Trump is the man without empathy, who feeds off catastrophe, confusion and anxiety

 

 

 Jeffrey St. Clair>>

+ Give Trump some credit. He has no interest in faking empathy, as Biden did so ineptly. In Trump’s playbook, empathy is a weakness, even amid tragedy. Instead, each disaster is an opportunity to go on the attack, to ascribe blame on his enemies, to aggrandize himself, and to find ways to profit from the carnage, financially and politically.

+ I’m reminded of Robert Musil’s sprawling unfinished satirical masterpiece, A Man Without Qualities, set in what Musil called the “pseudo-reality” of pre-war Vienna. Trump is not Musil’s Ulrich, by any means, an insignificant man trapped in the machinery of a world going mad. Trump is Ulrich’s inverse, a self-inflated man driving the world mad. He is the man without empathy, who feeds off catastrophe, confusion and anxiety.

+ Thus, it was no surprise that only moments after an American Airlines plane collided with a Blackhawk helicopter near National (aka, Reagon) Airport and crashed into the Potomac, killing 67 people, Trump, constitutionally unable to console, went on the attack, casting blame before the bodies could be recovered and identified.

+ Last week, Trump fired 400 FAA senior officials, including the entire Aviation Security Advisory Committee and the head of the TSA, and froze the hiring of new Air Traffic Controllers. Now, an American Airlines plane collides with a Blackhawk helicopter outside DC, killing 67 people. But before any investigation can be done, perhaps because there’s no one left in the government to investigate, he took to Twitter to target the helicopter pilot and the air traffic controllers…

+ The next day, Trump scuffled his way into the White House press room and suggested that the real cause of the collision may have been DEI hires…

+ Then Trump affixed his grandiose signature to an imperial edict (which is apparently how the government will run for the next four years, independent of Congress), effectively blaming Biden and DEI for the DC plane crash.

+ As Trump targeted DEI, the NYT reported that staffing at the air traffic control tower at D.C. airport was “not normal” at the time of the collision. Only one controller was handling helicopters while also giving instructions to planes, which is usually done by two controllers. Meanwhile, according to The Verge, Trump ousted FAA commissioner Michael Whitaker on January 20 at the behest of Elon Musk, who was furious that the FAA fined SpaceX for failing to get approval for launch changes.