Shortly after he suggested that the federal government should deploy the young DOGE staffers as air traffic controllers—“We should use some of them in the control towers, where we were putting people that were actually intellectually deficient,” the president said—the same senior White House official quickly dismissed the comment as a serious proposal.
“Lmfao no,” the White House official told WIRED in a text message. “You guys need to learn how to cover him. He was making the point that smart bright people need to be ATC’s [sic.].”
Trump simultaneously suggested the DOGE staffers are young and “very smart,” but also that “some are young, and some are not young. Some are not young at all.”