At 3:54 Friday afternoon, with more than 3,500 planes already in the air, the FAA ordered airports across the country to stop departures for “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” Nearly two hours later, the President of the United States finally had something to say. “MAKE OUR ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP.” By late Friday nearly 5,000 flights had been canceled and another 10,000 delayed. Families were sitting on terminal floors, pilots had been holding passengers on runways for hours, and Donald Trump still hadn’t addressed the emergency. The people he sent out to explain it were Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Duffy blamed old switches, old routers and copper lines from the 1980s. Those lines were old on Thursday, too. What happened at 3:54 on Friday that brought the whole system down? “We’re still working on the details of what went wrong today,” he said.
Three days before the ground stop, Duffy’s department had begun rolling out a new AI system called SMART at all 22 Air Route Traffic Control Centers. More than two dozen members of Congress had asked the department to pause long enough to explain how the system had been tested and whether controllers had been trained to use it. The controllers’ union said the people who would actually use it had been left out of design and testing altogether. Air Space Intelligence, the company that built SMART, said it had nothing to do with the ground stop. Duffy said there was “no possible way” it was involved. Right beside him, Mullin said officials were looking into how the old equipment worked with the new. When a reporter asked whether AI had played a role, Mullin wanted to correct the reporter’s choice of words. He preferred “SI,” for “super intelligence.” And when NBC’s Monica Alba asked why Republicans hadn’t fixed the problem in nearly two years of controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, Duffy wanted to know which network she worked for.
“We don’t deserve this, America,” Duffy said that night. He’s right. We don’t deserve an America where a former reality TV cast member is put in charge of aviation and responds to a nationwide emergency by going after the reporter asking what went wrong. We don’t deserve an America where babies too young to be vaccinated are dying of measles while the man Donald Trump put in charge of public health is a vaccine skeptic. What scares me is how much we all have to entrust to people whose chief qualification is their loyalty to one man. Ten days before Duffy stood at that microphone, Americans voted to take both chambers of Congress out of his party’s hands. On Friday we learned that Colorado voters had sent Lauren Boebert home and elected Eileen Laubacher, a retired two-star Navy rear admiral. Those voters understood something this president still doesn’t. It matters who does the job. Come January, the people we elected can start holding the people he appointed accountable for what they’ve broken.
See the full story in the video.
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Heather
This video is based on my written post, available HERE, and based on the events of 11-13-2026.
This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Sources:
Secretary Mullin and Secretary Duffy Brief Members of the Press on the FAA Ground Stop: YouTube Video
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-statement-nationwide-ground-stop
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/faa-issues-nationwide-ground-stop/
https://www.npr.org/2026/11/13/nx-s1-6040403/faa-nationwide-groundstop-airports
https://abcnews.com/US/nationwide-ground-stop-ordered-airports-faa/story?id=138121848
https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/us-flights-grounded/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/13/health/us-measles-elimination-status
https://www.ksl.com/article/51644051/wisconsin-infant-is-third-measles-related-death-this-week-in-us
https://www.freshproduce.com/who-we-are/commentary/cyclospora-faqs
https://coloradonewsline.com/2026/11/13/laubacher-defeats-boebert-4th-district/
