To say JD Vance is good at what he does is like saying water is wet at this point, but it bears repeating because he continues to impress, starting with how smoothly and confidently he stepped into the role of GOP vice presidential nominee back in July and then after he was elected in November as Donald Trump’s second in command.
Advertisement
Vice Presidents by design are essentially supposed to be the wingmen of the presidents they serve under, helping to bolster their arguments and make their cases to the American people, Congress, and the media while at the same time demonstrating to those both home and abroad that if something, God forbid, happened to the president, they are ready to lead on all matters foreign and domestic.
And while Vance has only been in the VP role for about ten days, he proved once again that he was up to the challenge during the White House press conference Thursday on the mid-air collision that happened Wednesday night near Reagan National Airport, a horrific incident in which authorities have indicated they believe none of the 64 on board the commercial plane nor the three in the military helicopter survived.
SEE ALSO–>> Not Cool: WaPo’s Above-the-Fold ‘Priorities’ After Aviation Disaster Spark Outrage, Questions
Not surprisingly, the mainstream media and the left (but I repeat myself) are beside themselves over President Trump repeatedly expressing concern over DEI in aviation in the aftermath of the crash and how he’s openly questioning if an emphasis on it during the Biden years and even back to the Obama years played a role in the tragic events that took place the night before.
Here’s some of what Trump said during the briefing:
Advertisement
“We want the most competent people. We don’t care what race they are,” the president said. “If they don’t have a great brain, a great power of the brain, they’re not going to be very good at what they do and bad things will happen.”
When asked in the earlier briefing by ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce whether he was saying the crash was the result of diversity hiring, Trump said, “we don’t know” what caused the crash, adding investigators are still looking into that. “It just could have been. We have a high standard. We’ve had a higher, much higher standard than anybody else.”
It is perhaps with the knowledge in mind that the media seems keen to stoke confusion, doubt, and outrage over Trump’s concerns as it relates to the crash and a possible DEI connection that Vance took to the podium during the press conference.
In his remarks, he gave the Cliff Notes version of what Trump has talked about, succinctly explaining exactly why it is indeed important to investigate what role it might have played and why it needs to be nixed:
Thank you Mr. President for your leadership. I just want to re-emphasize what the President said and you’ve heard from the Secretary of Transportation and of Defense. There really was a whole government response, we were all on the phone, we were all communicating yesterday trying to get to the bottom of this immediately but also try to communicate with the American people about what happened.
Something the President said that I think bears re-emphasizing, which is that when you don’t have the best standards in who you’re hiring it means on the one hand you’re not getting the best people in government, but on the other hand it puts stresses on the people who are already there.
And I think that is a core part of what President Trump is going to bring and has already brought to Washington DC – is we want to hire the best people because we want the best people at air traffic control and we want to make sure we have enough people at air traffic control who are actually competent to do the job.
If you go back to just some of the headlines over the past 10 years you have many hundreds of people suing the government because they would like to be air traffic controllers but they were turned away because of the color of their skin. That policy ends under Donald Trump’s leadership because safety is the first priority of our aviation industry.
Advertisement
Watch:
My prayers are with last night’s plane crash victims and their families.
Safety is this administration’s top priority, and that means hiring the best people in air traffic control to ensure this kind of tragedy never happens again. pic.twitter.com/NStDsUwW09
— Vice President JD Vance (@VP) January 30, 2025
Relatedly, some headlines Vance didn’t mention but which are also at the core of the message he and Trump delivered about ending DEI in government hiring/promotion practices go as follows:
The investigation is still ongoing into what happened over the Potomac Wednesday night and why. But even if DEI wasn’t a significant factor, it’s still got to go because it has already turned deadly in industries beyond the airline industry. It’s only going to get worse if total war is not declared on it from the inside out, and that includes the private sector, which needs to take the ball Trump has thrown onto the court on the matter and run with it.
