Who hires a pilot to intentionally crash the plane?

When America’s democracy goes down in flames like a Boeing Max 8, future historians will investigate the disaster. They’ll dig through the rubble of Trump’s presidency, seeking to learn how a once great nation crashed to earth so soon after a new pilot took the controls.

This aircraft had many pilots over the years, some better than others. There were smooth flights and scary ones. Some of the pilots flew high. Others were barely able to pull the plane out of a steep dive. One was so bad his pilot’s license was revoked.

Until now, this Great American airline never hired a pilot whose intent it was to crash the plane and do as much damage as possible on the ground. That reality made it all the more important that there be courageous co-pilots on board.  

Among the ruins, investigators will eventually find what is known as the “Black Box.” These devices hold significant clues as to why a crash occurred. One poignant irony about “black boxes” is that they’re really not black at all. They’re orange. A tribute to irony.

These orange boxes were added to passenger planes to assist in uncovering the causes of crashes because most were caused by pilot error. Listening to cockpit conversations preceding a crash offered important clues when investigators were trying to understand why the tragedy occurred.

On that orange box, at the scene of the crash, investigators will discover the voices of co-pilots like Mike Enzi, John Barrasso, and Liz Cheney. They were in the cabin urging Trump on.

They didn’t crash the plane. Trump did. Most passengers didn’t want him to be the pilot. However, there was an anachronistic rule weighting votes in favor of folks flying first class. They didn’t care whether he knew how to pilot the plane. They liked him because he promised to take them where they wanted to go, the rest of the passengers be damned.

They rationalized that if there was a problem, the co-pilots would step up. Copilots Enzi, Barrasso and Cheney, among others, could tell from the start that something was wrong. Still, they didn’t open their mouths except to blame others who were nowhere near the controls.

As soon as the plane began taxiing down the runway, it was obvious to anyone with eyes to see, Trump had no idea how to fly the plane. As the aircraft picked up speed, everyone could see it was rudderless. There was never any hope the jet could stay on a straight, narrow, honest path.

Once in the air, the plane didn’t gain much altitude as it continued flying dangerously close to the tree tops, swerving first to the right and then farther to the right. Frightened passengers screamed while the pilot Tweeted reassurances as the aircraft suddenly plunged hundreds of feet. Air traffic controllers watched helplessly, issuing grim reports, all dismissed by the pilot as “fake news.”

Cheney, Enzi, and Barrasso tightened their seatbelts low around their laps, smiled villainously, and told us to settle in for the ride. They knew but didn’t warn us of the turbulence ahead.

Unlike the pilot of the Malaysian Airliner who apparently crashed his airplane intentionally some place between Beijing and Kuala Lumpur in March of 2014, Trump didn’t lock anyone out of the cockpit before deliberately crashing the plane. He wanted everyone to watch it happen.

Neither Barrasso nor Enzi knew much about flying a plane. They read Mitch McConnell’s best seller, “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Crashing a Democracy.” John and Mike were satisfied to be hitchhikers and went along for the ride.

Liz Cheney knew what was going on in that cockpit. After all, her father was the greatest crash pilot in history. Dick Cheney crashed our democracy into Iraq to atone for having ignored warnings that Al Qaeda planned to crash airplanes into the Twin Towers. A good father might explain to his daughter how tough it is on one’s soul to know you could have prevented a catastrophe but didn’t.