Does Trump have a cunning plan to reduce the number of people flying?

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Trump’s comments in the wake of the air disaster last week were appalling by any civilised standard. Declaring, without evidence, that it was the result of diversity policies, along with his suggestion that the job of Air Traffic Controller can only be done by geniuses and that those geniuses are exclusively to be found in one particular demographic, managed to showcase his racism, misogyny, ableism, transphobia and homophobia almost in fewer words than it takes to list them. Like other opponents of diversity programmes, he seeks to deliberately mislead people about the nature of such programs, suggesting that they imply employing people who can’t do the job but match an under-represented demographic, rather than seeking to ensure that, in identifying and appointing people who can do the job, there is no direct or indirect discrimination against certain demographics and that employers attempt to reflect the diverse nature of the society in which they operate within their workforce.

His comment that people need to be geniuses to become Air Traffic Controllers rather begs the question about who decides what a genius is, and on what basis. We already know, of course, that Trump is himself a genius and a very stable one at that. We know that because he has told us so. Is his definition good enough? To put the question another way, if you were about to take a flight into US airspace, and you knew that the Air Traffic Controller handling the landing at your destination airport was only in post because he was an able-bodied white heterosexual male in possession of an official certificate stating that he is a Trump-level genius, would you still want to board the plane? It might help to reduce aviation-derived emissions in the US, I suppose.