The new Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, was asked this morning whether air travel in the United States is safe. He said:

“Can I guarantee the American flying public that the U.S. has the most safe and secure airspace in the world? The answer to that is absolutely yes. We do.”

This is unequivocally true. There hasn’t been a fatal commercial aviation accident in the United States in nearly 16 years. This is despite around 800 million passengers flying every year, on more than 16 million flights, that spend about 25 million hours in the air. The numbers fluctuate, so you can’t extrapolate perfectly, but, at a conservative estimate, since the last crash in 2009 more than ten billion passengers have flown in the U.S., on more than 150 million flights, that spent more than 225 million hours in the air. What happened yesterday was a terrible tragedy, but it was an aberration. The death toll as a result of commercial aviation in the United States since 2009 is 67. The death toll from wasps over that same period is more than one thousand. Commercial aviation is a miracle, and it’s because it’s a miracle that we are so shocked when things go wrong.

I mention this in part to add some useful context, but also because I simply do not understand what the handful of journalists and Democratic politicians who have rushed to blame Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, or the new administration in general think that they are doing. As with gun-control, it is incumbent upon anyone who makes a causal claim to take his thought to its logical conclusion. None of those who tried to politicize last night’s accident have been able to do that. Within hours, New York‘s David Freelander tweeted out, “Eight days ago Trump issued an executive order freezing the hiring of air traffic controllers.” Okay. And? Finish the thought for me, David. “Eight days ago Trump issued an executive order freezing the hiring of air traffic controllers, which means . . . ” what? Last night, a military helicopter crashed into a passenger jet in crowded airspace. What is the mechanism that linked this mistake to Trump’s pause on federal hiring? Trump froze future hiring, and then . . . what? Did our existing collection of air traffic controllers — a group that has thus far been totally unaffected by this order — become less diligent in response to its announcement? Were the pilots so angry about it that they no longer cared if they lived or died? Did an angry God try to interrupt the policy by wiping out 67 people? The whole thing is nonsense and superstition and monomania. The last time we had a plane crash in the United States, in February, 2009, Barack Obama had been president for just over a month. Was it his fault? The idea is stupid.

We already treat our presidents as mystical talismans whose mere presence in the Oval Office makes things better or worse. To start imbuing them with the power to keep planes in the sky would be to make this much worse. It was stupid, back when he was president last time around, for Donald Trump to try to take credit for the lack of air disasters, and it is stupid, this time around, for his critics to do the opposite. This was a terrible accident — nothing more, nothing less. Not everything is about our personal political obsessions.