Trump Makes the Unexpected Choice to Fully Own Airport Chaos
Senate Democrats and the Trump White House have been exchanging proposals on ICE reforms for months without much progress. The negotiations have been ongoing since Democrats in February began to refuse to fund the Department of Homeland Security without meaningful reforms to ICE and CBP officers’ practices and conduct. It’s this standoff that has contributed to chaos in airports as TSA staff miss paychecks, and its against this backdrop that Trump, seemingly inspired by a caller on a right-wing radio show, ordered ICE agents to deploy to back them up on Sunday.
As negotiations continue, over the past few weeks, Democrats in both chambers have repeatedly tried to get Republicans on board to a bill that would fund all other agencies under the DHS umbrella — including TSA, the Secret Service, FEMA and the Coast Guard. The bill would, notably, help to ameliorate the long lines at airports. Each time the effort was blocked by Republicans.
In recent days, negotiations have picked up and Senate Republicans were seemingly more open to funding all of DHS except ICE — basically, taking the Democrats’ deal. Republicans could then address ICE funding later in a party-line reconciliation bill, which only needs 50 votes in the Senate, not the 60 most other legislation requires.
But overnight, President Donald Trump blew that plan up. He is holding DHS funding hostage to address another of his priorities.
In an escalation of his pressure campaign on his own party’s senators to pass the SAVE Act — which the Senate is currently debating with little hope of actually passing it — Trump announced on social media that Republicans should not make a deal with Democrats to end the ongoing DHS-specific government shutdown until Democrats agree to pass the voting requirements legislation.
“I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,’” Trump said in a Sunday night Truth Social post. “It is far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate…”
Of course, there is almost no chance that Democrats will support the SAVE Act, a voter suppression bill, in adequate numbers to overcome the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. Trump’s gambit has the effect of further increasing pressure on Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and other Republican senators to change filibuster rules to pass the SAVE Act — and, potentially, to fund DHS, too.
This all came about within hours of Trump offering his own solution to TSA agents not getting paid: ICE would help out! Photos and video Monday captured the immigration officers milling around in airports across the country.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) laid it all out in a social media post on Monday.
“After blocking it 7 times, Senate Republicans agree that we should fund TSA, FEMA and Coast Guard, and set ICE aside while we negotiate reforms,” Slotkin said. “President Trump is holding DHS funding hostage to protect ICE.”
— Emine Yücel
War, on Market Time
Some are starting to see a pattern that could not exemplify Trump II more: that the president is timing major announcements or moves in the war to coincide with the opening and closing of the stock market.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) argued this on Monday in a post on X, calling Trump’s claim that the U.S. is negotiating an end to the war “a panicky message to the markets: ‘No war escalation until markets close on Friday.’” Bloomberg reported on Monday that Trump had started negotiations with Iran partly out of a desire to calm the markets.
There’s a precedent for this: early COVID. This is ancient history by this point, but in March 2020, the stock market was in freefall. This was deeply concerning to Trump, who would hold press conferences on Friday afternoon in the hours before the market closed. At one point, he reportedly sent supporters a signed chart of the Dow Jones shooting upwards at around the time that he began a news conference in which he declared a national emergency over the pandemic.
With Iran, Trump threatened to bomb Iranian power plants on Saturday. No trading then. He posted that he would call off the strikes that he announced and that negotiations were going well on Monday morning, before markets opened.
It’s all showmanship, a more disturbing consequence of having a reality TV show star run the country. In COVID, as now, the reality ended up being far grimmer than whatever show the president could stage. Around 20 million jobs were lost in 2020; the stock market continued to plummet until the Fed stepped in. Iran is just starting.
— Josh Kovensky
Trump’s Notorious Hatred for Windmills Incurs a Price Tag
It’s in the billions, as the Interior Department negotiates settlements with wind farms that it ordered to halt construction. From the Washington Post, which reports that the operations were labeled a security threat by the DoD:
The Trump administration reached an agreement to pay $1 billion to French energy firm TotalEnergies to stop developing two offshore wind farms off the coast of New York and North Carolina, instead directing the investments to oil and gas projects.
[…]
The company’s two offshore wind projects — called Attentive Energy and Carolina Long Bay — were still in the planning stages, having yet to be fully permitted, and far from being built. Last year, the Interior Department had stopped all additional federal permits for renewable energy projects, leaving the vast majority of offshore wind projects dead in the water.
The department based the stop-work orders on national security concerns, flagged in a classified report by the Defense Department that has not been made public.
— John Light
In Case You Missed It
New from David Kurtz: EXCLUSIVE: Trump Admin Confirms 91 Wrongful Deportations of Asylum Seekers
Today’s Supreme Court dispatch from Kate Riga: Fox News-Pilled SCOTUS Invents Wild Hypotheticals to Justify Curtailing Right to Vote by Mail
The Backchannel: Iran Is Setting the Pace; Trump Is Reacting.
TPM Cafe: I Homeschool My Kids, but I’m Repulsed by the Parental Rights Movement
More on the administration’s ramshackle affordability campaign from Layla A. Jones: Trump Says He’s Concerned About Housing Access. His Policies Are Making it Worse.
Photos: Airline Travelers Encounter Armed ICE Agents at Airports Across the Country
Morning Memo: Trump DOJ Keeps Charging First and Investigating Later
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
Trump Slinks Away From His Promise of a Texas Senate Endorsement — Kate Riga, Emine Yücel and Khaya Himmelman
What We Are Reading
Democratic States Seek to Block Massive TV Station Merger — Dave Dayen, American Prospect
Trump Has Detained the Parents of More Than 11,000 U.S. Citizen Kids — Jeff Ernsthausen, Mario Ariza, McKenzie Funk, Mica Rosenberg and Gabriel Sandoval, ProPublica
The Rise of the Ray-Ban Meta Creep — Miles Klee, Wired
“Gooning Towards the Führer” as policy coordination: The Trumpist administrative style — Henry Farrell, Programmable Matter
Who’s going to be the first victim of ICE gunshots at an airport? I’m just waiting for it to happen.
Me too. I expect it will be when an angry crowd surrounds ICE’s chosen victim and prevents them arresting the person.
I am trying to imagine them using pepper spray inside an airport. I think guns are a more likely choice.
Full disclosure: I want to see confrontation. I don’t want to see someone else die, but at the risk of sounding jingoistic, there is a cost to freedom. The Boston Massacre comes to mind.
Everything is going to cost us in billions and trillions. Just like Doge cancelling leases (i bet we are still paying) and putting employees on paid leave. That saved us…nothing and cost us much.
A comment to an article today in The NY Times. Commenter is RP Smith. Hopefully they will survive the experience of listening to Trump for 40 minutes.
They are armed. Just walking around with no particular mission. Sooner or later one of them will want to pull out his weapon just to see what happens and break up the boredom.