Bookman: Long lines at airports lead back to Trump’s 2020 election loss

by Jay Bookman, Georgia Recorder, [This article first appeared in the Georgia Recorder, republished with permission]

March 26, 2026

Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the keystone to metro Atlanta’s economic prosperity, has been a wreck for much of this week. With security lines that can be four hours or longer, flights have been missed, vacations have been missed, TSA paychecks have been missed, and thousands of passengers are getting … well, a word that rhymes with missed.

All because Donald Trump wants to keep his ICE bullies masked and unaccountable to the American public, while Democrats don’t. Democrats are demanding that ICE officers be held to the same standards and constitutional restraints that apply to every other law enforcement agency in the country, local, state or federal. They believe that ICE officers should be accountable to the American people and to the courts, and they’re using their limited leverage over federal spending – in this case, the TSA budget – to try to force that discussion.

As a consequence, many TSA agents continue to work hard at the airport even though they haven’t been paid for weeks, while ICE agents – brought in to “help” – are getting paid to stand around watching the unpaid TSA agents do all the work. 

If that sounds confusing, even crazy, it is. In normal times it would make no sense to let a dispute over immigration enforcement clog up something as unrelated but important as security lines at airports, but as you might have noticed, these times are not normal. Odd things are happening.

We have chaos in the Middle East, chaos on Wall Street, chaos at the airports and oil markets, chaos in the courts and in the federal government. And chaos, by definition, creates impacts that we can neither predict nor control. For example, the events playing out at Hartsfield this week are a direct if unpredictable result of recent ICE excesses in Minneapolis and elsewhere. One has led to the other.

As a result, there’s a pervasive and maybe bipartisan sense that things are spinning out of control, that we have no steady hand at the wheel steering us in a wise direction. To the contrary, those charged with setting our course seem more committed to feeding the chaos than calming it, and consequences that once seemed far off, that we used to just read about or watch on the news, are hitting closer to home, becoming things that we experience personally and first-hand. 

Here’s another reason that security lines have been so long at Hartsfield: Trump has never gotten over losing the 2020 election. 

Last weekend, Senate Republicans went to Trump with a potential deal that would unclog our airports. It would resume funding for TSA officers, thus taking that issue off the table, allowing separate efforts to continue to find a compromise on ICE misconduct. 

Trump refused. 

As he told Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and later announced to the American public, he has no interest in resolving the TSA standoff until the Senate approves the so-called SAVE Act, which would give the Trump administration greater control of our elections, including who gets to vote and who doesn’t.

“I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying Radical Left Democrats” unless they pass the SAVE act, ban most mail-in voting, ban trans athletes and kill the filibuster, Trump wrote on his social media site.

Given Trump’s history and his belief that the only honest election is an election that he wins, Democrats want nothing to do with his regime trying to usurp election administration.

So no deal has been made, and we, once a normal country, await the next round of insanity.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jill Nolin for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com.