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New Trump Memo Claims DEI, Obama, and Biden ‘Decisions’ Linked to Fatal Aviation Disaster

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President Donald Trump continued his attacks on his Democratic predecessors and diversity programs late Thursday afternoon, signing a presidential memo that linked “decisions” made by Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s administrations, and DEI initiatives, to Wednesday’s mid-air collision between an Army helicopter and a regional commercial airplane. The President’s memo offers no practical evidence they played a role. Sixty-seven people are believed to have died, and no one is believed to have survived.

Trump’s memo orders “a systematic assessment of any deterioration in hiring standards and aviation safety standards and protocols during the Biden Administration.”

Axios reports that the “order shows Trump is doubling down on his claim, without evidence, that DEI policies were a factor in the crash. His memo explicitly mentions ‘diversity equity and inclusion,’ and reflects how anti-DEI efforts are a centerpiece of his second administration’s policy.”

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Critics, including U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), say the incident took place on Trump’s watch, after he allowed the head of the FAA to reportedly resign under pressure, and gutted a critical aviation safety group Trump also just fired the head of the TSA, and placed a hiring freeze on nearly all government positions.

One Federal Aviation Administration traffic controller was assigned to both helicopters and planes when the deadly collision occurred, the FAA stated in a report.

“The report, reviewed by The New York Times, said that one controller was communicating with both helicopters and planes. Those jobs are typically assigned to two people, not one,” The Times reported. “Staffing at the air traffic control tower at Ronald Reagan National Airport was ‘not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,’ according to an internal preliminary Federal Aviation Administration safety report about the collision that was reviewed by The New York Times.”

Staffing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport “has been understaffed for years,” and “nearly a third below targeted staff levels,” The Times reports, citing “years of employee turnover and tight budgets.”

RELATED: Trump’s Claim Diversity and Democrats ‘Could Have’ Caused Deadly Collision Draws Backlash

Calling the deadly collision a “shocking event” Trump’s memo says it “follows problematic and likely illegal decisions during the Obama and Biden Administrations that minimized merit and competence in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).”

A CNN fact check found that a congressional law from 1973 “aimed to increase federal hiring of qualified people with disabilities.”

“The Obama Administration implemented a biographical questionnaire at the FAA to shift the hiring focus away from objective aptitude,” Trump’s memo alleges. He claimed “the Biden Administration egregiously rejected merit-based hiring, requiring all executive departments and agencies to implement dangerous ‘diversity equity and inclusion’ tactics, and specifically recruiting individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities in the FAA.”

The memo claims, “During my first term, my Administration raised standards to achieve the highest standards of safety and excellence,” but a CNN fact check reveals that “Trump’s FAA used the same language about hiring people with disabilities [that] he’s now blasting.”

“During his Thursday press conference,” CNN reported, “President Donald Trump repeatedly suggested there was a link between the tragedy and diversity hiring policies at the Federal Aviation Administration.”

“It’s most important to note that Trump provided no evidence whatsoever that there was any such connection. But it’s also worth noting that some of Trump’s specific assertions about the FAA’s push to hire people with disabilities were either inaccurate or missing critical context about what happened during Trump’s own first presidency.”

Political strategist Donna Brazil noted, “Without an investigation or the recovery of all of the souls that have fallen, Trump inflicts partisan damage without proof or evidence.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘This Is His Responsibility’: Trump’s Response to Deadly Mid-Air Collision Stuns Critics

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Carville Says There’s Only ‘One Thing’ Trump Is Thinking About on His China Trip

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Democratic strategist and political commentator James Carville is blasting what he says is the “one thing” President Donald Trump is thinking about on his trip to China, and it has nothing to do with diplomacy, the U.S. economy, or the war in Iran.

Carville told Al Hunt on their Politicon podcast that it was “really interesting” that all the people he took to China were essentially the people who were in the “first three rows” from his inaugural address. He “put them on Air Force One, and he took Eric — who handles the business end of his business.”

“You’re going to watch a grift and graft over there, like you can’t imagine,” Carville continued. “That’s all this trip is about, and I got news for you, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sixpack, or whoever you are out there, he doesn’t give a s—— about you, your future, your finances, your retirement, your anything.”

“He just cares about making all the money he can as fast as he can, and people [who] don’t realize that are just, just woefully stupid.”

Hunt reminded Carville that earlier this week Trump said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”

READ MORE: Republicans Are Now Doing to Trump What Few in the GOP Have Ever Dared to Do

“Oh, you don’t, Donald,” Hunt responded. “Well, you know something? I think a lot of Americans think about their financial situation, and I’m sure those billionaire oligarchs you’re traveling with don’t, but a lot of voters do, and, uh, you’re gonna pay, you’re gonna pay a price.”

Carville added that Trump also said that he doesn’t even think of Iran.

“I think there’s only one thing that he’s thinking about in his trip to China. And that is a big grift,” Carville said. “Look at who he’s taking with him.”

Carville said there would be “economic exchanges” and “investment opportunities” during the China trip.

“You can see, this is where this is going,” he continued. “They just buy him off. He does not care.”

“He doesn’t care if he, as long as he can go there and make as much money, as fast as he can make it, that’s all what he cares about.”

READ MORE: ‘Rededicating the Country to God’: Trump White House Hosts Evangelical Christian Festival

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Christian Content Creator Fighting Sin Is Teaching Others How to Eat Biblically: NYT

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27-year-old Michigan-raised Kayla Bundy is a Christian content creator who turned to the Bible for ways to eat healthy — but her lifestyle is also part of a “higher calling,” The New York Times reports, explaining that she is “a biblical eater, someone who consumes mostly foods mentioned in the Bible.”

“Sin entered into the world through food,” Bundy told the Times, “and Satan doesn’t stop there. Food, for me, is really like a weapon of how I can fight back.”

According to the Times, a “diet inspired by the Bible has found new audiences online in the Make America Healthy Again era.”

Bundy, who has over 500,000 followers on TikTok, and has been eating biblically for eight years, “claims that her diet ‘fixed’ her skin, her hair and her depression, and she sells coaching sessions to help others with their diets,” The Times reports. She “is open about not having nutrition credentials, but she sells a $28 digital guide to biblical superfoods, as well as coaching sessions that start around $700 for a month, she said.”

READ MORE: Republicans Are Now Doing to Trump What Few in the GOP Have Ever Dared to Do

She buys raw milk, eats sardines and authentic sourdough bread without commercial yeast, and tries to cook with locally sourced foods.

“I had never really thought to look to the Bible for a recipe book,” said Bundy, who now lives in Bali. Cutting out refined sugar made her feel good, and she started “studying scripture from that lens of noticing what they are eating.”

32-year old Georgia stay-at-home mom Annalies Xaviera “posts biblical eating tips,” and “said her Facebook following had jumped from scant thousands to over 300,000 in just a few weeks this spring. She sells a digital cookbook.”

“The Bible says that God appreciates and celebrates small steps of obedience,” Xaviera told the Times.

“When you’re in a craving,” she said, “have you ever thought to stop and pray?”

READ MORE: ‘Rededicating the Country to God’: Trump White House Hosts Evangelical Christian Festival

 

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‘Rededicating the Country to God’: Trump White House Hosts Evangelical Christian Festival

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The Trump White House is hosting an unprecedented Christian prayer festival Sunday on the National Mall — a nine-hour event that a Trump advisor describes as “rededicating the country to God.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and House Speaker Mike Johnson are all expected to appear.

The funding for “Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” comes in part from taxpayer dollars earmarked for America’s 250th birthday celebration, organizers say, according to The Washington Post.

The speakers are almost all Christian, and expected to largely be evangelical Protestant leaders and members of the Trump administration, “many of whom have embraced the message that America’s founders wanted the country to be explicitly Christian,” the Post reports. The event will have a “focus on American identity as aligned with a specific slice of conservative Protestantism.”

Pastor Paula White-Cain, Senior Advisor to the White House Faith Office who delivered the invocation at President Donald Trump’s first inauguration, said the Jubilee “is about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values, on the Bible.”

“This is really truly rededicating the country to God,” she added.

READ MORE: Republicans Are Now Doing to Trump What Few in the GOP Have Ever Dared to Do

According to The Guardian, the invited speakers include those who experts have been “characterized as Christian nationalist or extremist.”

Among them, a pastor who has called the Democratic platform “demonic,” the Guardian says, along with “a rabbi who has defended the use of torture,” and “a Christian author and radio host who said in 2020 he would die in the fight to keep Joe Biden out of the White House and was later named in a defamation suit over 2020 election fraud claims.”

Scholars have deemed the event unprecedented in the modern era.

“I’m unaware of anything like this, with this involvement of senior government officials, on this scale, trying to paint this false picture of the United States as a quote unquote Christian nation,” Amanda Tyler told the Post. Tyler is executive director of BJC, a Baptist group that promotes religious liberty through church-state separation. “Trump’s rhetoric in the past 18 months is how he’s ‘going to make America Christian again,’ that it’s his job to push religion. This is all part of that piece.”

Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse told the Post, “There’s a difference between saying America is a nation with many Christians in it and that America is a nation dedicated to Christianity and defined by it.”

“Those are very different things,” he said.

Kruse also noted that the only rules about religion that the framers of the Constitution wrote “were ones that keep religion at arm’s length. No establishment, no limits on free exercise, no religious test for office.”

But the Trump White House defended the event, its focus, and its list of speakers.

Brittany Baldwin, executive director of the White House’s 250 Task Force, in an April webinar, said: “We worked very hard with the faith leaders we trust … to ensure that we hear their concerns and we have the right focus for our community of believers, across the country. So I think if you do see another religion represented, it would probably be in a modest way.”

Paula White-Cain went even further, saying that the jubilee would not include leaders “praying to all these different Gods.”

READ MORE: Republicans Are Using a Secret Super PAC to Pour $1 Million Into Democratic Primaries

 

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