Good morning, readers. Welcome to a special edition of the Trump Effect. We do this occasionally on merit, and I don’t think I remember a more chaotic start to a week. I’m aware it’s only Tuesday. Here’s yesterday, step-by-step.

First, let’s set the stage. We’re in prime spring break travel season. This comes around every year. This year, travel demand is at an all-time high.

Second, we’re in the midst of a partial government shutdown. You might think ‘partial’ and say, well, won’t be that bad. You would sort of be right, and that’s part of the problem. The government is functioning mostly the same. So the pain isn’t as bad as if it were a full government shutdown. But the partial part that impacts travelers is pretty darn important. This government shutdown means that TSA agents – these are the folks that you MUST GET THROUGH in order to board your flight – are not getting paid. Getting through security also applies to NTSB investigators trying to get to airline disasters. More on this later.

2.5 – or maybe third – they are all going to start blending together now. When you don’t pay TSA agents, it turns out they quit or call in sick. Fair enough. Which leads to lines so long at many of America's major hub airports that they just stopped telling people how long it was going to take. Once it got over three hours, seems they were just like, ‘no, we’re not going to put that up on the screen any more.’

Fourth (?), the reason for the government shutdown is largely because democrats don’t want to fund the federal government’s divisive Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents or ICE. Historically, these are the armed, masked federal agents who have been terrorizing sanctuary cities, most notably in Minneapolis, where two American citizens were killed. So, what should we do? LET’S SEND THEM TO THE AIRPORTS! That was announced on Sunday.

Late Sunday night, there’s a fatal plane collision at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, causing a full ground stop. Tragically, two pilots were killed when an Air Canada plane collided with a fire truck on the runway. Early Monday morning, a full ground stop was also called at Newark Liberty Airport in NJ. For those keeping track, that’s two of NYC’s three airports out of operation, and the other, poor JFK, with the +3 hour lines and ICE agents ready to stream in.

By Monday afternoon, the NTSB said that they had to beg to get one of their investigators through a TSA checkpoint after being in-line for over three hours in Houston.

Curious who is in charge of all this? The answer was no one, really, until late Monday when the Senate voted to confirm Sen. Markwayne Mullin as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Now he’s in charge of all of this.

So that was Monday. Very excited to see what today brings.