Sen. Kelly says Trump’s DEI remarks on plane crash reflects ‘poor leadership’

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) criticized President Trump for tying the DC plane crash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hiring practices in government.

“To say that it has to do with the person's color of their skin or their gender, I think that's just poor leadership,” Kelly said in an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”

“And especially at a time where any president is supposed to be the consoler in chief, and not the person that's going to try to divide us as a country, especially when you don't have the appropriate information. And he clearly does not have the information in this case,” Kelly continued.

Kelly, a retired astronaut and Navy pilot, said he’s been involved in similar investigations into crashes and that he expects multiple factors to have contributed to Wednesday night’s crash, which apparently had no survivors of all 67 people aboard the two aircraft that collided.

“These accidents are all often very complicated set of things that happen sequentially. It's often not one thing that causes a major aviation accident like this,” he said.

Kelly said he trusted the investigative authorities.

“This is too early in the investigation. The NTSB is really good at this. They'll do a thorough investigation, and we'll eventually see what the cause of this accident was,” he added.

The cause of the crash between an American Airlines plane and a military helicopter Wednesday night is still unknown, and investigative authorities have not publicly indicated who could be responsible for the crash.

Trump, at a press conference Thursday, said it was not clear the air traffic controllers made any mistake but pledged to investigate all angles of the crash. He also knocked his Democratic predecessors over aviation standards, suggesting that the Democrats didn’t put safety first and that diversity initiatives have weakened the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Pressed by reporters on how he could conclude that diversity had something to do with the crash, Trump said, “Because I have common sense, okay? And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.”

“We want brilliant people doing this. This is a major chess game at the highest level. When you have 60 planes coming in during a short period of time, and they’re all coming in different directions, and you’re dealing with very high-level computer, computer work and very complex computers.”