Shutdown Turbulence

Airports stall, allies seethe, public health collapses, and Trump still thinks this is all about love

Good morning! The Trump shutdown is now stranding Americans on the tarmac. Flight delays rippled across the country again yesterday, as air traffic controllers, unpaid, exhausted, and overworked, tried to keep the skies safe while also figuring out how many Uber shifts it takes to cover a mortgage. Nashville flights slowed to two hours apiece, O’Hare clocked nearly an hour, and in Burbank there weren’t even controllers on duty, another agency had to step in to keep planes from circling the Hollywood sign.

It’s déjà vu with a vengeance. In 2018–2019, Trump presided over the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, thirty-five grinding days of shuttered agencies, unpaid workers, and a president so determined to hold the country hostage for his border wall that he let the whole federal apparatus seize up. It ended not with a grand bargain, but with reality punching through at 30,000 feet. A handful of air traffic controllers at LaGuardia and Newark called in sick after weeks without pay, and suddenly the system buckled. Delays spread like wildfire, safety concerns mounted, and within hours Trump folded, signing a short-term funding bill without his precious wall. In other words: it wasn’t Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi who dragged him to the table, it was a couple of exhausted federal workers who decided enough was enough and grounded the president’s political stunt.

The question now is how long before history rhymes again. Trump is back in shutdown land, playing the same reckless game, only this time with fewer guardrails and a public already weary of chaos. If a few controllers brought the last tantrum to its knees, imagine what might tip the scales this round.

Inside the agencies themselves, the view is equally grim. Jenna Norton, a furloughed NIH program director, stood outside the Capitol and said the quiet part out loud: everything a shutdown threatens, shuttered programs, layoffs, gutted services, Trump has already done. NIH grants on racial health disparities were canceled because they contained words like “structural racism.” A Reagan-appointed judge called it the most blatant government discrimination he had ever seen, only to be overruled by a Supreme Court eager to rubber-stamp the purge. Over 1,300 NIH staff have been laid off, including communications staff who used to tell Congress and the public what research was being done. Norton calls it what it is: a democracy vs. autocracy fight. Her Taylor Swift-style friendship bracelet doesn’t say “1989” or “All Too Well.” It says “Support the Constitution.” Imagine needing jewelry to remind yourself your oath of office still means something.

While planes are delayed and agencies hollowed out, Trump has been busy turning diplomacy into improv comedy. Standing beside Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, he muttered about Gaza being “3,000 years old” (or maybe 500, depending on the count) and promised peace deals as if he were selling timeshares. Then he told Canadians they’d “love us again,” dismissed their auto industry as disposable, and bizarrely claimed he saved 100,000 Canadian lives by blowing up fishing boats off Venezuela. Canadians noticed. Ontario Premier Doug Ford declared enough was enough: “They have to feel the pain,” he thundered, threatening tariffs and even cutting cheap electricity exports that literally keep the lights on in New York and Michigan. Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro chimed in, pointing out that Trump’s tariffs are already spiking costs for Pennsylvania farmers and manufacturers. Even American allies north of the border are saying what Congress won’t: stand up to the bully, or be steamrolled.

And in Seoul, Koreans are watching Trump with the same slack-jawed disbelief. As Chris Norlund reports, Obama’s speeches were once studied across Asia as master classes in English rhetoric. Trump’s, when translated, are studied as master classes in idiocy. Parents who send their kids to U.S. schools hear Trump threaten to “wipe out” protesters in Portland and invoke martial law, and they worry whether their children are safe. Koreans know what this looks like, they lived through their own Trump-like president, a conspiracy-addled cult-chaser who tried to rule by decree. He’s gone now, replaced by a leader who goes on cooking shows to promote K-pop and kimchi exports as engines of growth. Imagine that: a president who measures success in joy instead of jail cells. To Koreans, Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a punchline, one whose language loses even more dignity in translation.

But Trump’s language at home is deadlier than the mockery abroad. “Insurrection” has suddenly become the administration’s word of choice, dropped into every DHS press release and Trump aside. When his own judge blocked Guard deployments to Oregon, Stephen Miller denounced her ruling as “legal insurrection.” When reporters asked if Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act, his non-answers sounded suspiciously like scripted cues: “maybe, if necessary.” It’s not accidental. As historian Heather Cox Richardson warns, this is the prelude to martial law. Miller and Noem are trying to create a fantasy of chaos so Trump can step in as the savior, declaring Americans themselves the enemy. They’re even lifting straight from Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist who claimed true power lies in the “exceptions” to the law. Miller calls it “plenary authority.” What it really means is dictatorship.

The irony is that Trump is attempting this power grab at his weakest moment. Seventy-eight percent of Americans oppose his shutdown agenda. His approval is in the basement. Most dictators seize power at their peak of popularity, not their nadir. But desperate men with shrinking bases are often the most dangerous. That’s why Richardson’s warning matters: watch the words. Every time Trump says “insurrection,” he’s not describing reality, he’s rehearsing for a coup.

And then there’s public health, where the coup has already succeeded. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary, is presiding over the worst measles outbreak in decades. Children have died. Six living surgeons general, including Trump’s own Jerome Adams, have now issued a joint statement demanding Kennedy resign. It’s never happened before. The American Academy of Pediatrics has told its members to ignore HHS guidance because it will kill people. Kennedy has gutted mRNA research, slashed HPV and Hepatitis B programs, floated autism warnings on Tylenol, and staffed CDC leadership with Peter Thiel investors instead of scientists. He forced out a CDC director after 29 days. He disbanded the immunization committee. He has turned the nation’s health into a lab experiment for conspiracy theories. Trump doesn’t care. For him, Kennedy isn’t a liability, he’s the perfect wrecking ball against institutions that actually save lives.

The framers of our system, for all their brilliance, built it on an assumption: that the office of the presidency would be held by someone acting in good faith. They never designed the guardrails for a criminal actor at the helm, someone who treats the law as a speed bump and the people as props. And so here we are: planes grounded, NIH gutted, Canada furious, Korea laughing, Stephen Miller rehearsing dictatorship, and RFK Jr. dismantling the nation’s health security.

Trump insists the people will “love us again.” But what the people actually love are working airports, functioning hospitals, and leaders who don’t threaten to send tanks into Portland. What they love is a democracy that serves its citizens, not one man’s whims. This is what happens when you elect a president who can’t tell history from improv, science from superstition, or democracy from a personal fiefdom.

The world is watching. So are we. And history tells us one thing for certain: when air traffic controllers, pediatricians, and premiers are all yelling “enough,” the landing is never smooth.

As if the shutdown circus wasn’t surreal enough, Marjorie Taylor Greene has broken ranks. Yes, that MTG, normally Trump’s most reliable bullhorn, is suddenly campaigning for the renewal of health-related tax credits and demanding the release of the Epstein files. It’s a sharp detour from the Trump playbook, and the timing is exquisite. This week she’s even slated to appear at a press conference alongside Epstein’s victims, a spectacle that could force the issue into daylight no matter how many Justice Department doors Pam Bondi slams shut. When even MAGA’s queen of conspiracy wants the files out, you know the narrative is starting to crack.

Trump is preparing for what may be his most chilling stunt of the week: a “roundtable on Antifa.” Harmless on paper, but in Trump’s imagination, Antifa isn’t a loose anti-fascist ethos, it’s an all-caps terrorist syndicate with headquarters, rosters, and secret training camps. That fantasy serves a purpose. By pretending Antifa is an “organization,” he can declare ordinary dissent to be insurrection. And that word, insurrection, is suddenly everywhere in Trumpworld, as though his lawyers and speechwriters were given a memo: say it until it sticks.

Put it together and the shape of the game is obvious. A shutdown that starves public programs, a public health secretary who treats measles like a wellness cleanse, a chorus of “insurrection” whispering through the airwaves, and now a fabricated enemy at the table. Trump is building the scaffolding for martial law one soundbite at a time. But cracks are forming in the edifice, even his loudest allies are shifting, even his propaganda blitz can’t drown out the calls for truth. The real question now isn’t whether the scaffolding holds, but whether enough of us recognize the structure before it’s finished.