The air travel crisis is deliberate

Trump is sowing chaos in American airports amid a global jet fuel shortage in a desperate attempt to consolidate power.

I flew into Laguardia last night about 30 minutes before the runway crash between an Air Canada plane and a fire truck that killed two pilots, injured dozens of people and shut down the airport. The collision was apparently caused by a miscommunication from an exhausted air traffic controller who was distracted by a different emergency at the time, while his tower was understaffed at night. This is the second fatal plane accident in the U.S. since Trump took office, as his administration has been firing air traffic control employees "without cause nor based on performance or conduct” in order to “save money.”¹ And last night’s incident was just a blip on the radar compared to the massive air travel crisis that Trump has not only created but is now deliberately making worse in his own country as his dictatorship slips out of his hands.

The mess started a month ago when the Iran war created a global jet fuel shortage by choking off oil shipments at the Strait of Hormuz. Airlines across the world have already been raising the price of plane tickets dramatically and preparing to cancel some longer flight routes altogether in anticipation of their fuel reserves running low. Iran has also attacked several airports and hotels in the Middle East in retaliation, which is causing a ripple effect of flight cancelations throughout Europe and Africa. The oil crisis and resulting international travel fuckery have become so egregious that it appears the “goal” of this war we started is now just to reopen the strait that closed because the war. It’s that circular Vietnam war logic all over again, driving us further into this pointless quagmire of violence.

On top of climbing ticket prices and international flight cancellations, we’ve now got a domestic travel crisis due to the partial government shutdown. TSA agents are entering their second full week without pay, and they’ve responded by quitting their jobs and calling out sick by the thousands, which is causing hours-long security lines and missed flights across all major U.S. airports. Trump is desperate to blame Democrats for the chaos, but it’s actually Republicans in Congress who’ve blocked TSA funding nine times because it doesn’t also include more money for ICE. The Democrats are holding off for certain ICE reforms, like banning face masks and requiring them to have judicial warrants to break into people’s homes, but have been eager to fund TSA and the rest of the agencies at Homeland Security with clean, standalone bills in the meantime. Republicans wouldn’t come to the table.

Amid the standoff, Trump has decided to pour ICE onto the problem. He originally framed this plan as sending ICE agents in to offset the TSA shortage and help ease the security lines, despite their lack of training for that very specific job. But now he’s fully admitting that ICE is just heading into airports to harass and arrest people and piss off his political opponents by sowing additional chaos and fear. “That’s why the Democrats are going crazy,” he told a reporter this morning. “ICE loves it because they’re able to now arrest illegals as they come into the country. It’s very fertile territory.”

ICE has already made one horrifying arrest of a mother in front of her child at San Francisco’s airport today, which serves as a preview of what’s to come. We should expect some violence, which seems to happen everywhere Trump sends groups of armed men to crack down on peaceful people minding their own business.

Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans finally reached a deal to fund TSA and give the airports some relief. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R) caved and agreed that Republicans would vote yes on funding all of the DHS agencies except ICE—including TSA, FEMA and the Coast Guard—and deal with ICE funding separately in reconciliation. But when he finally took that bipartisan deal to Trump yesterday, the president threw a tantrum and killed it, demanding instead that Republicans refuse to fund TSA unless its tied to passing the SAVE America Act. (That voter suppression bill, as I wrote last week, does not have the votes to pass without blowing up the filibuster, and Thune has said repeatedly that Republicans don’t have the votes to blow up the filibuster either.)

So, given the option of just letting Congress fund TSA and avoiding weeks or months more of travel hell facing Americans, Trump is leaving the mess in place on purpose and sending in untrained, masked white supremacists with guns to harass travelers on top of it. This is the policy equivalent of approaching a starving person with a bag full of food, punching that person in the face instead of giving them the food, and saying you’ll beat them harder if they choose to remain hungry. Trump is governing by spite, and there don’t appear to be any checks or balances on his decisions by the Republicans who control the House and Senate.

Congress should go ahead and pass their TSA funding deal without Trump’s blessing and force him to veto it. Let him personally own the reason someone couldn’t make it home to their sister’s wedding or their mother’s funeral this weekend. The president is actively making our lives more miserable and restricting our ability to move around the country and the world. It’s bad policy and bad politics—and I suspect American voters will be so filled with rage come November that no voter suppression bill could possibly be strong enough to stop the backlash that’s coming.

1. Considering that we’re spending more than a billion dollars a day on the war in Iran that nobody wanted, and the Pentagon under Pete Hegseth spent nearly $7 million on lobster tails in a single month last year, it’s safe to say that the mass indiscriminate firing of civil servants and essential airline workers was not about saving taxpayers money.