An American Airlines flight from New York to New Delhi was diverted to Rome after unspecified security concerns.

Crews lift the American Airlines’ plane wreckage from last week’s fatal crash out of the Potomac River.

“Can you never do that again?” my son texted me on Monday in our family group chat. I had sent a series of photos of my flight in the tiny Cessna Caravan that had just flown my mortal being 120 miles, from Chicago O’Hare International Airport to West Lafayette, Indiana. The nine-seat aircraft, which runs on a single turboprop engine, was so small that the ground crew had to weigh luggage and passengers in order to distribute their weight evenly in the cabin. It was, in short, the kind of plane that makes it easy to fear for your life. By contrast, I hadn’t been concerned at all—and my son had found no cause to worry—about the American Airlines regional jet that I’d taken on the first leg of my trip, from St. Louis to Chicago.

Just a few days later, an American Airlines regional jet collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter in Washington, D.C., killing everyone involved: 60 passengers, four crew members, and three service members. The National Transportation Safety Board has said it will take at least a year to identify a final probable cause of the crash. Until then, one can only guess that the aircrafts and their machinery were not themselves to blame. The New York Times has reported that the relevant air-traffic-control tower may have been understaffed and that the helicopter might have been outside its flight path. As Juliette Kayyem wrote for The Atlantic yesterday, a rise in flight traffic has been increasing the risk of midair collisions for years, especially in busy airspace such as Washington’s.

[Read: The near misses at airports have been telling us something]

Statistically, for now at least, flying is still much safer than driving. According to the International Air Transport Association, on average a person would have to travel by plane every day for more than 100,000 years before experiencing a fatal accident. A host of factors has made flying more reliable, among them more dependable equipment, better pilot training, tighter regulations, stricter maintenance standards, advances in air-traffic control, and improved weather forecasting. But the amorphous, interlocking systems that realize commercial flight are hard to see or understand, even as they keep us safe. For ordinary passengers—people like me and my son—any sense of danger tends to focus on the plane itself, because the plane is right in front of us, and above our heads, and underneath our feet, and lifting us up into the sky. A fear of flying makes little sense, because flying is just physics. One really fears airplanes, the aluminum tubes in which a fragile human body may be trapped while it is brought into flight. A machine like that can crash. A machine like that can kill you.

The Boeing 737 Max’s recent string of mishaps, including two fatal accidents in 2018 and 2019, and, more recently, a lost door during flight, are still fresh in the minds of passengers, and history only reinforces the fear. In 1950, a TWA Lockheed Constellation en route from Mumbai to New York crashed when its engine caught on fire and detached. In 1979, another engine detachment on a DC-10 wide-body jet caused the crash of American Airlines Flight 191. In 1988, an Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 lost an 18-foot-long section of upper fuselage on the way from Hilo to Honolulu. Human error—a contributing factor in most crashes, if not their direct cause—can also stem from equipment failure, as in the case of Pan Am Flight 812 in 1974 and Air France Flight 447 in 2009.

Yet the salience of an airplane’s actual machinery has been fading too. For passengers, the experience of commercial flight may be worse than ever, but the planes themselves now seem more reliable and more accommodating (if only so many passengers weren’t packed into them). Twenty years ago, regional flights would commonly use turboprops to transport passengers between hubs and small-to-medium-size cities. These planes were louder and bumpier. Flying in them felt worse, and it inspired more anxiety for that reason.

Are little turboprops actually more dangerous than jets? A direct comparison is difficult, because the smaller planes are often used for shorter flights, and more flights mean more takeoffs and landings—when most accidents occur. But the numbers are somewhat reassuring overall, at least when it comes to commercial flight. (The numbers for general aviation, which includes recreational planes, skydiving operations, bush flying, and the rest of civilian noncommercial flight, are less reassuring.) The NTSB filed investigations into eight fatal aviation accidents in the United States from 2000 to 2024 that involved commercial aircraft with turboprop engines, and 13 for aircraft with turbo fans (the most common passenger-jet engine).

In any case, modern airport logistics, just like modern jumbo jets, have helped build a sense of safety—or at least hide a source of fear. U.S. passengers used to board and disembark their flights from the tarmac with more regularity. This was true of prop planes and bigger jets alike. The shrill whine of turbines and the sweet smell of aviation fuel made the mechanisms of flight more palpable; it reminded you that you were entering a machine. Nowadays, that reality is hidden. You board comfortable, quiet cabins from the climate-controlled shelter of jet bridges.

All of these changes have tamped down the fear of planes to the point that, for many passengers, it will now resurface only under certain throwback conditions—such as when I found myself bobbing over the Hoosier farms in a plane cabin the size of a taco truck. That sort of white-knuckling is a distraction from the truer, more pervasive risks of air travel in 2025. The systemic lapses and conditions that have produced frequent near misses in aviation, and that may have contributed to this week’s accident, now seem likely to worsen under the Trump administration, which has purged the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration, and blamed DEI for a fatal crash.

[Read: Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI?]

The nation’s pervasive weakness in aviation safety is genuinely scary, but it’s shapeless, too. It provokes the sort of fright that you feel in your bones, the sort that makes you entreat a loved one to please never fly in one of those again, okay? And yet, I might well have been safer in the cold cabin of a turboprop 5,000 feet above Indiana than I would have been on an approach to an overcrowded, understaffed airport in a quiet regional jet. The plane still seems like the thing that might kill you. Even now, I suspect it always will.

On a Saturday morning almost exactly 22 years ago, the space shuttle Columbia was about to finish what had been, until then, a perfect 16-day mission. The families of the seven astronauts on board were on the runway at Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. But as Columbia reentered the atmosphere—traveling at 15,000 miles an hour, just 16 minutes from home—it suddenly broke apart. Debris began to fall from the skies over East Texas.

President George W. Bush was informed of the disaster at Camp David by his chief of staff, Andy Card. Bush was rushed from the Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin, back to the White House. At 2:04 p.m., speaking from the Cabinet Room, a visibly somber president addressed the nation. I had a particular interest in what he would say. Although I had recently been promoted to a new position on the White House staff, I had served Bush as a speechwriter over the previous two years.

“The Columbia is lost,” Bush told the country. “There are no survivors.” He named the crew of seven, praising their courage and pioneering spirit.

“These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly, knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life,” the president said. “Because of their courage and daring and idealism, we will miss them all the more. All Americans today are thinking as well of the families of these men and women who have been given this sudden shock and grief. You’re not alone. Our entire nation grieves with you. And those you loved will always have the respect and gratitude of this country.”

After assuring America that the space program would continue, he said this:

In the skies today we saw destruction and tragedy. Yet farther than we can see, there is comfort and hope. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, “Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.”

The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth. Yet we can pray that all are safely home. May God bless the grieving families, and may God continue to bless America.

The speech, full of empathy, free of blame, lasted three minutes and 12 seconds.

Donald Trump took a dramatically different approach from Bush, and from every one of his modern predecessors. The day after a midair collision over the Potomac River that killed 67 people, Trump—within five minutes of asking for a moment of silence for the victims, saying, “We are all overcome with the grief for many who so tragically perished,” and declaring, “We are one family”—blamed the crash on the two Democratic presidents who preceded him, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. He also blamed Pete Buttigieg, who served as Biden’s transportation secretary (and whom Trump cursed out) and diversity programs that, among other things, encourage the hiring of people with severe disabilities.

[Read: Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI?]

During his 35-minute press conference, Trump cited no evidence to support his claims and admitted he had none; the investigation into the cause of the crash of an American Airlines passenger jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter had barely begun, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder had yet to be located, and the bodies of all the victims had not yet been recovered from the icy waters of the Potomac. But that didn’t stop Trump from unloading baseless attacks and assigning blame.

Oh, and one more thing: The “problematic” diversity hiring practices at the FAA that Trump cited during his press conference were in place during his first term, and his claim that he’d changed Obama’s diversity standards for hiring air-traffic controllers is false.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, sentenced to eight years of hard labor for writing critical letters about Joseph Stalin, described an “essential experience” that he took away from his years in prison: how human beings become evil and how they become good. “In the intoxication of youthful successes,” he wrote,

I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.

Solzhenitsyn added:

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

Solzhenitsyn was offering an elegant description of an anthropological truth: Most human beings contain a complicated mix of qualities, and are capable of acts of virtue and acts of vice, even within a single day. There are admirable, even heroic qualities within us, which need to be cultivated, and there is also “the wolf within us,” which needs to be contained.

Whether a society is civilized or decivilized depends in large part on how well it shapes and refines moral sentiments, to use the language of the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, of which sympathy—our capacity to understand and share the feelings of others by imagining ourselves in their situation—is core. Smith called the “man within the beast” the impartial spectator—essentially, our conscience—whose approbation or disapprobation influences our conduct.

[Read: Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini]

Among the things that shape moral sentiments, including sympathy, are words and rhetoric. No one doubts their power; we see it in politics and poetry, in literature and letters, in songs and sacred books. Words evoke and give voice to strong emotions; they shape perceptions and create human connections. At their best they inspire honor and compassion within us; they offer us a glimpse of truth and enrich and purify our souls. But words can also misshape our souls. They can unleash the wolf within. That is why words, including the words of presidents, matter so very much.

What Trump said during last week’s press conference won’t rank among the 1,000 most inappropriate or offensive things he has said, which I suppose is the point. Rhetoric, particularly presidential rhetoric, has formative power, and with Trump, as with many of those in the MAGA movement, it is always the same: words of aggression, demonization, and brutishness, with the intent to stoke conflict, inflame hatred, and turn us against ourselves. Even during times of tragedy.

The way our leaders speak can shape our civic sentiments, and we are in a moment when our leader is inclined to make those harder and colder rather than softer and warmer, which just isn’t what we ought to want. But it is what we have.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus said, “For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” Donald Trump’s heart is full of rage, committed to vengeance. As a result, so is much of America.