, now apparently sullied by the fact that Biden kept him on. And he got rid of the important aviation security advisory group mandated by Congress after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. Or rather, the group still exists, but as of this week has no members: More genius.

Undermine air safety, food safety and environmental regulations, as Trump’s actions say he intends to do, or undercut the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which the president has talked about doing away with entirely, and people will die.

Whatever caused this crash, the spotlight on operations at Reagan National is also a reminder of the importance of expertise.

And when Trump says we’re only going to be hiring Mensa air traffic controllers, how does that line up with his catastrophically unqualified picks for extremely important jobs?

At this week’s confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the nominee was reminded of his past statements that “no vaccine is safe and effective,” and that the CDC’s refusal to acknowledge a link that doesn’t exist between vaccines and autism “is like Nazi death camps.”

He’s said that “tremendous circumstantial evidence” shows school shootings are caused by the use of antidepressants, that it’s “highly likely” that Lyme disease is a bioweapon and that COVID is a “genetically engineered bioweapon that targets Black and white people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.”

At the hearings, he showed that he does not understand even in general terms the workings of either the Medicare or Medicaid programs he would be overseeing at HHS. Wicked cleverness is one of the few things of which this particular Kennedy has never been accused.

There are many areas, air safety being only one, in which we really cannot slash, bully or bluster our way to a better America. If Trump himself is as smart as he constantly says he is, he will stop trying.

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