Andy Borowitz reviews Friday’s flight grounding. He is, as usual, magnificent!

I wonder whether the FAA cuts imposed by DOGE played a role in this massive malfunction.

Neither Markwayne Mullin, Secretary of Homeland Security, nor Sean Duffy, Secretary of transportation, has relevant experience to run the nation’s air space. Mullin owned a successful plumbing business. Duffy was a television “personality.”

This is what Borowitz posted:

On Friday night, Trump ceded the podium to Beavis and Butthead. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

On Friday night, as the nation’s worst ground stop since 9/11 stranded millions of Americans, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin declared, “This is what the leadership of President Trump looks like.” 

I couldn’t agree more.

Mullin, Mitch McConnell’s rival-in-sentience, wasn’t alone during Friday night’s clown show. His sidekick was Transportation Secretary-slash-startled-deer Sean Duffy, a former cast member of MTV’s “The Real World.” At the White House podium, he demonstrated why he was the least qualified person to manage an emergency since Michael “Heckuva Job, Brownie” Brown bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Rather than dispense information that might help the throngs of desperate passengers forced to eat at their concourse’s mobbed Sbarro, he went on a whingeing rant about Congress’s refusal to appropriate the funds necessary to update FAA systems, which apparently run on dial-up modems and AOL free trial disks.

For a reality-show veteran, Duffy appeared shockingly divorced from reality. 

When he complained about “Congress,” he neglected to note that Republicans have controlled both its houses for the past two years, during which they have done nothing but accede to their demented death-cult leader’s every whim. Furthermore, Trump’s supposed obsession with the FAA’s infrastructure was somewhat undercut by his decision to cede the White House podium Friday night to his Cabinet’s version of Beavis and Butthead. (I’ll leave it to MTV veteran Duffy to determine which one he is.)

Has the woeful state of the nation’s aviation systems really been keeping Trump up at night? Apparently not so much as America’s desperate need for an army of masked thugs to shoot innocent people on the street. The approximately $115 billion Congress has shoveled into the ICE dumpster fire is more than double what it would take to transform the FAA’s infrastructure into something befitting a first-world country.

How has Trump actually demonstrated his deep concern about air safety? On January 21, 2025—his second day in office—he fired the entire membership of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee. 

You might wonder why he thought eliminating people who keep the skies safe was a good idea. To the extent that Donald Trump has thoughts, they’re not original. His anti-immigrant rhetoric, for example, owes a debt to a prominent German political leader of the 1930s and 40s. And his decision to axe air safety advisors calls to mind the wrecking ball that Ronald Reagan wielded on August 5, 1981, when he fired 11,345 air traffic controllers in one fell swoop.

For decades, anti-union Republicans have hailed Reagan’s draconian response to the strike by members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) as the beginning of the end of the American labor movement. But it was also the beginning of a crisis in air safety.

Ronald Reagan fired almost all of the nation’s air traffic controllers in a single day. What could possibly go wrong? (Photo: Dirck Halstead/Getty Images)

Joseph A. McCartin, a Georgetown professor and author of Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America, writes, “Reagan’s decision to ban all strikers meant that it took years for the system to come back to its prestrike staffing levels.” That system is still reeling.

According to a 2023 report, “Ensuring adequate staffing and training for air traffic controllers—an essential part of maintaining the safety and efficiency of the National Airspace System (NAS)—has been a challenge for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), especially at the Nation’s most critical facilities.”

Who issued this alarming report? The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General. In the first Friday of his second term, Trump purged over a dozen Inspectors General in an overnight massacre. The Department of Transportation’s Inspector General was among them.

Heckuva job, Trumpy.