Up until Tuesday afternoon’s press conference (and his press secretary’s “gas gaffe”), Donald Trump was having a great week, largely because the biggest mistake making headlines belonged to United Airlines.
Unfortunately for Trump’s critics, that left them with a gaping hole in their schedules – until Star Trek‘s John Cho suggested that perhaps Donald Trump was actually to blame for an incident in which a non-compliant United passenger was manhandled and dragged from a plane by law enforcement.
That is one spicy hot take. Obviously Donald Trump’s mere existence has created the kind of environment in which law enforcement feels emboldened to wrench someone from their window seat for failing to exit the aircraft when requested.
Fortunately for Cho, he made the connection on social media, so Twitter was characteristically helpful in fleshing out his theory.
It must have made sense to Cho because the tweet is still pinned to the top of his timeline. A quick scroll through his other missives reveals that he’s no fan of the President, and regularly frets about the state of affairs under the current administration. He’s also not entirely well informed on the subject of whether the government authorized the sale of individual Internet browser histories.
Cho also seems concerned with the subject of racial discrimination, something that did come up, briefly, in the United story: the doctor who was removed claimed that he was targeted because of his obvious Asian ethnicity.
United clarified later and said that his seat was selected at random. Unless Donald Trump was personally responsible for programming the hardware United uses to handle its passenger manifests, it’s unlikely he was involved in that aspect of the incident, either.
For its part, United is maintaining that the passenger removed was being disruptive and combative, and that they had no choice but to involve law enforcement. The City of Chicago, which provides O’Hare with its security detail, says the officer who handled the passenger has been placed on leave.
