This story has everything — a two-year-old viral clip, the “Deep State,” the math teacher from The Virgin Suicides, Larry The Cable Guy, incompetence…
Yes, it’s another day in Trump’s America, where an old viral clip of a TSA pat-down worked its way up a ladder of MAGA celebrities to the President of the United States himself. Trump then added his particular brand of insightful commentary remarking, “Not a good situation!”
For anyone unfamiliar with the years-old clip, it shows a boy being subjected to a lengthy and thorough pat-down after a faulty TSA sensor mistook a laptop for a bomb. The clip garnered instant ridicule and horror, which ranged from common-sense pleas for better oversight to people calling the agent a pedophile across public forums.
Clearly, it’s important for the TSA to strive for better policies with regards to how they search children — did the guy need to check the waistband of the kid’s shorts twice or his shirt’s neckline? Probably not — but with the faulty sensor, the boy’s mother refusing to let the agent use a metal detector, and the added pressure of her recording the whole thing for social media consumption, it’s fair to say it was a stressful situation for the agent. One in which he didn’t want to screw up by doing his job poorly, especially with the amount of oversight the TSA has. Remember, this is the same TSA worker whose (largely thankless) job comes with a starting salary of $31k while being the last line of defense against terrorism. (For what it’s worth, in the past week TSA confiscated 76 firearms in carry-on bags, 66 were loaded, 25 had rounds chambered.)
The outrage for this viral moment has long passed. The TSA long ago stated that the kid was only subjected to the thorough pat-down due to a sensitivity disorder and his mother’s desire to keep the magnetic wand scanner away from his body, though those facts are still disputed by the mother. That didn’t stop the ever-reliable “Deep State Exposed” Twitter account from deep-diving into the past to get people on Twitter all fired up again by reposting the clip.
The tweet was shared by James Woods and later retweeted by Larry The Cable Guy who remarked, “This is infuriating and hard to watch,” before sharing it with his 537k followers, one of whom seems to be the President of the United States.
The TSA is a strange target for conservatives. Also, the administration comes under the purview of the President of the United States, so it’s not like his hands are tied. Sadly, the whole thing feels like political fear-mongering.
Jennifer Williamson, the mother of the boy in the video, seemed to initially bask in the renewed attention to the clip, before finally tweeting that it’s better to just let the incident go and continue living life with her family.
You do your best to explain what occurred was not right. You hope that most people have enough common sense to understand why. Then you have to let go. I would still be chasing down inaccuracy instead of living life with my family.
— Jennifer Williamson (@JenDemiRecs) March 20, 2019
Word, Jennifer. Or maybe Trump can oversee the implementation of some changes to the TSA screening policy, which can certainly be better. But he given that he’s currently ranting about George Conway on Twitter, he may not have time.