As travelers languished in hours-long security lines at more than a dozen U.S. airports this week, President Trump boarded Air Force One headed for Memphis. He had a victory lap to take. “We stopped crime!” he declared at an event at the city’s airport. About a year earlier, he had deployed federal troops here as part of his blitz against Democrat-governed jurisdictions. Crime was down 43 percent compared to last March, and Trump’s Memphis Safe Task Force, as his administration called the operation, was responsible, according to him. “We still have work to do,” cautioned Memphis mayor Paul Young at a press conference later. Not only was crime still a problem, it was unclear if the president had meaningfully impacted its decline — it had been falling at a rate of about 40 percent for years. But that was besides the point for the administration. This wasn’t about safety. This was theater.

Elsewhere around the country, 150 ICE agents had been dispatched to major travel hubs, ostensibly to help short-staffed TSA agents — none of whom were getting paid because of a fight on Capitol Hill over DHS funding. “ICE was my idea,” the president bragged to reporters. Lines at airports sprawled. Passengers were evidently charged millions of dollars in security fees earmarked to pay TSA officers, who weren’t getting the money. Images shared on social media showed ICE agents standing around and scrolling on their phones. Two agents in San Francisco dragged a woman named Angelina Lopez-Jimenez through the airport while her 9-year-old daughter watched and cried. “This is entirely a manufactured crisis by the Trump administration. It is a shameless, insensitive policy by an uncaring regime,” one person waiting for a flight told the........

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