In four days, federal employees will suffer their first missed paycheck
since Trump’s border wall shutdown; it’s hard to say who will be worst
hit: the employees who are furloughed will never see that money (but who
may have been able to pick up some other work while they were off the
job to cover their bills); or the “essential” federal employees who’ve
had to show up for work every day without pay, but who will, someday,
get a paycheck to cover their forced labor.
In the latter group are 51,739 TSA “officers” (TSA screeners aren’t
cops, but they’ve adopted the “officer” honorific in a bid to secure
flyers’ obedience while they confiscate their apple-pie filling). Since
the shut-down began, TSA officials have insisted that screeners were not
staging “sick outs” (for example, to avoid daycare expenses by staying
home with their kids) and that the extra waiting time that passengers
were suffering through (53 minutes in Laguardia!) was the result of
heavier than usual travel.
But after Friday, TSA screeners will have to decide whether they want to
stay on the job without pay, and it’s a sure bet that lots of them will
stay home, and there’s not much the TSA can do about it. A TSA walkout
would cripple the nation’s businesses and strike directly at
higher-income Americans (that is, the people who supported Trump as he
used racist wall promises to secure the votes needed for a
two-trillion-dollar tax giveaway to the wealthy).
What happens next is anyone’s guess. Trump’s probably right that giving
in on the wall will lose him any chance of re-election as discouraged
racists stay home from the polls (as they had done historically, until
Trump gave them something to vote for), and deliver victory to Democrats
who have a small but meaningful chance of taxing the shit out of
looters and oligarchs. But the patience of looters and oligarchs – with
the exception of a few long-term thinkers like Charles Koch – is in
notoriously short supply. If Trump loses the racists, he won’t be able
to help the billionaires. But if he loses the billionaires, he won’t be
able to afford to court the racists.
