Donald Trump insists, incorrectly, that he was the one to rescue those stranded astronauts — and he’s getting roundly called out for trying to take credit for something he had almost nothing to do with.
As the Washington Post reports, the plans for the safe return of Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams, the astronaut pair who flew up on Boeing’s leaky Starliner craft last June only to be stuck there for nearly nine months longer than expected, were in the works long before Trump even won his second presidential match-up against Joe Biden.
Despite the president’s claims on his dying Twitter clone that he “asked Elon Musk to go up and get the abandoned Astronauts, because the Biden Administration was incapable of doing so,” their return on a SpaceX capsule as part of its Crew-9 mission was announced last August, when NASA also revealed that Starliner would be coming back to Earth uncrewed.
Though Biden was president during the Starliner launch, meaning NASA was under his purview when it decided to go ahead with the expensive and long-overdue mission despite concerns about its safety, the decision to delay Wilmore and Williams’ return was made out of pragmatism and not “politics,” as Trump and Musk have suggested.
Scientists had long warned that Starliner was not safe enough to fly, but it flew all the same. If NASA had risked sending the astronauts back down on it, we may have ended up with a tragedy the likes of which our country hasn’t seen since the Columbia explosion more than 20 years prior. It’s not hard to imagine that had Trump been president during that debacle last year, he may not have made the right call.
Over on Musk’s flailing social network, the MAGA crowd’s jubilance was tempered by even-keeled holdouts who pointed out that Trump had “nothing at all” to do with the astronauts’ return.
“Did you know,” the satirical PatriotTakes account posted, “that the so-called ‘stuck’ astronauts returned in a module already docked to the ISS since September 2024?”
In a fit of literal gallows humor, another user included a gif of someone hanging themselves when joking about how well the president’s propaganda works.
“Trump just said the astronauts were stranded by Biden again,” the user quipped. “And my grandparents just ate that shit up like their space autism grandson didn’t just explain to them exactly what happened less than an hour ago.”
Similar epithets were reserved for the president on Reddit, where another user was incredulous that another poster thought Trump and Musk “rescued” the astronauts.
“The astronauts themselves have said there was nothing political about this,” the Redditor mocked, “and the arrangements were made for this in September, long before shit for brains took office.”
Trump’s Truth Social post taking credit for the Williams’ and Wilmore’s return wasn’t the first time he’s fibbed about who deserves credit and blame for Starliner’s failures and the subsequent stranding — and it almost certainly won’t be the last.
More on Trump’s blame game: Trump: “Crooked Joe Sold Them Down the River With His Ridiculous All Electric Car Hoax”