IDIOTS IN CONTROL

This Proves Trump Goons’ Catastrophic Incompetence: Author

“There is nothing we should have confidence about in their explanation,” the president’s biographer said.

The incompetence of top Trump officials was on full display at a press conference held in the chaotic aftermath of the nationwide air travel meltdown, the president’s longtime biographer said.

Author Michael Wolff said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin did little to address Americans’ concerns about the first nationwide ground stop since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Air travel ground to a halt for four hours on Friday after the Federal Aviation Administration abruptly announced that it had issued a nationwide ground stop at all airports due to “extraordinary circumstances” and “reasons of safety.”

After the ground stop was lifted, Duffy and Mullin held a press conference to answer questions—but had little information to share. They blamed the crisis on old air traffic control technology and overloaded routers, while making clear that the ground stop was not linked to any threat to the U.S. or to this week’s widespread Microsoft outage.

“This is what the leadership team of Donald Trump looks like,” Inside Trump’s Head co-host Joanna Coles said Saturday. “There’s no planes, and you can’t use your computer.”

“These two guys, this is who we’re counting on,” Wolff said. “They seem to be essentially dismissing this problem or dismissing the crisis: ‘This is structural,’ ‘We need more money to fix this,’ blah. Instead of beginning with, ‘Not since 9/11 has there been a shutdown of American airspace as massive of as this. But pay no attention. It’s just a little circuit overload.’”

The Trump biographer speculated that the situation behind the scenes could be one of two scenarios.

“Either they don’t know what it is because they are that uninformed, that dopey, the American the structure of air travel has been so disrupted and underfunded and so many people have been fired and jobs not replaced that they are really kind of at a loss here,” he said.

“Or, they do have a sense of what happened and they don’t really want to ‘fess up to it. So nothing is good in this situation. Nothing,” he added. “What we do know is that there is nothing straightforward about this. There is nothing we should have confidence about in their explanation.”

The Transportation and Homeland Security Departments did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this story.

Play Video

In another press conference on Saturday, Duffy still had no definitive answers but pointed fingers at a contractor, L3Harris, which was tasked with upgrading legacy copper wires to a fiber optic system.

Duffy said the communication outages that triggered the nationwide ground stop were likely linked to upgrade work that L3Harris was conducting on a dated system.

The contractor, for its part, said it was cooperating with the FAA’s investigation into the ground stop while emphasizing that it has “completed more than 70 percent of the planned airspace communications conversion.”

“L3Harris takes the nationwide ground stop and its impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously,” it said in a statement.

Wolff, meanwhile, said the multiple aviation crises that have plagued the Trump administration could be attributed in part to the massive staffing cuts enforced by the now-defunct DOGE.

“I think everything within the bureaucracy of the United States government, of the federal government, we have to look at through that lens,” he said of the DOGE cuts.

“There has been incredible disruption within the ranks of the bureaucracy. Now, that seems like an abstraction. Does that really have any real world impact?” he added. “Well, yes. This is real world impact. But the impact is so great at this point and we should keep that front of mind.”

Find and subscribe to Inside Trump’s Head with Michael Wolff and Joanna Coles on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes of incomparable insight into the psyche of the world’s most talked-about man drop every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday evening on YouTube and Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday mornings on other podcast platforms.

See more of our coverage in your search results.

ADD THE DAILY BEAST ON GOOGLE

Julia OrnedoReporter

Inside Trump's HeadPodcast

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.