On today’s show: A Delta plane crashed at Toronto’s Pearson airport Monday afternoon. All passengers on board were accounted for. NBC News has the latest. Trump voters splinter over his rapid shake-up of Washington. Eliza Collins from the Wall Street Journal examines how some are thinking. European leaders gathered for an emergency meeting after Trump shut them out of Ukraine talks. Reuters explains what happened at that meeting. Plus, a team from Elon Musk’s SpaceX is being brought in to overhaul systems at the FAA, Pope Francis’s hospitalization is extended, and the polar vortex is back, bringing more brutal weather to millions. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
Chapter 1: What happened during the Delta plane crash in Toronto?
But first, a Delta Airlines plane flipped over while landing at Toronto's Pearson Airport yesterday afternoon. Officials say there were no deaths, but at least 18 people on board were injured, three critically, including a child. A man named John Nelson was on the plane and described what happened to CNN.
Chapter 2: What are the eyewitness accounts of the plane crash?
When we hit, it was just a super hard, like I hit the ground and the plane went sideways. And I believe we skidded like on our side and then flipped over on our back.
He said there was a fireball on the left side of the plane and described it as chaos.
I was upside down. The lady next to me was upside down. We kind of let ourselves go and fell to hit the ceiling, which is surreal feeling. And then everybody was just like, get out, get out, get out. We could smell jet fuel. Even now I smell like jet fuel. And then we just crawled out the back of the airplane. The firefighters, the EMTs were there right away.
Chapter 3: What are the official statements regarding the plane crash?
In a statement, Delta said the flight was carrying 80 people, including four crew members, flying from Minneapolis before it crashed on the Toronto runway. Toronto Pearson Fire Chief Todd Aitken said during a briefing it's too early to speculate as to what caused the crash.
What we can say is the runway was dry and there was no crosswind conditions.
Multiple outlets are reporting, however, that Toronto had windy conditions with gusts up to 40 miles per hour at times. Former National Transportation Safety Board Vice Chairman Bruce Landsberg spoke to CBS News shortly after the crash. He said in strong wind conditions, a plane will start to turn into the wind, sort of like a weather vane because of the tail.
The pilot has to counteract that by pushing simultaneously on both the rudder pedals to keep the airplane going straight and then putting a wing down in order to keep it from drifting off the runway. So it requires a very delicate balance. And of course, the wind isn't steady. It's going to be gusting.
So just about the time you think you've got everything squared away, another gust comes along or the gust stops. So the pilot is constantly fighting to keep the aircraft properly aligned.
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Chapter 4: How do experts view the safety of air travel after recent incidents?
Landsberg said, however, these were his preliminary impressions and investigators will learn more. This comes less than a month after the crash outside of Washington, D.C., when a Black Hawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines jet, killing all 67 people on both aircraft, an incident which has left many people nervous about air travel right now.
Scott Hamilton, an aviation expert speaking to the NBC affiliate in Seattle, says flying remains an extremely safe mode of transportation.
It is absolutely safe to fly. There is nothing at all that is a common thread between these accidents.
This incident also happened as the Trump administration is making cuts to staffing at the Federal Aviation Administration. But Hamilton says that has nothing to do with what happened here.
Chapter 5: What are current public opinions on Trump's presidency?
Some have already tried to make a nexus between these layoffs and these accidents. There is no nexus. The people in the Federal Aviation Administration who have been laid off are technicians. They're not air traffic controllers. And of course, the layoff only was effective yesterday or the day before. So that's just completely irrelevant.
Two runways remain closed at the airport in Toronto, while American and Canadian officials work together to investigate the crash. Just over four weeks into President Trump's second term, we're getting some early snapshots of how voters are feeling. A recent survey from CBS News and YouGov found slightly more Americans, 53%, approve of Trump's job performance, 47% disapproved.
Polling by Pew Research Center earlier this month revealed a similar narrow margin, though in their polling, slightly more people disapproved of Trump's performance. So people seem to be quite divided at first glance. But we are seeing more alignment on some specific policies.
For example, when asked about Trump's pardons of January 6th offenders, about three quarters of the people who responded to Pew's survey said they disapproved of pardons for violent crimes. On other issues like immigration, a recent NPR-Ipsos poll found most people said they support Trump's call for mass deportation of immigrants without legal status.
But far less popular are the administration's effort to end birthright citizenship and its policy of holding immigrants at Guantanamo Bay. Republican strategist Sarah Longwell has been conducting focus groups with voters. She spoke with PBS NewsHour about some of the people she has met. Monty from New York told her he's happy with Trump's work so far.
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Chapter 6: How do Trump voters feel about his recent policy decisions?
I think he's running the country like a business. So what happens if management steps into a business for the first time? Shut everything down. Let's see the books. Let's look at everything. Let's see what needs to stop being spent on and what. So I understand that. It sounds scary. The funding freeze.
And I know it does like shake up a lot of industries or a lot of places, but it's something that needs to be happening.
The Wall Street Journal recently did a pulse check with roughly two dozen people who voted for Trump. And national politics reporter Eliza Collins told us many of them are excited about what he's doing.
ending transgender women in sports, you know, pardoning January 6th defendants. In particular, his focus on federal workforce cuts, Elon Musk's Department of Government efficiency. They like that going through and trying to find what they say is waste and fraud.
But a handful of people told Collins while they like the idea of what Trump is doing, they want him to slow down.
They felt like the scope of what he was doing was too far, though they agreed with the goal. So they liked the idea of making the government more efficient, but they didn't think that people should have to lose their jobs over it. They didn't like the idea of layoffs or buyouts. They liked getting the border under control, but they felt that deporting families was problematic.
They just wanted to focus on criminals.
At least one person Collins spoke to said she voted for Trump because she wanted lower prices and to stop fentanyl from coming into the U.S. But now she's worried her family might lose their house if her partner gets laid off from his government-adjacent job.
She had voted for Biden last time, had been a longtime Democrat, and had basically given Trump a try this time and deeply regretted it. She called it the greatest mistake of her life.
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