It was, of course, a tragedy when an Army helicopter collided with a passenger jet Wednesday night over the Potomac.

In situations like this one, it has traditionally been the role of a president to publicly mourn the dead, promise a full and transparent investigation, and withhold judgment about the cause of the accident, all while calming the public.

President Trump, of course, reads from a different playbook.

Tonight, I'll discuss the aftermath of the crash, as well as the frenetic week that was with Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Mark Leibovich is my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Ali Vitali is the host of Way Too Early on MSNBC.

And Nancy Youssef is a national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

Thank you all for being here.

I want to start by playing a brief clip of Donald Trump talking about the crash, if we could.

REPORTER: Do you have a plan to go visit the site or meet with any of the first responders?

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President: I have a plan to visit, not the site, because, you tell me, what's the site?

The water?

You want me to go swimming?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I just want to note, in watching that and absorbing that previous presidents might have said something anodyne in response to a question like that, you know, when the time is right, I will go to the site and thank the first responders and I'll stand with the families of the victims and that would be that, but this is a politician with very, very different instincts.

Peter, is this -- is his response, and he's been nonstop responding to the crash for two days, is this -- does this hark back to the chaotic days of Trump 1?

PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Yes.

Well, Donald Trump is nothing like anodyne.

He's nothing like any other president.

We've seen that before.

Maybe after four years, we had kind of forgotten a little bit because we didn't see him every day in the same way.

But you're right.

He is his own kind of leader.

He doesn't do the empathy thing.

He doesn't do the feel your pain thing.

He's not a Bill Clinton or a Ronald Reagan after challenge or any of that kind of stuff.

And we saw that last time during COVID in particular.

Remember, day after day, he got out there and rather than talking about the human suffering of thousands of people dying per day, he went on the attack against Democrats, against his own scientists, against China, the World Health Organization, all of those.

Essentially, that's what he did again this week with the air crash, instead of coming out and saying this is a time for all of us to pull together and figure out what happened, he instantly, within minutes, goes from the hour of anguish to really an hour of anger and aggression.

In which he not only goes after his opponents, he name checks them, Obama, Biden, Buttigieg.

He talks about diversity as if that had anything to do with this crash without any evidence whatsoever.

That's how he rolls.

And he is not going to change because the conventions of Washington don't approve.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Why does he do it this way?

NANCY YOUSSEF, National Security Correspondent, The Wall Street Journal: I don't know, other than, I can tell you the impact though, in some place at the Pentagon, which of course was shocked over what happened.

We had the names of the three crew who were on the Black Hawk, and for the first time in the 20 years that I've been around the building, a family chose not to release the name of their loved one, asked the military to not release it.

It turns out it was the woman on that helicopter.

Now, I can't tell you their reasons, but I can tell you that depending on it, it had an effect.

You started to hear people talk if I'm a woman or a minority pilot, or people can assume that I'm only here because of diversity.

Someone sent me a list of every crash that's been involved, involving any kind of military vehicle, and said to me, count the women.

That's the kind of reaction that it's creating within the building that, that people are going to be judged not by their merits and certainly a pilot is -- the merits are right there.

There's no -- a plane doesn't know your race or gender.

And now we're having questions around whether a pilot will be judged on their flight hours, on their performance because of this kind of discourse.

ALI VITALI, Host, MSNBC's Way Too Early: As if that spotlight wasn't already there, right?

It's what makes these attacks about DEI and diversity and inclusion so sharp is the people who are nonwhite and non-male know that those biases are already ingrained for some Americans and this only underscores and builds upon them.

You're right that there's a cost to the mis and disinformation that Trump has put forward.

We saw it during the Hurricane Helene response, when he talked about FEMA.

And FEMA workers were endangered on the ground in some situations because of conspiracy theories pushed by the president.

In situations like this, it's the NTSB, the National Transportation Safety Board that actually makes the announcements about potential things that could have gone wrong in plane crash scenarios.

Trump broke with decades of precedent about that and just put forward conspiracies and conjecture.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Mark, hold your point for one minute.

I want you to react to video of precisely what Ali's talking about, Donald Trump kind of freestyling on possible causes of the accident.

Just watch this for one minute.

DONALD TRUMP: You could have slowed down the helicopter substantially.

You could have stopped the helicopter.

You could have gone up, you could have gone down.

You could have gone straight up, straight down.

You could have turned, you could have done a million different maneuvers.

For some reason, it just kept going and then made a slight turn at the very end and there was -- by that time, it was too late.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Mark, I want to hear you on the DEI overlay of this whole controversy and on basically everything that's happening in Washington these days because it's been a preoccupation of the Trump administration for the first 11 days of its time in office.

But going to this, it's -- what is the political utility for Donald Trump of going out and behaving like a radio D.J.

on drive time radio talking about aviation accidents or just sitting around a bar, YouTube commenter?

What is the impulse?

What is the effect?

MARK LEIBOVICH, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: I mean look That's not what we're used to a president of the United States doing.

And you can talk all about DEI or Donald Trump's style or what have you.

I mean, the fact is, 60 or, you know, a lot of people died not far from where we're sitting, tragically.

It's a fairly uncontroversial human response to just sort of sit with it, you know, try to heal.

I mean, every single president in history that I can tell who has been through something like this plays - - you know, goes by the same playbook.

And I was reading some, you know, one of the morning tip sheets today.

And said, well, that's the usual boring response.

But this is Donald Trump's style.

I don't think this is about style.

I don't think it's about DEI.

I think it's about -- I don't know.

I mean, I think it's just who he is.

And, look, it mimics a lot of his behavior in the first term in both campaigns.

I mean, this, in some ways, is democracy at work because everyone knows what this guy was and this is perfectly predictable.

People voted for it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

What does it do to him politically?

I mean, this is the question.

Now that we're in the, we're in it now, we're in the Trump administration, we're in the second term, obviously for the lead up, it was all speculative and theoretical.

But does this do political damage to him with anyone that he cares about, or is this just part of the show that people actually are drawn to?

MARK LEIBOVICH: I mean, it could -- look, his approval ratings could tick down.

I mean, it started out at a pretty, you know, robust number for him.

I mean, the fact is, though, I mean, when you think about checks and balances, when you think about things that could potentially be a consequence for his actions, there is very little.

I mean, he basically owns both chambers of Congress.

You know, the Supreme Court's obviously sympathetic.

He doesn't have to run for reelection.

His cabinet, his staff, Republican Party, I mean, he owns all of that.

So, it's basically a consequence free environment.

You know, maybe does -- do approval ratings move the needle?

I mean, do congressional Republicans worry about them being too aligned for this in a way that makes them vulnerable?

But, ultimately, look, Donald Trump will do what he can get away with.

And whether a few points on his approval ratings are going to move the needle on this is unclear.

PETER BAKER: And the thing is, by tomorrow, or next week, we will have been on -- maybe even later tonight, we will be on to the next controversy, the next scandal, the next outrage, the next provocative thing he's done, maybe things that will be popular, maybe they won't, and we won't be talking about this because we'll be talking about the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing.

What we've seen of the Gatling gun approach to governing is that he hits so many targets all at once that you can't really focus too long on any individual one for any opposition to build up.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's pretty smart.

PETER BAKER: It's working for him in a lot of ways because he has put everybody on the defensive.

Everybody who's he sees as his enemies are on the defensive, whether it be the FBI, whether it be the Democrats, whether it be the DEI offices, whether it be anybody.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Look, the DEI offices are on the defensive, but let me push back a little bit.

The OMB, that memo freezing all government, you know, essentially, that would seem -- they seem to acknowledge that that was a mistake and that put him back on the defensive for the first time.

PETER BAKER: And then the first time you saw Democrats really kind of rise up again, that they'd been deflated and demoralized.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Or woke up.

PETER BAKER: Woke up.

That's not really a verb we're allowed to use anymore.

But, suddenly, you started hearing them say, whoa, wait a second, this is outrageous.

And you hadn't really heard them with much volume saying that in the previous few weeks.

ALI VITALI: Well, except when he pardoned all of the January 6th insurrectionists, they rightly came out infuriated by that.

But I think this is the problem.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That kind of went away so quickly, the whole cycle.

ALI VITALI: I think a lot of the press (ph), though, right, because of what you're saying, because this is the person that we all know Donald Trump is, whether he is President Donald Trump or he is private citizen former President Donald Trump.

He is brash, he is unempathetic, and you don't expect him to change.

How many of us were mocked for the original stories we did almost ten years ago now about, will there be a change in presidential tone?

I mean, clearly, that tone change never came, and, thankfully, none of us were holding our breath.

But I do think that for Democrats, they've had a strategy of, well, we don't want to jump at everything.

We only want to highlight what's important.

But when it looks like potentially getting rid of USAID, when it looks like folding up various government agencies, when it's pausing programs that Americans rely on in their day to day life, pardoning January 6th rioters, not showing empathy and pivoting to diversity and conspiracy after a tragic plane crash, how do you choose what's important enough to swing back on and what's not important enough for Silas (ph).

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Let me ask one more question on the DEI issue, because this is an issue, obviously put aside the particular Trump framing of it.

It's not an issue that's a particularly popular set of programs with a large swath of America.

There's a general feeling that after 2020, things went too far.

There are -- the Democrats themselves don't seem to be too eager to go defend these programs as they were.

Is this just, at the end of the day, just very smart politics on Donald Trump to find a villain with a easy to remember acronym, DEI, and it stands for a lot of things, including some obvious racial resentment and all the rest of the ugly things that might be also percolating here?

NANCY YOUSSEF: But also during the campaign, when he would say things, like we're going to stop transgender women from being a part of women's sports, that was one of the loudest applause lines he would get during the campaign.

It is something that really resonated with his base.

And remember during his first term, we saw things like Black Lives Matter and protests around issues and he made it very clear that he was against it and thought it was an issue that was against the values that he held.

And so I think for his base, it is something - - it is that he has been speaking to and that they've been urging him to go after because some see it as some of the overpractices that were happening as they see it under the Biden administration and before it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: One more question because you're in the Pentagon all the time.

There are many senior officers, flag officers, I've spoken to over the last several years, who did feel like the emphasis was too much on, let's say, a Democratic Party agenda related to race and gender and so on.

There are a lot of people who are for that, obviously, in the Pentagon.

What's the mood right now inside in terms of implementation of these programs?

Is there relief among senior officers about where this is going because they don't want to talk about these issues at all?

Is there a lot of anxiety in the part of senior officers of color, women?

Give us -- go a little bit deeper on what you're feeling apart from the defensiveness that you outlined.

NANCY YOUSSEF: So, in the NDAA of 2023, it actually required the military to get rid of DEI offices.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That's a national -- explain what that is.

NANCY YOUSSEF: I'm sorry, the National Defense Authorization Act.

And in that -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, that pays the bills.

NANCY YOUSSEF: That's right.

And in that they had to get rid of it.

So, a lot of this had already started before the Trump administration came in and one of a lot of them offices that they just changed the name in some instances.

And so this has been an issue that they've been tackling a year before the administration came in.

Where I see troops talking about in particular leaders is the potential to affect readiness.

Once we start thinking about as a unit, as anything less than a unit, that can affect military readiness.

And I think when you're hearing troops start asking themselves, is my race, is my gender going to be used against me, that's when you start to feel it.

The military needs unit cohesion, and that begins by looking at everyone there as merit-based in there because of their contributions to the unit.

That's where you start to hear the worry.

And you start to hear minority service members and female service members start to express their concern.

We just had a memo come out in the last hour saying we're not going to celebrate things like Black History Month and others in the same way.

It undercuts the military culture which demands that everybody look as a fellow soldier.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's very interesting and worth more conversation.