Trump Administration Live Updates: Top F.B.I. Officials Are Told to Resign or Be Fired

And then there was President Trump. In the wake of this week’s midair collision near Washington, Mr. Trump was more than happy to jump to conclusions and pull the country apart rather than together. After declaring it to be an “hour of anguish for our nation,” Mr. Trump just five minutes later let anguish give way to aggression as he blamed diversity policies promoted by Mr. Obama and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for the crash, which killed 67 people.

Mr. Trump has never been like other presidents. He does not follow many of the rituals and traditions of his office. He practices the politics of division rather than unity. Where past presidents have sought to project a comforting, paternal presence for a stricken nation in moments of crisis, Mr. Trump’s instinct is to move quickly from grief to grievance. He has long demonstrated that he is more comfortable as the blamer in chief than consoler in chief.

His decision to use the bully pulpit of the White House on Thursday to assign responsibility for the crash to his political rivals by name without offering a shred of evidence was, even for Mr. Trump, a striking performance. And it was no off-the-cuff comment. He followed up by signing an order directing a review of “problematic and likely illegal decisions” by Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden.

“I put safety first,” Mr. Trump told reporters in his first visit to the briefing room of his second term. “Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first. And they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen because this was the lowest level. Their policy was horrible and their politics was even worse.”

The Democratic presidents, he said, made “a big push to put diversity into the F.A.A.’s program,” leading to Wednesday night’s disaster over the Potomac River. Never mind that the “problematic” hiring policy language he read had also been in place during his own administration and that he could not say whether it had any connection to the crash.

It was not the first time Mr. Trump has exhibited what even his own former aides have called an “empathy gap.” Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, with thousands of Americans dying every day at its peak, Mr. Trump rarely paused long enough to dwell on the human toll and never sponsored any memorial to the fallen. Instead, he focused his public messages on finding others to fault, whether it be China, Mr. Obama, Democratic governors, the World Health Organization, federal regulators or his own scientific advisers.

He has responded similarly to natural disasters by going on the attack. Just this month, Mr. Trump reacted to the devastating wildfires in greater Los Angeles by blasting Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, calling him “Newscum.”

After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, he engaged in a war of words with San Juan’s mayor and, when he finally visited the island, memorably tossed paper towels to people who had been left without food, water or power. Angry at criticism of his handling of the calamity, he later suggested to aides that the United States sell or trade away Puerto Rico.

“Trump doesn’t lead with empathy,” said Olivia Troye, who served on the White House Covid task force staff before later publicly criticizing the president’s management of the pandemic. “He exploits tragedy for whatever political grievance he’s peddling at the moment, never offering the comfort or stability a president should.”

The exception has been if the victims of a tragedy buttress a political argument he has been making. At a ceremony this week to sign a bill cracking down on unauthorized immigrants charged with certain crimes, he expressed compassion for relatives of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student killed last year by a migrant from Venezuela who had crossed into the United States illegally.

Mr. Trump often moves to place any crisis into his own political or ideological narrative, regardless of the facts. He tied the California fires to wrongheaded environmental and water policies, assertions that experts disputed. After the New Year’s Day terrorist attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Mr. Trump blamed immigration, even though the attacker was a U.S. citizen born in Texas.

This week, after American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter over Reagan National Airport, Mr. Trump went straight to diversity policies, with no evident basis. The problem, he said, was that candidates for air traffic controller jobs were rejected because the work force was “too white” while people with serious mental or physical disabilities were hired.

In addition to Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden, two of Mr. Trump’s longtime favorite targets, the president singled out Pete Buttigieg, who served as Mr. Biden’s transportation secretary, saying that “he’s a disaster.” Mr. Buttigieg, as it happens, is considered a possible Democratic candidate for president in 2028.

Mr. Trump’s instant focus on diversity programs generated outrage among Democrats. “Listen, it’s one thing for internet pundits to spew off conspiracies,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said on the Senate floor not long afterward. “It’s another for the president of the United States to throw out idle speculation as bodies are still being recovered and families are still being notified. It just turns your stomach.”

Mr. Buttigieg pushed back on social media. “Despicable,” he wrote. “As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch.”

Mr. Buttigieg and other Democrats pointed out that Mr. Trump had just fired the members of an aviation security advisory group, although there was no indication that the move had contributed to this week’s crash. “Time for the president to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again,” Mr. Buttigieg wrote.

In this opening chapter of his return to power, Mr. Trump seems fixated on diversity programs more than ever. Other than immigration, he has made it perhaps the central villain of his second term. Among his first acts was to order the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs throughout the federal government and a review of federal grants and loans to weed out any that promote diversity.

Recognizing the writing on the wall, many states, localities, universities and private companies are now scrapping their diversity programs, either to curry favor with the new administration or to preserve their federal financing. Mr. Trump and his allies have successfully made the acronym D.E.I. politically radioactive.

As with so much else in this Trump 2.0 era, the road to Mr. Trump’s broadsides against the Federal Aviation Administration’s leadership and policies may lead back to Elon Musk, the president’s billionaire patron who has been given wide latitude to restructure government in the new administration.

Mr. Musk has long quarreled with the F.A.A., which has hit his SpaceX rocket company with fines for safety lapses and sought to delay a launch. Last fall, he called for “radical reform at the F.A.A.” and a week later he reposted a picture of Michael Whitaker, the agency administrator, with the caption, “He needs to resign.” Mr. Whitaker did just that the day Mr. Trump took office last week, and the new president appointed an acting successor on Thursday.

While Mr. Trump said there would be a “systemic and comprehensive investigation” of this week’s crash, he did not wait to offer the conclusions of his own rather less methodical inquiry. He went on at some length about F.A.A. diversity policies that encourage the hiring of people with severe disabilities, the same ones in place when he was in office last time.

What he could not say was whether any people with severe disabilities were actually hired as air traffic controllers as opposed to for other jobs compatible with their abilities. Nor could he say whether anyone on duty on Wednesday night fit that category.

Indeed, he acknowledged that there were many unanswered questions. “We don’t know that that would have been the difference,” he said of helicopter pilots not following instructions. He said he did not know whether another plane might have blocked the pilots’ view.

He said he did not know why adjustments were not made when the two aircraft hurtled toward each other. He said he did not know if the helicopter pilots were wearing night-vision goggles. “We don’t know that necessarily it’s even the controller’s fault,” he said at another point.

But just because he did not know all those things did not mean he was not certain who was to blame. No need to wait for the investigation to reach that conclusion.