on the downward slope of being right.... (or wrong)

He began with a sombre tone.

"This was a dark and excruciating night in our nation's capital and in our nation's history — a tragedy of terrible proportions," Donald Trump told the packed room of journalists.

"As one nation, we grieve for every precious soul that has been taken from us so suddenly."

He asked those at Thursday's press conference to join him in a moment of silence to reflect on the 67 lives lost the night before.

But that moment proved to be the proverbial calm before the storm.

Donald Trump turns aviation tragedy into new front in the culture wars
By North America correspondent Carrington Clarke

An almost instant pivot from mourning to anger.

The president of the United States unleashed a blizzard of accusations, quickly suggesting blame for the collision.

"We do not know what led to this crash," he admitted, "but we have some very strong opinions and ideas, and I think we'll probably state those opinions now."

His strongest opinion? That progressive policies had allowed incompetent people into critical jobs.

He mocked the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for its "diversity push", claiming the agency was too focused on inclusion and wanted people with severe disabilities to become air traffic controllers.

He insisted that air traffic controllers need to be "talented, naturally talented geniuses", implying that a person with a disability couldn't be one.

Trump also took a direct swipe at former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, sarcastically calling him a "real winner" before swearing from the podium: "He's a disaster. Now he's just got a good line of bullshit."

Has an American president ever profanely insulted a political opponent while trying to console a grieving nation in the wake of a horrific tragedy?

A few kilometres away from where Trump was delivering his tirade, divers were still in the frigid, dark waters of the Potomac, undertaking the unimaginable task of searching for bodies — bringing some level of comfort to the bereaved families.

While they worked in silence, the commander-in-chief used his platform not to honour their efforts, not to order flags flown at half-mast in respect for the victims, but to make a political point.

Politics of a tragedy

In the face of a tragedy like this, most politicians steer clear of direct partisan attacks — either because they recognise it as distasteful or because they believe the public would find it so.

Trump holds no such qualms.

To a hammer, everything is a nail.

To Trump, a tragedy is an opportunity — to play politics.

To rail against what he sees as one of the great ills of America: the push for diversity.

When pressed for evidence that diversity hiring had contributed to the crash, Trump simply replied: "It just could have been."

Pressed again, he responded: "Because I have common sense, OK? And unfortunately, a lot of people don't."

If it turns out that the individuals involved in this tragedy were hired despite failing to meet the accepted standards of the job, Trump may feel vindicated.

But there is no evidence that this occurred.

The employees working in the control tower that night must now be under immense psychological pressure, having witnessed and been involved in such a catastrophic event.

To then have the president suggest that incompetence played a role likely only compounds their pain.

The Overton window keeps shifting

The culture war over "woke" policies has only intensified in recent years, and Trump's instinct is to continuously fan the flames.

He has campaigned to dismantle policies designed to address systemic disadvantages by providing opportunities to marginalised groups. He argues these policies are unfair and lead to lower standards.

He is not alone.

His ally, Elon Musk, has also aggressively pushed this narrative. A year ago, the billionaire provoked outrage when he criticised United Airlines and Boeing for efforts to hire non-white pilots and factory workers.

Musk even mocked the acronym DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) by deliberately misspelling it as "DIE," writing on X:

"It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE."

The belief that diversity is being prioritised over competence has taken root within the MAGA movement. So, when this tragedy occurred, it was almost instinctive for Trump to blame DEI policies — despite offering no evidence to support the claim.

A similar reaction followed the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles. The tragedy was swiftly politicised, with the city's fire chief facing the brunt of the criticism.

Kristin Crowley, a 22-year veteran and the first LGBTQ fire chief in LAFD history, was targeted by conservative commentator Megyn Kelly.

Kelly called her an "obese lesbian" and raged that the department was too focused on diversity, claiming it was being run by "overweight, out-of-shape women".

It was cruel, personal language.

Yet, it says everything about how far the Overton window — the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population — has shifted in America that such remarks no longer shock the public.

Trump argues that America should be "colourblind" and a true meritocracy, where diversity is not a goal in itself.

But whatever one's opinion on DEI programs, the most telling aspect of Trump's response to this tragedy is what it reveals about his leadership.

What this tells us about Trump's second term

In the lead-up to his second term, there were questions about whether Trump might soften his approach.

Would winning re-election — including the popular vote and stronger support from minority groups — satisfy his ego? Would he become more conciliatory, particularly in moments that demand it?

His response to this tragedy gives us a clear answer.

Trump remains the same politician he has always been.

He sees every day, and every event, as an opportunity to push his agenda, to shape America in his desired vision, and to attack his political enemies.

Donald Trump never does sombre for long.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-01/donald-trump-washington-dc-plane-helicopter-crash-analysis/104884782

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

Gus Leonisky

POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE SINS OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…

philadelphia crash....

A Learjet 55 medical transport plane with six people on board crashed in Northeast Philadelphia on Friday evening. Witness and security camera footage captured a bright flash in the sky before the disaster, followed by explosions and thick plumes of smoke.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed that the jet went down at around 6:30pm local time, shortly after departing from Northeast Philadelphia Airport. The aircraft was en route to Springfield-Branson National Airport in Missouri.

The Mexico-registered twin-engine jet belonged to Jet Rescue Air Ambulance, according to FlightRadar24 data. Newly appointed US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy confirmed that six people were on board. Emergency personnel at the scene told NBC News that the victims were likely two doctors, two pilots, and a patient with a family member.

https://www.rt.com/news/612002-plane-crash-explosion-philadelphia/

THE AIRCRAFT WOULD HAVE BEEN FULLY LOADED WITH JET FUEL... THE SMALL EXPLOSION IN MID-AIR BEFORE THE FIERY CRASH COULD HAVE BEEN S "BIRD" STRIKE OR A DRONE FLYING IN THE DARKNESS... OR SOMETHING ELSE... WE WILL FIND OUT SOMETIMES....

CODOLENCES TO THE FAMILIES....

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

Gus Leonisky

POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

By Gus Leonisky at 2 Feb 2025 - 5:14am
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try me......

If Presidents Can’t Control Executive Agencies, Elections Are Fake BY: JOY PULLMANN

Amid the hundreds of substantive executive actions President Donald Trump has taken in his first two weeks back in the White House, perhaps none matter more than his efforts at bureaucracy-busting. That notably includes what Julie Kelly calls a “Friday night massacre” days ago of the Department of Justice’s January 6 prosecutorial staff, which erased 30-40 temporary positions Biden’s DOJ had attempted to make permanent.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, “arguably, he has done more in two weeks than Trump’s entire Department of Justice did during his first term,” Kelly said in a Saturday video. So has acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, both while the Senate confirmation of U.S. attorney general nominee Pam Bondi remains pending.

Together, they’ve sought the firing or retirements of numerous top FBI and DOJ personnel, and an accounting of all FBI personnel involved in the Jan. 6, 2021 prosecutions. Martin is also directing an internal probe into the DOJ’s abuse of a post-Enron obstruction statute that the Supreme Court said the department used unlawfully to imprison right-leaning Capitol protesters with help from Constitution-hating federal judges. CIA mouthpiece Ken Dilanian complained on NBC, “This is probably the biggest purge in the modern history of the FBI, and we’re talking about most of the senior leadership at the bureau.”

The Office of Personnel Management and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are also posing prominent test cases for how the Trump administration can reform a federal bureaucracy that has, by design, resisted elected control since its inception. The administration is considering folding USAID into the State Department, and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) doge Elon Musk claimed early Monday morning Trump supports doing so. The two agencies have long engaged in power struggles.

USAID is widely perceived as a CIA front organization. Former State Department official Mike Benz says USAID has funded international censorship and regime change operations. As demonstrated by journalists Diana West and M. Stanton Evans, the State Department has embedded Communist subversives from well before Whittaker Chambers all the way through secretaries Hillary Clinton and Antony Blinken, making it another top strategic threat to American self-governance.

Last Monday, acting agency administrator Jason Gray placed 50-60 USAID employees on paid administrative leave while he investigates “information that they may have been conspiring to circumvent Trump’s executive orders requiring the halting of federal aid funds to overseas programs and all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs within the agency,” reported RealClearPolitics’ Susan Crabtree.

Saturday night, officials from DOGE attempted to enter USAID to begin accounting for its personnel and funding. Security Director Jack Voorhees and deputy Brian McGill physically barred them, and were subsequently placed on leave, CNN and Fox reported Sunday.

The administration says claims that DOGE personnel didn’t have proper security clearances to access USAID information are false. According to a 2024 book by former Trump administration USAID official Mark Moyar, Masters of Corruption, Vorhees routinely weaponized security clearances to stymie the policies of elected officials.

Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio Sunday complaining about the incident and insisting that “by law” Congress must determine whether the president can revise a president-created agency.

USAID officials placed on leave include Voorhees, Employee and Labor Relations Director Nicholas Gottlieb, and Assistant General Counsel for Ethics Jack Ohlweiler. Moyar’s book says Ohlweiler and Voorhees are some of the agency’s most politicized employees.

Masters of Corruption says Voorhees intentionally delayed Moyar’s security clearance so he could not enact Trump’s policies and in alleged retaliation for Moyar reporting entrenched corruption and criminal activity at the agency. It says Voorhees lied to Moyar and others about delaying the clearance. It alleges Ohlweiler helped deny Moyar a security clearance on partisan grounds, with no due process.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, sent letters to USAID about the alleged whistleblower retaliation, naming Voorhees. He received non-answers.

Moyar also demonstrates that many agency inspectors general work to cover up corruption rather than reduce it. That was certainly the case for the inspectors general who closed their books on Spygate-related power abuses, whose work led to no significant prosecutions and elicited noncooperation from numerous key players. The Trump administration has also already fired some 17 agency inspectors general.

In his book, Moyar says he was harassed by the national security state for disclosing evidence about USAID that included: “unauthorized personnel actions, most notably the creation of a new civil service deputy; bullying of employees; allocation of nearly all CMC travel money to two individuals; maintenance of a small inner circle of favorites that dominates hiring panels and receives most of the perks, such as bonuses and slots at war college courses; marginalization of senior foreign service officers and elevation of pliant junior foreign service officers…[and] conflicts of interest.”

USAID has funded organizations facilitating illegal migration into the United States, foreign abortions, climate change hysteria, transgender ideology, international Marxism, and anti-white racism, according to a 2022 Heritage Foundation report. The report also says USAID has funded organizations that fund leftist district attorneys who encourage crime and use their offices to prosecute Americans for disagreeing with Democrats.

Former Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield testified before Congress that USAID helped fund the development of the Covid-19 virus. A 2018 inspector general report found USAID funding had fueled opium farming in Afghanistan, which funds terrorism.

Ignoring all this, Democrats and corporate media insist Trump’s aid funding freeze is risking “millions of lives” via suspending food, medicine, and other humanitarian assistance. But such assistance is a front for a malignant agency threatening American lives and sovereignty and pumping leftist priorities across the globe.

Other incoherent responses from Democrat media include that a president can’t erase an agency another president created (USAID) but also can’t create an agency (DOGE). It’s not about logic, it’s about maintaining power by any means possible. As Chris Bray points out, Democrats today are filing lawsuits claiming every executive action is literally Orange Hitler, while just about five years ago they were the ones demanding everyone obey illegal Covid executive orders or we were killing grandma and deserving of jail time.

Democrats claiming Trump will “politicize” agencies by installing “loyalists” are only expressing rage that Republicans are attempting to take the keys to the unconstitutional power structure Democrats have controlled for more than a century. Besides creating an illegitimate shadow government erasing constitutional government. the bureaucracy is itself a politicized patronage system.

The bureaucracy also distributes patronage by doling out favors and finances: favorable decisions and contracts. It’s unseemly — and wrong — for public employees to have privileges unattainable for most of the Americans paying their salaries. That includes effectively being protected from ever being fired, even for rank insubordination or incompetence.

If the executive cannot control his own personnel, agencies, and funding lawfully given to him by a duly elected Congress, elections mean nothing. If the executive is not actually an executor, then the entire bureaucracy is an autocratic, self-licking ice cream cone. It runs the country, not any elected official. And Congress is complicit, because it allows the distribution of opium funds to Afghanistan and queer “safe spaces” in Kenya without ever having to take a public vote on any of this garbage, so long as these taxpayer-provided slush funds slather their retirements and relatives with “nonprofit” and “contractor” lard.

Whatever you want to call unelected bureaucrats and “nonprofit” grifters distributing funds obtained from American citizens against our consent as expressed in elections and line-item votes, it is not a republic, nor a democracy. If Trump can’t fire his own employees and redistribute public funds the executive branch has been given by law, he’s not really the president, and elections are fake.

All this means Trump isn’t “weaponizing” or “politicizing” these agencies. He’s fighting their inherent weaponization. Firing and investigating people who abuse public power, and ending the theft of American labor to fund evil international patronage schemes — that isn’t retribution, it’s justice.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her latest book with Regnery is "False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America." A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include "Classic Books For Young Children," and "101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation." An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include "The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," from Encounter Books.

https://thefederalist.com/2025/02/03/if-presidents-cant-control-executive-agencies-elections-are-fake/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

Gus Leonisky

POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

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