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.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Americans keeping close track of political news may have been toggling their screens today between Senate confirmation hearings: the second day of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s for secretary of Health and Human Services, and the first for Tulsi Gabbard’s for director of national intelligence and Kash Patel’s for FBI director. But each of those three hearings deserves the public’s full attention: Donald Trump’s nominees offered new glimpses into their approaches to policy, truth, and loyalty to the president.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Day Two

Ahead of Kennedy’s first day of hearings, our colleague Nicholas Florko noted that the HHS nominee is no stranger to conspiracist statements: “RFK Jr. has insinuated that an attempt to assassinate members of Congress via anthrax-laced mail in 2001 may have been a ‘false flag’ attack orchestrated by ‘someone in our government’ to gin up interest in the government preparing for potential biological weapon threats. He has claimed that COVID was ‘targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,’ and that 5G is being used to ‘harvest our data and control our behavior.’ He has suggested that the use of antidepressants might be linked to mass shootings.”

“If Republican senators skirt around [Kennedy’s] falsehoods during today’s confirmation hearings,” Nicholas wrote, “it will be evidence of their prevailing capitulation to Trump. And it also may be a function of Kennedy’s rhetorical sleights … He’s capable of rattling off vaccine studies with the fluency of a virologist, which boosts his credibility, even though he’s freely misrepresenting reality.” But Kennedy’s sleights didn’t serve him quite as well today as he might have hoped.

At several points, senators encouraged Kennedy to acknowledge that vaccines are not the cause of autism, but instead of confirming what numerous studies have shown to be true, Kennedy insisted that he would need to “look at all the data” before coming to any conclusions. “The room went silent today during Senator [Bill] Cassidy’s closing questions,” Nicholas noted when we spoke this afternoon. “Cassidy was practically begging Kennedy to recant his previous statements on vaccines. Kennedy, like everyone else in the room, had to know this was a make-or-break moment for his confirmation. But despite the potential fallout, Kennedy refused, promising only that he would look at any studies presented to him disproving a link between vaccines and autism.”

The nominee for HHS secretary also showed, for the second day in a row, his lack of understanding about basics of the Medicare system, fumbling his answers to a series of rapid-fire questions from Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire. Hassan also shared that she is the mother of a 36-year-old with cerebral palsy, and accused Kennedy of relitigating settled science on the fact that vaccines do not cause autism. “It’s the relitigating and rehashing and continuing to sow doubt so we can’t move forward, and it freezes us in place,” she argued.

Cassidy, whose vote could prove key to whether RFK Jr. is confirmed, said after today’s hearing that he is “struggling” over whether to confirm Kennedy.

Tulsi Gabbard

Gabbard came into her confirmation process with a history that raises questions about her commitment to national security (she has, among other things, met with former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and expressed sympathetic views toward Russian President Vladimir Putin). As our colleague Tom Nichols wrote in November, “Gabbard has every right to her personal views, however inscrutable they may be. As a private citizen, she can apologize for Assad and Putin to her heart’s content. But as a security risk, Gabbard is a walking Christmas tree of warning lights. If she is nominated to be America’s top intelligence officer, that’s everyone’s business.”

The topic that ultimately received much attention in her confirmation hearing today was her refusal to say whether Edward Snowden is a traitor. Despite pressure from Democratic and Republican senators, Gabbard refused to answer the question, repeating that Snowden had broken the law and that she would take steps to make sure whistleblowers know how to properly make a complaint. Gabbard also revealed that she was unable to extract any concessions in her 2017 meeting with Assad. “I didn’t expect to,” she said.

Gabbard’s potential confirmation will depend on how her somewhat incoherent set of policy views sits with Republican senators. Last week, our colleague Elaine Godfrey explored the one through line—besides ambition—that has guided Gabbard’s otherwise inconsistent political career.

Kash Patel

Donald Trump is not always clear about what he means when he refers to “DEI,” but presumably it involves how someone’s identity is taken into consideration during the hiring process. In this morning’s press conference addressing the tragic plane crash last night, Trump asserted, without evidence but crediting his “common sense,” that DEI hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration was at fault.

It was odd, then, that a few hours later, Republican senators used Patel’s confirmation hearing to highlight his identity: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina asked about examples of racism Patel has experienced, and Senator Mike Lee of Utah acknowledged the struggles Patel and his father must have faced as racial minorities in the United States and Uganda, respectively. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, as if he were reading from a book report about the Gujarati people, lauded the religious diversity in Gujarat, India, where Patel’s family is originally from, omitting the state’s extreme tensions and violent history. Patel opened his own remarks by acknowledging his family’s journey from abroad. He invoked the phrase Jai Shri Krishna, a standard greeting for a sect of Hindus seeking blessings.

Patel was calm and still—he became riled up only when questioned by Senator Amy Klobuchar about his past suggestion that he would “shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state.’” But he was walking a tightrope. Today’s hearing may be the rare instance when Patel has publicly broken with Trump, to whom he has otherwise been unequivocally loyal. He refused to explicitly state that Trump lost the 2020 election, but he also said, “I do not agree with the commutation of any sentence of any individual who committed violence against law enforcement.”

Overall, Patel seemed to be trying to carefully toe a line, answering questions about the culture-war issues that Trump and congressional Republicans care about—Senator Marsha Blackburn, for example, asserted during the hearing that the FBI prioritizes DEI and “counting Swiftie bracelets” over conducting investigations—while attempting not to alienate the employees he hopes to lead. Pressed by Blackburn, Patel made a vague statement about the “high standards” FBI employees must meet.

Related:

RFK Jr. has a lot to learn about Medicaid. What everyone gets wrong about Tulsi Gabbard

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The memo that shocked the White House The near misses at airports have been telling us something. Donald Trump is just watching this crisis unfold. Jonathan Lemire: “What I saw at Trump’s first press conference”

Today’s News

Officials announced that there are no survivors in the crash last night between a U.S.-military Black Hawk helicopter and a regional American Airlines passenger jet landing at an airport near Washington, D.C. Three soldiers were aboard the helicopter, and 64 people were on the flight from Wichita, Kansas. Donald Trump appointed Christopher Rocheleau as the acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. The agency had not had an administrator since the start of Trump’s new term. Eight hostages were released from Gaza by Hamas, and Israel released 110 Palestinian prisoners.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Don Peck interviews Nicholas Carr about h​​ow online life has rewired our brains.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

“The ‘exciting business opportunity’ that ruined our lives” Trump’s war on meritocracy If Iranian assassins kill them, it will be Trump’s fault, Tom Nichols writes. Don’t politicize aviation safety. The return of snake oil Why Meta is paying $25 million to settle a Trump lawsuit

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Your FOMO Is Trying to Tell You Something

By Faith Hill

I feel deeply haunted by the thought that if I don’t go to the party or the dinner or the coffee stroll, my one wild and precious life will be void of a joyful, transformative event—one I’d surely still be thinking about on my deathbed, a friend at my side tenderly holding my hand and whispering, Remember? That time we went bowling and the guy in the next lane over said that funny thing? Every year, my New Year’s resolution is to keep one night of the week free from social plans. Almost every week, I fail.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Jamie McCarthy / Getty.

Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes speaks with Hanna Rosin about how bad the war for your attention has really gotten.

Read. The Stranger Things effect is coming for the novel, Mark Athitakis writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.