Donald Trump may indeed be to blame for these plane crashes
Donald Trump’s negligence, incompetence, and criminal corruption are responsible for so many things that go wrong these days, it’s tempting to just assume that every new scandal or problem is going to trace back to him. That’s overly presumptive without evidence, of course. But when it comes to this new crisis where a particular model of Boeing aircraft keeps crashing, there is now solid evidence that this is indeed at least partly Trump’s fault.
To be clear, the problem originated with Boeing itself. The company essentially admitted as much when it promised to develop and release a software update to compensate for the apparent hardware defect that’s been causing the 737 MAX 8 to abruptly fall out of the sky and crash, for lack of a better way of putting it. But this evening Rachel Maddow reported on MSNBC that Boeing has been working on this software update for months, and that the work actually stopped for five weeks during Trump’s government shutdown.
To be clear, the first crash happened in October 2018, long before the shutdown. But there’s real reason to believe that this week’s second crash might have been prevented if the software patch hadn’t been delayed by five weeks. When you throw in the fact that the United States has had no FAA Administrator for more than a year because Trump refused to appoint one after Congress wouldn’t allow him to install his own personal pilot in the position, the whole thing gets uglier.
Yes, it’s entirely possible that this second crash would have happened even if the President of the United States weren’t a negligent criminal. But the five week delay on the software patch is indeed Donald Trump’s fault. Considering that the Trump regime still has yet to ground the Boeing 737 MAX 8, even as most other nations have, and that Trump is buddies with the CEO of Boeing, the whole thing is a nightmare.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report