This morning in the White House, Donald Trump met yet again with a group of intensely reviled amoralists whose only purpose in life is to drain wealth and happiness from the American public: airline CEOs. The whole gang was there: the heads of American, Delta, Southwest… the other airlines. If you can believe it, their discussion was maddening and terrifying, with our president going off on a deeply self-parodic tangent about how his personal private pilot informed him that everything with all the planes is fucked up.
Please watch this video but then try and forget everything:
Trump tells airline CEOs they—& govt.—are using “obsolete” equipment “the airports give you.” Trump says his pilot, “a smart guy,” told him. pic.twitter.com/kvbRzrlSkY
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 9, 2017
The only good part of this video is that these airline CEOs have to sit there and nod seriously as our president goes on an on about some shit he heard from his personal private jet pilot in between mouthfuls of cold McDonalds.
Here are some further notes, from the traveling press pool:
“Delta’s doing well.” POTUS quipped to Bastian when he introduced himself.
“We’ll make it number one,” POTUS joked to the head of LAX, who said her airport was the seventh largest airport in the world.
Upon being informed that the Atlanta airport is the largest, POTUS remarked that he loves the state of Georgia.
Southwest spoke first and said the top priority for helping airlines would be to “modernize the air traffic control system” noting that money spent on the system has not helped improve it in the past.
“I hear we’re spending billions and billions of dollars, it’s a system that’s totally out of whack.” POTUS said of the air traffic control system.
POTUS inquired as to why airline corporations had allowed the government to invest in a faulty system. Southwest informed POTUS that the airlines are not “in control” of those decisions.
POTUS said that the system could potentially work better if FAA was run by a pilot because it is not currently, as a meeting attendee confirmed for him.
Pool ushered out at 10:07 am.
If Donald Trump’s aim with this meeting was to sew panic in the citizenry based largely on information passed to him by some random unnamed man who is almost certainly completely unqualified to be making such claims, then I for one can say—mission accomplished!