Former United States Representative and current CNN commentator Adam Kinzinger kindly offered some stellar advice to Donald Trump today, which the petulant president will no doubt ignore.
Following devastating news out of Washington D.C., which experienced a deadly air crash in the late evening hours of Jan. 29, Trump sprinted to social media to share his take. Even as reports were flooding in, and emergency responders were desperately seeking survivors, the leader of our nation was on Truth Social ranting about the accident.
Experts are still dissecting what went wrong to cause an American Airlines flight to collide with a military helicopter over the Potomac, but Trump’s not waiting around for the facts. He’s far more interested in being among the first to comment on the disaster, no matter how much danger that spontaneity poses. This is the president of the nation we’re talking about — any reaction from him needs to be well-considered, factual, and rational — that have never applied to one Donald J. Trump.
Which is why exactly no one was surprised to see the utter lack of maturity (or functioning thought) in comfort to their devastated families, or to scared American citizens. Instead he’s searching for who to pin the blame on, as he rages on Truth Social about the plane’s “perfect and routine line of approach” and seemingly thrusts fault into the laps of the military pilots. “Why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn,” the president openly wondered. “This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!”
The entire message is hugely irresponsible from a head of state. Hypothesizing over the culprit behind a deadly crash would be dangerous for a citizen — it’s utterly thoughtless from a president. Which is exactly what Kinzinger said in response to Trump’s late-night ramblings, when he accurately noted that “Trump literally knows nothing about aviation, approach control, visual separation,” and yet he’s somehow still bold enough to share his opinion for the world to see.
Kinzinger went on to urge “quiet” from the president until more facts are known.
In a followup tweet right around an hour later, Kinzinger blasted Trump’s initial response as “bush league and childish,” and invited Trump to “let grown adults work it out” before he starts filling people’s heads with false impressions. That was a common response to Trump’s foolish post, as people reeled from his “child’s book report” of a reaction and blasted him for failing to send his condolences before slinging blame.
Trump did eventually learn how to be presidential — or at least someone on his team did — but not until after numerous other leaders — including Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and former President Barack Obama — already beat him to the punch. His tardy platitudes failed to impress — come as they did a good 11 hours after that first fear-mongering tweet — and instead served as a reminder of the hellish four years we have ahead of us.
Published: Jan 30, 2025 03:03 pm