As he builds his lavish ballroom and sends an $80 billion bailout to Argentina’s right-wing leader, President Trump, rather than issue court-mandated SNAP food aid to hungry Americans, has added insult to injury by creating conditions that may prevent millions from seeing family and friends this holiday season.
Federal officials, under orders from Trump, began cutting the number of flights at nation’s busiest airports Friday. The initial 4% reduction is already causing coast-to-coast mayhem; by next week, the cuts will escalate to 10% of flights.
The administration claims its action will “relieve pressure” on air traffic controllers, who have been working for five weeks now without pay due to the Trump government shutdown.
The simple and humane solution to the food stamp problem is, of course, to obey the court orders from two judges and pay benefits in full. The food aid is normally received by one in eight Americans.
As for the air traffic controllers, they’ve been facing pressure due to under-staffing since well before the government shutdown, now in its 37th day. Their situation only worsened when the paychecks stopped but they were required to keep on working.
The passenger airline cuts starting Friday were announced by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Brian Bedford, the FAA administrator, on Wednesday. Cargo flights, they said, will also be cut.
Unions and allies warn that this will cause even sharper increases in the price of food and other essentials for consumers during the holiday season. “Just buy the child one doll instead of two,” Trump said in his advice to parents across the nation only a day before feasting at one of his lavish dinners.
The simple solution in the case of the air traffic controllers: Reopen the government and pay them immediately.
Trump has ordered the Republican-controlled Senate not to do any of these things, so the increasingly cruel shutdown is punishing more Americans by the day.
Rather than talk about saving health insurance subsidies for working families who rely on the Affordable Care Act—which Republicans continue to hold ransom—Trump has posed only one solution to the shutdown—demanding that Republicans end the filibuster.
That would allow them to do whatever they want without having to pay attention to Democratic Party efforts to save healthcare. The Republicans don’t want to end the filibuster because they are fearful, based on this week’s election results, that the Democrats may be in control of the Senate in a year.
Trump’s moves are hurting millions of Americans. Some 670,000 federal workers are furloughed while 750,000 others continue working without pay. Some 43 million food stamp recipients are not getting their badly-needed food aid.
The airline cuts, in addition to hurting the public and the controllers, will cause severe economic harm in many states.
Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has said the cuts will damage the New York State economy, impacting both small and large businesses, in addition to crippling the ability of many to travel and causing even worse price increases for consumers of products that shippers have more trouble delivering. She’s being joined by governors of other states who host major air hubs.
Unions, of course, are speaking out against the flight cuts.
The AFL-CIO said: “Tens of thousands of public service workers are being forced to work without pay. The shutdown reduces safety oversight, endangering public safety. The livelihood of civil servants should not be reduced to political bargaining chips. The urgent need is to prioritize the safety of transportation systems, workers, and passengers.”
Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune, however, incredibly said Friday morning that “it is the rank-and-file people in the Democrat (sic) Party, not the Democrat (sic) leaders who will solve this shutdown. They will rise up and rein in the extreme left elements of their party that are responsible for this.”
The fact is the overwhelming Democratic victories in elections this week, particularly the Mamdani election in New York and the wins in New Jersey and Virginia, were a mandate for ending MAGA politics. That reality is either completely lost on Thune or he is simply exposing that he’s a part of the dangerous right-wing movement in this country that operates on the idea that it can fool all of the people all of the time.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views expressed here are those of the author.
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