Trump Offers Bizarre Explanation for Nationwide Flight Chaos

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The president, 80, blamed the nationwide ground stop, which lasted more than four hours, on a “bunch of old broken stuff” in the air traffic control infrastructure. Trump…

Donald Trump offered a curious explanation for the nationwide aviation meltdown that brought air travel to a standstill on Friday.

The president, 80, blamed the nationwide ground stop, which lasted more than four hours, on a “bunch of old broken stuff” in the air traffic control infrastructure.

But instead of addressing the American public directly, Trump turned to his favorite network, leaving Fox News reporter Peter Doocy to relay his explanation for the historic disruption after speaking with the president by phone.

“He says it does not seem like this is a cyberattack or AI or anything like that,” Doocy told Laura Ingraham. “I asked him a couple different ways, and he said it doesn’t seem like that, and that that is the first thing that they always look for.”

“He said there’s nobody taking credit, which would be common if somebody did execute a huge cyberattack like this on critical infrastructure, but that he would let us know and the team would let us know if that is something that happened,” he continued.

Trump had remained effectively silent on the unfolding chaos, which began at around 4 p.m. EST Friday, when the FAA initially grounded all flights nationwide until 11 p.m. Some flights began resuming shortly after 8 p.m.

“He said instead this seems to be a situation where there’s a bunch of old broken stuff in the infrastructure that the FAA relies on to keep planes in the sky. He said there’s a bunch of—some of this is like 55-year-old equipment that needs to keep working, keep running, and that they have worked on it, they’ve talked to Congress about replacing, it just hasn’t gotten replaced yet. So that is the first information that we have from the president.”

Trump was drawing criticism on social media Friday night for not being visible or addressing the grounding publicly.

“Nothing from POTUS. Nothing from the WH comms shop. No DoT presser. One frantic DHS press gaggle with no new info but anxiety-producing references to 9/11.

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