Donald Trump loved Boeing. He loved it almost as much as he loved himself. He and the company were both bold, rugged, successful, manly master builders. Even before he became president, he paid $100 million for his own personal Boeing 757 – bigger than the 737 MAXes that were Boeing’s signature planes. None of those planes had his name on them. Nor did they have gold-plated seat belts.

“(The 757) was always the crown jewel of his wealth – the ultimate sign that he had made it,” CNN said.

When the newly elected president learned a new Air Force One would cost $4 billion, he went ballistic. Boeing lowered the price and made a $1 million donation to his inaugural. No harm done. Boeing’s then-chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, was “a friend of mine,” he said, and Trump was a good friend to Boeing, pressuring other countries to buy its planes.

In June 2018, Trump declared that he had been strict on commercial aviation since taking office. After all there had been no deaths in 2017. (There had been none anywhere in the world.)

Four months later, an Indonesian 737 MAX crashed, killing all 189 aboard. Four months after that, an Ethiopian737 MAX crash killed all 157 people on board. Trump didn’t offer condolences to the families of eight Americans who were killed in the Ethiopian crash. Instead, he tweeted that planes were becoming too complex to fly: “I don’t want Albert Einstein to be my pilot.” Nor did he offer condolences to the families of the remaining 338 victims from all over the world on both planes. After all, this premier airplane builder was located in the U.S. and supposedly was regulated by the U.S. government, which was charged with overseeing the planes’ safety.

Turned out the U.S. was not regulating Boeing. Boeing was regulating itself. The Federal Aviation Administration had ceded most of its authority to Boeing, with help from Congress. When Boeing wanted even more authority, it went to Congress and got it. By 2018, the FAA was allowing it to certify 96% of its work. Meanwhile, FAA engineers said they worried that they were no longer able to monitor what was going on inside Boeing. When engineers cited a need for a redesign, the FAA said a redesign would interfere with Boeing’s costs and construction timetable. (It was racing to beat its European rival, Airbus, for control of the skies.)

After intense lobbying, Congress even gave Boeing control over the safety of its planes. The New York Times wrote in 2019: “The FAA department that oversaw the MAX development had such a singular focus that it was named after the company: ‘The Boeing Aviation Air Safety Oversight Office.’” Some FAA engineers worried that the agency had installed managers who would defer to Boeing.

After the planes went down, Muilenburg called Trump personally and begged him not to ground the planes. The FAA repeatedly told Trump by phone that Boeing had a good safety record and didn’t need to be grounded. In a statement, the FAA said there were no “systemic performance issues” and no data justifying grounding. To which a former FAA official said: “You had data. You had 350 dead in four months.”

Trump waited until nearly every country in the world had grounded its Boeing planes. Just as the FAA was about to announce the U.S. grounding, Trump said he would do it himself. “I have never seen the White House come up with an announcement like this,” said the former head of FAA’s accident investigation division.

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao met with the families of 11 victims six months later.

In 2020, a congressional committee found the crashes were caused by “a culture of concealment” and poor oversight by federal regulators. Rep. David Price, chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, told the committee it was “troubling that certain safety features were available as options rather than as standard equipment.”

In January, after an emergency door panel blew off a Boeing 737 over Oregon, the FAA’s new administrator, Michael Whitaker, told Congress that the oversight of Boeing “is not delivering safe aircraft.”

“There have been issues in the past,” he said. “They don’t seem to be getting resolved, so we feel like we need to have a heightened level of oversight.”

The rest is history – lots of  recent history.