I would like to ask for a moment of silence, for the victims and their families, says Donald Trump as he begins a press conference about the plane crash in the morning, local time.
He calls the accident, the worst in the USA since November 2001, a tragedy.
After expressing sorrow over the fatalities, Trump stops reading from a paper and instead begins to speak more freely about his opinions on what has happened.
He blames the two Democratic ex-presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama for having compromised flight safety during their mandates in the White House and instead prioritized diversity. The President also attacks the aviation authority FAA and criticizes their employment of people who, he claims, among other things, have intellectual disabilities.
I put safety first. Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put politics first, he says.
Trump stated earlier in the day that the weather was clear and that, in his opinion, it looked like the crash could have been prevented.
"Why didn't the helicopter take off or land, or turn? Why didn't the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane? This is bad, a situation that looks like it could have been prevented", the President writes on his platform Truth Social.
