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Donald Trump Thinks He Made Airplanes Safe Again & Twitter Is Roasting Him

by Bernadette Deron
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images News/Getty Images

It's only the second day of 2018 and we already have a ridiculous tweet from our current president that the internet wants to completely tear to shreds. But in all honesty, does this news surprise you? While the level of success that President Donald Trump has reached in his first year in office is, uh, highly debatable, there's just some things that he definitely cannot take credit for — like air travel safety. Well he did try to take credit, and the tweets about Donald Trump taking credit for airline safety could not be more on point.

Trump is no stranger to taking credit for things he's had nothing to do with, and his latest boasting tweet is no exception. On Jan. 2, Trump decided to tweet about the success of commercial air travel over the past year, which he believes is somehow related to his taking office in 2017. He claims that he has been "very strict" on "commercial aviation", which resulted in zero deaths of airline travelers over the past year.

While I'm not exactly sure how Trump can believe that the overall effectiveness of safety of airline travel is related to his presidency, for some odd reason he does. So you know that per usual, Twitter users absolutely blasted the president for making such an absurd claim. And the tweets are equally as hilarious as they are harsh and completely spot-on.

Trump posted the original tweet that he's taking credit for zero air travel related deaths early on Jan. 2.

And in true Twitter fashion, users fired back and roasted him.

These tweets ripping Trump's claim to shreds are seriously hilarious, especially knowing Trump's tendency to take ownership of pretty much anything that's considered a success. He's taken ownership of everything from getting Hillary Clinton to use the term "radical islam", to making Lady Gaga a star.

But there were also a number of Twitter users that pointed out that commercial airline travel has been safe for quite some time now.

For years, actually. According to Forbes, the last time anyone has died on a U.S.-certificated scheduled airline was Feb. 12, 2009. Colgan Air Flight 3407, operating from Newark, N.J. to Buffalo, N.Y. crashed in Clarence Center, N.Y. due to an an aerodynamic stall just shy of landing on the runway. Sadly, this technical malfunction killed all 49 passengers on board, and an additional person on the ground.

Since then there hasn't been a single airline related death in the United States, and yet Trump seems to think that 2017 was the safest year on record. In truth, 2017 was an exceptional year for air travel worldwide. According to a report from the Aviation Safety Network, not a single airline recorded a commercial passenger jet death over the past year, making 2017 the safest travel year on record. But that's globally. Here in the United States, we've had safe skies for close to a decade.

And a handful of Twitter users made that point abundantly clear.

And a couple of users pointed out that while there were no aviation related deaths in 2017, there were a number of other significant fatalities in the past year.

For example, in 2017, the number of fatalities related to gun violence totaled to 15,526, according to the tracker website Gun Violence Archive. So while we haven't seen any deaths related to commercial airline travel, there have been thousands of fatalities related to other causes. And Twitter users made sure to draw attention to those fatalities, rather than focus on air travel safety.

This latest Trump tweet is yet another classic example of the president taking ownership of success that doesn't belong to him. And in all honesty, I think most of us are sadly used to this behavior by now. And who knows what Trump will try to take credit for in this coming year?

So while Trump is correct in stating that this year was one of the safest travel years to date, we don't exactly think it has anything to do with him or his White House administration. It's not like Trump is flying the planes himself and running the major commercial airline companies, so what does he have to do with it? The world will never know.