Have we ever witnessed anything so gratuitously cruel and racist coming out of the mouth of an American president as what Donald Trump had to say at his press conference about the likely cause of the horrible aviation collision over the Potomac River this past week?

Speculating, he claimed the accident could have been caused because of diversity, equity and inclusion policies stretching back to the Obama administration. When he was pressed to explain what he was basing this on, he said “because I have common sense and unfortunately a lot of people don’t.”

First of all, consider: This was a moment of grave national crisis, the causes of which were (and are) still unknown. I think it is safe to say that all of Trump’s predecessors in the White House would call for national unity and mourning in such a moment. Did he do that? No, he used the opportunity to sow ever more division, basically blaming the tragedy on Presidents Biden and Obama.

Consider secondly, he put the blame on diversity, equity and inclusion policies put in place by Democratic administrations. Such policies used to be called affirmative action, and are meant to address historical injustices against Black, brown, female, and LGBTQ+ Americans. So blaming those policies for the aviation disaster was a way of blaming it on “those people” in the MAGA world there would be immediate recognition of who was meant, and near-universal agreement that such persons are less competent than white males.

This is racism, pure and simple. Affirmative action policies have been a favorite whipping boy for Republicans since the Reagan administration. In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon had supported affirmative action in federal hiring, endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment, and was sympathetic to the plight of gay and lesbian people. However, the rising conservative movement in the late 1970s unfortunately sold its soul to racism to gain electoral advantage.

In this case, it seems to me that Trump was using this timeworn tactic to deflect attention from the dizzying confusion that his administration had unleashed on the nation with its ill-conceived directive earlier in the week to halt all government funding to a host of programs — spending that had been mandated by Congress.

Rather than acknowledge any errors, he had to lash out at his perceived “enemies.” Let any women, Blacks, brown and LGBTQ+ people who voted for him take notice: He will throw you under the bus at every opportunity.

John Connolly lives in Haydenville.