Shortly after midnight, a few hours after the horrifying collision between an airplane and a helicopter at Reagan National Airport, President Donald Trump felt the time was right for a shocked nation to hear his insights into the tragedy. “It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!”

While you might question the sophistication of his analysis, Trump was correct about both the physics of the collision (namely, that it could have been avoided if the helicopter had gone either up or down) and the moral valence of the mass casualty event (bad, not good).

But, by midday today, without the benefit of any important conclusions about the cause of the crash, Trump adopted a different perspective. “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas,” he told reporters in a rambling press conference. His strong opinion was that the cause was a “diversity push” in the Federal Aviation Administration’s hiring process.

Lest that comment be dismissed as the half-formed musings of a president reacting in real time to a developing event, a few hours later Trump doubled down. In a live broadcast from the Oval Office, he signed an executive order that, in the words of an off-camera Vice President J. D. Vance, pinned responsibility for the crash on “the Biden administration’s DEI and woke policies.”

The purpose of Trump’s wild finger-pointing appears to be twofold: first, to avoid taking any blame for a disaster; and second, to exploit the tragedy while it is in the public’s mind, using it to advance the notion that his administration is replacing favoritism toward minorities with pure, race-blind merit. “As you said in your inaugural, it is color-blind and merit-based,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, joining Trump at the press conference. “The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department, and we need the best and brightest, whether it’s in our air-traffic control or whether it’s in our generals or whether it’s throughout government.”

This was rich coming from a man who might be the least qualified secretary of defense in American history—a Cabinet official whose professional qualifications include mismanaging two small lobbying organizations and whose alleged history of drinking and mistreatment of women led his own sister-in-law to urge the Senate to reject his nomination, as it very nearly did.

[Jonathan Chait: Donald Trump’s most dangerous Cabinet pick]

And Hegseth is hardly an outlier. Trump has already done more to abandon the ideal of meritocracy than perhaps any presidential administration since the Progressive Era. He is going to war against the civil-service system, which was established more than a century ago to ensure that federal jobs go to qualified civil servants, rather than as rewards for party hacks, as had been the case previously. Trump, who believes that nonpartisan civil servants constitute a “deep state” conspiracy against him, would rather lose their expertise than risk it being deployed in ways that thwart his personal ambitions.

He has gone even further in this direction in selecting his Cabinet. Every president tends to fill such roles with supporters, but Trump has elevated loyalty to an almost comical degree. Not only must Trump’s Cabinet officials have supported him in the election, but they must endorse, or at least refuse to contradict, his infamously false claim to have won the 2020 election. The driving logic behind many of his most high-profile Cabinet picks appears to be a desire to find individuals who will stand behind the president if and when he violates norms, laws, or basic decency.

That is how Hegseth, despite his miserable record of management experience, was elevated to run the Pentagon. It is how Kash Patel, the author of a ridiculous children’s book portraying himself as a wizard and Trump as a king, was nominated to run the FBI. And it is how Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has waged a pseudoscientific war against vaccines and appears to not know basic facts about Medicare and Medicaid, was tapped to run the federal department that oversees those programs.

One problem with discussing Trump’s opinions on fast-moving matters like the plane crash is that, in the absence of a completed investigation, it’s impossible to say for sure what did cause the disaster. Investigators haven’t even determined which errors were made, let alone why they occurred. It is possible that the entire fault rests with the helicopter pilot, as Trump himself suggested the night of the crash.

It’s true that the federal civil service has many problems, not least the extreme bureaucratic hurdles that stand in the way of both hiring qualified candidates and firing low-performing employees. It’s true, too, that the FAA has been sued over a clumsy program to boost minority representation. That effort arose out of an understandable desire to broaden the overwhelmingly white hiring pipeline for air-traffic controllers, but is alleged to have included perverse hiring criteria that unfairly filtered out qualified applicants.

There is no evidence yet that the FAA, let alone its hiring practices, had any responsibility for the crash. But to the extent that Trump thinks the underlying issue is an insufficient focus on merit, his moves to purge the government of non-Trumpist civil servants is all but guaranteed to make the problem worse. When you are not only selecting for loyalty, but defining that loyalty to mean “affirming morally odious values and factually absurd premises,” you are reducing your hiring pool to the shallowest part.

[David A. Graham: Blind partisanship does not actually help Trump]

And to be sure, when loyalty itself is the job requirement, this makes a certain kind of sense. La Cosa Nostra does not recruit its members very widely, because, as with Trump, its fear of betrayal outweighs its interest in hiring and promoting the most skilled racketeers and leg-breakers. When you are trying to run a government along Mafia hiring and promotion principles, you are necessarily forfeiting expertise and intelligence.

If Trump has his way, over the next four years, the political composition of the people engaged in directing air traffic, testing food for safety, preventing terrorism, and other vital public functions will change dramatically. The ones who have a serious problem with January 6 will be gone, replaced by people who are willing to repeat Trump’s lies—if they are replaced at all. You can justify that process as the president’s prerogative to shape the executive branch. What you can’t call it is an elevation of merit.

“We’re so back,” one reporter whispered to another.

All of the chairs in the White House briefing room were filled, and reporters and photographers were crammed into every available nook and cranny. I was standing in the back, squeezed in between a window and a none-too-pleased Secret Service agent.

The sight was reminiscent of the COVID briefings of 2020: President Donald Trump gripping the sides of the lectern in the White House briefing room, pursing his lips as he looked out at the journalists yelling and jockeying for his attention.

And just like in 2020, Trump used a national calamity to try to score political points and denigrate his foes. Fourteen hours after a midair collision between an American Airlines jet and a military helicopter outside Washington last night—the first crisis of the young administration, a moment to console a stunned and grieving nation—Trump repeatedly implied that the crash was the fault of his Democratic predecessors and of DEI policies.

[Read: He could have talked about anything else]

Trump offered no evidence to support his claims but repeatedly cast the blame on others, even as bodies were still being pulled from the frigid waters of the Potomac River just a few miles away.

“Because I have common sense, okay?” Trump said, when asked how he had concluded that diversity programs—programs that Trump claimed were put in place by the Biden and Obama administrations—were to blame. “Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.”

The crash near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport killed 67 people and was the first major crash in the United States involving an airline in more than 15 years. Trump’s instinct after the tragedy was yet again to choose divisiveness. On social media, within hours of the collision, he offered not condolences but conspiracy theories: “It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane.” As he did so often in his first term, he was reacting to a crisis as an observer and not as the president, who has the resources of the federal government at his disposal and the responsibility of getting answers.

And then, in his briefing-room appearance today—the first of his 10-day-old second term—Trump offered a few initial notes of sympathy, and then turned almost immediately toward castigating DEI, leaving several correspondents to turn and shake their heads in disbelief.

“I put safety first,” Trump said. “Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen, because this was the lowest level. Their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse.”

[Read: Donald Trump is just watching this crisis unfold]

Trump showcased his instinct to immediately frame tragedies through his own ideological or political lens, facts be damned. And it’s a pattern: Earlier this month, he blamed the Southern California wildfires on Democratic politicians and suggested that illegal immigration was the cause of a terrorist attack in New Orleans, even though the attacker was a U.S. citizen born in Texas.

When pressed today, he snapped at reporters (“I think that’s not a very smart question—I’m surprised, coming from you”) and called on friendlier faces from conservative-leaning outlets, who tossed him softballs. He admitted that the crash was still under investigation and that the cause was not yet known. But he was quick to claim that the Federal Aviation Administration had lowered its standards under President Barack Obama (“They actually came out with a directive: ‘too white’”) and that his administration was restoring them, despite the hiring and spending freezes his team has aimed to put in place.

But summarizing Trump’s remarks on air-traffic controllers doesn’t quite capture the experience of sitting through them:

Can you imagine, these are people that are, I mean, actually, their lives are shortened because of the stress that they have. Brilliant people have to be in those positions, and their lives are actually shortened, very substantially shortened, because of the stress when you have many, many planes coming into one target, and you need a very special talent and a very special genius to be able to do it.

Seated to the right of Trump was a phalanx of supportive aides—including Vice President J. D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy—who would all get brief turns at the microphone to weigh in on the tragedy and praise Trump’s leadership.

Trump’s eyes darted around the room. His hand, with its index figure outstretched, would move in little circles as he considered which reporter to call on. Then it would steady, and he would point deliberately, selecting one person in a sea of outstretched hands, gesturing that he or she was being granted the privilege of asking the president the next question.

Similarly freewheeling question-and-answer sessions became the hallmark of Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, with Trump performing for the cameras—often for more than an hour at a time—and exuding the bravado of someone who believed that he alone could steer the nation through the greatest public-health crisis in a century. Trump couldn’t get enough of those press conferences. He pushed to hold them as close to the 6 p.m. evening news as possible to increase viewership; he used them to take swipes at his political opponents, including then–New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who tended to hold his own COVID briefings earlier in the day.

But instead of being reassuring, fact-based public-service announcements, the briefings were defined by falsehoods, politicization, and outlandish recommendations to inject disinfectant. Those nightly battles, Trump’s closest aides believe, helped seal his defeat in the 2020 election. He came across as incompetent, desperate, eager to shift the blame. He ignored suggestions to turn the briefings over to then–Vice President Mike Pence, the head of his COVID task force, or to a team of doctors and scientists. He kept going to the podium day after day. By the time he finally abandoned the briefings, he trailed Joe Biden by six points in the polls.

Both Hegseth, a former Fox News host, and Duffy, once a reality-TV star, have significant experience in front of the cameras. But a White House official told me that there was never a question that Trump himself would brief the press after the crash.

And when the news conference ended after 36 minutes, the reporters, some with dazed expressions, filed out of the briefing room. As I navigated the crowd, I caught a glimpse of a fellow journalist’s phone and the text message he had just sent:

“WTF.”