The 'Not Me' Trump administration's blame-shifting

Real leaders take responsibility.

(Allen.G /Shutterstock.com)

By Shalise Manza Young

When we were younger and something happened in our house, some small infraction that was more aggravating to her than egregious, my mother would ask my sister and I who was responsible.

Often, the answer was “not me.” To our mom, it was often enough that one year there was a gift under our Christmas tree for Not Me, her unseen third child.

It’s become clear there’s at least one Not Me in the Trump administration, though there’s also a Don’t Look at Me skulking through the halls of the West Wing.

Earlier this week, transportation secretary Sean Duffy was speaking on Fox about a days-long crisis at Newark Liberty International Airport, just the latest in a string of aviation-related issues in recent months.

Asked how close things got to “potential disaster” at Newark, Duffy did what so many of his fellow Cabinet members and President Donald Trump love to do: played the blame game.

“Let’s talk about what happened: so, we have really old infrastructure in America, it hasn’t been updated in the last 30, 40 years,” he said. “This should have been dealt with in the last administration and they did nothing.”

Not Me, I’m not the one in charge, blame Joe Biden! And when I’m really desperate, watch me blame Barack Obama!

Things are bad at Newark. There were already flight delays because the airport’s busiest runway has been closed for renovations since April 15, and like many airports in the United States, it has dealt with a shortage of air traffic controllers for years. But then on April 28, controllers at Newark’s radar approach control center lost all contact with 15 to 20 planes preparing to land for somewhere between 30 seconds, according to Duffy, and 90 seconds, according to those on the job at the time of the incident.

Old, faulty equipment appears to have been the cause, and though there were no accidents while the system was down, the experience was so distressing for those FAA employees that at least five have elected to take a 45-day trauma leave.

One source told CNN there have been at least two similar outages previously.

And it happened again today. NBC News reported: “The outrage shortly before 4 a.m. EDT lasted only 90 seconds on a limited number of sectors, the FAA said, but the blackout is still a troubling development in the wake of revelations that controllers lost radio contact with pilots flying into the airport in recent months.”

Duffy’s predecessor as transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, appeared on MSNBC Tuesday night and acknowledged that the equipment FAA controllers use has long been out of date, but called out Duffy for playing politics in a serious situation.

“I hated the technology that we inherited because it did need to be upgraded,” he said. “Look, these problems have built up over a long time. I didn’t sit around saying who can we blame for this. We launched a contract to modernize the infrastructure, take what’s basically a copper wire system and transform it for the internet era, get fiber going there.

“That’s not something that can be done overnight. When you leave an office like that, you hand over the keys and it’s up to the next guy to take it to the next level.”

Buttigieg also underscored the decades-long decline in the number of controllers—a job that requires over a year of training and carries with it a tremendous amount of stress—though he noted that on his watch that number finally began to increase.

Of course, hours after the fatal midair collision between a commercial jet and an Army helicopter in late January that killed 67 people, there was Trump, incapable of showing empathy for the grieving families but always ready with racism, ableism and Not Me-ism. He indicated Buttigieg’s efforts to increase the diversity of the Federal Aviation Administration workforce, including among the controllers, were to blame for the crash; he also claimed that Biden and Obama had lowered the standards for hiring controllers, which is false.

Yet though Duffy was all too happy to point the finger at Biden and Buttigieg for not waving a magic wand to solve problems that have been festering for decades, it is under his leadership that the work done by the non-partisan Aviation Security Advisory Committee, responsible for reviewing FAA air traffic control management since 1988, was stopped, and the vice chair of the National Transportation Safety Board was abruptly fired with no reason given (surprise, surprise: he’s Black).

None of those factors makes flying any safer. To this layperson, they would seem to have the opposite effect.

It’s also worth noting that as a member of Congress, Duffy voted against FAA funding, including additional money for more air traffic controllers and technology. And in this griftiest of administrations, the FAA is negotiating with Elon Musk’s Starlink communications system to replace a $2.4 billion contract with Verizon.

Duffy—as all members of Trump’s sycophantic, unqualified, shambolic Cabinet do—was just following the president’s example; in an interview on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Trump was asked about the state of the American economy and said the good parts are his doing and the bad parts are because of Biden’s failures.

It’s true that Duffy has officially been on the job for only about 100 days, so not every close call and staffing shortage can be placed at his feet.

But does anyone think he’ll step up like a true leader and take responsibility for the myriad issues in the department he leads? Not me.

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

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