The Worst Thing Trump Did on 5/13/25

Sean Duffy once again proved that the high point of his career peaked on The Real World. 

The Transportation Secretary was frantically deflecting and avoiding answering why exactly the Newark Liberty Airport tower, one of the three airports serving New York City, and one of the major air traffic control centers in the country, had 3 people working instead of the REQUIRED 14 on Monday evening, from 3 to 10 PM. This massive shortage of staff caused major delays, with flights up to 7 hours behind schedule. 

This is on top of the revelation that the Newark air traffic control center has experienced 3 communications blackouts, where, each time, the tower wasn't able to communicate with any airplane for more than a minute. 

The most recent communications failure came this last Sunday morning, as Duffy and his staff were panicking, trying to tell everyone that flying into and around the Newark airspace was safe to do.  

Apparently, there were massive delays on Sunday in Atlanta, as failing runway equipment impacted hundreds of flights at one of the country's busiest airports. This is on top of a laundry list of tragic accidents, near misses, delays, and equipment failures that have plagued the Transportation Department since Trump took over.

This is all on Trump.  He tried to pull a Reagan and fire all the air traffic controllers (somethiing that was actually quite disasterous to US airline travel when Reagan did that in the 1980s, a problem that was only fixed when President Clinton hired them all back after taking office in 1993) in a pathetic attempt to look like he was cutting costs, but failed to understand the immediate and damaging consequences he had committed to the air taffic system.  Duffy has been desperately playing Whack-A-Mole, dealing with the continued problems Trump created within the first week of his Presidency.

None of these problems were occurring anywhere close to as frequently when President Biden was in charge. 

But, poredictably, Duffy eventually went on to blame President Biden. 

When I flew back from South Carolina a week plus ago, we had to do an emergency waive off at MSP because a Delta flight had not cleared the runway, something that occurs, but I've never had it happen before on a plane. My family, who all flew back to New England, experienced MASSIVE delays and cancellations just trying to get back home.

Trump has really damaged American Transportation.