A nearly 4-year-old tweet from President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., resurfaced on Friday amid the Federal Aviation Administration grounding all flights in the U.S. due to a communications issue.
“Breaking - All flights nationwide have beengrounded - the #FAA is facing a computer outage. Yet another major blow to incompetent Transportation Sect Mayor Pete and people who get important jobs with no experience to check some identity politics boxes,” Don Jr. wrote in 2023 during the last nationwide ground stop.
While users on X quickly dug up the post and mocked the president’s son, Don Jr. was silent about Friday’s ground stoppage, not offering the same vitriol toward current Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.
For his part, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg offered his own thoughts on the matter during an appearance at a conference in Denver.
“The system has many redundancies in it, so that normally, if there’s one point of failure, something else can catch it,” he said. “It was not clear to me why that redundancy did not prevent an outage of this magnitude.”
Buttigieg also addressed Republicans’ criticisms of his job as transportation secretary.
“We did a lot to upgrade the system. When we had an outage, I didn’t stand there complaining about the Trump administration,” Buttigieg said.
“This should not be about politics,” he continued. “What I will say, of course, is that there needs to be answers, and there needs to be transparency about what happened.”
Brittany Shepherd contributed to this report from Denver, Colorado.