There are several images in President Donald Trump’s two terms in office, the second just a week old, that will remain in the public’s mind: his escalator descent smearing all Mexican immigrants as criminals; watching on television, without intervening, the unfolding violence at the Capital; an upraised arm after being wounded; and now, at the lectern delivering certain-to-him opinion that diversity, equality and inclusion was the cause of last week’s nighttime collision between the American Airlines flight and the U.S. Army helicopter over the Potomac River.
One of the two helicopter pilots was female and her family initially asked that her name – a captain, it turned out, with 450 hours of flight time who had had a White House detail – not be made public.
Why? Because the president, tapping the wisdom of his gut as he says he does, said that the tragedy was caused by a less-than-qualified military, one that has been victimized by DEI. The pilot’s family must have rightly feared the social media disparagement, and perhaps being accosted, in-the-face moments, that the president’s words will engender in his supporters.
Never mind that the accident’s investigation was in its initial hours and days, and its causes still to be uncovered. For Trump, all that is needed is “common sense.”
Picture yourself a college graduate with good scores and some time on the athletic fields, a woman or male with brown skin. You’d admired your older uncle’s or your grandfather’s military record, his time overseas, heard it praised at family gatherings, and which now you’d like to try to emulate. Or, you’re that man or woman, black skin, who’d done very well in high school but because of limited household resources knew that in the military there was an opportunity to acquire a skill, or an advanced education, while serving.
In either case, would you take that track, now, after hearing the president? What would the parents of those accomplished and further promising individuals – individuals who are anything but white and male – now recommend? Because according to the president, his “common sense,” your gender, your skin color, will call your skills, your accomplishments in the military, that you’re in uniform at all, into question.
Because it is all about him, with no concern for fact or with a reservoir of empathy, who is returning the country to the 1960s and earlier, and the defense of this country will suffer. Do his supporters really endorse pronouncements like this from his gut?
