Donald Trump, who started his second term as United States president a little over a year ago, likes to talk about how he is making America great again. But, for foreigners planning their trips abroad, it appears Trump has played a significant role in reducing their perception that America is great — at least as a travel destination.
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TSA’s New Confirm.ID Tax
Back in March of 2014, I wrote about how the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) operates an extortion racket-style scheme via its PreCheck program that gives travelers who pay a fee and jump through a bunch of hoops including submitting to fingerprinting and a background check a chance, though no guarantee, that they can evade some harassment from the TSA itself. In the same vein, starting in February, TSA is planning to roll out a new tax and other demands, termed Confirm.ID, that will be required of individuals who do not have REAL ID compliant identification documentation in order for them to travel from point A or point B.
Speaking Tuesday before the Homeland Security Subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations regarding the implementation of REAL ID mandates on travelers, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem displayed succinctly in one sentence her disdain for the right of Americans to travel freely and her support instead for an authoritarian approach to travel.
The United States government’s Department of Homeland Security announced Monday it is delaying until May of 2025 requiring people to present REAL ID compliant identification to make it through security checkpoints at American airports. This delay extends a previous delay in implementation of the requirement that was set to expire in May of 2023.
Omicron is the newly named type of coronavirus that governments are using to spread fear and to impose new restrictions on people’s activities in the name of protecting “public health.” Among those new restrictions, national governments are banning the entry of people who have been in certain countries. For, example, United States President Joe Biden unilaterally declared on Friday (no congressional approval sought or obtained) that most people, with exceptions for US citizens and some others, who have been in any of eight listed countries in Africa over the previous 14 days may not enter America.
Francis S. Collins, the director of the United States government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), went full-on authoritarian in his Sunday interview with Jake Tapper at CNN’s State of the Nation. Collins, in the interview, supported in short succession the imposing of several extreme violations of the freedom of people who have chosen not to take experimental coronavirus vaccines — some of which are not even vaccines under the normal meaning of the term.
Use vaccine passports to prevent these individuals from attending public events and entering businesses, fire them from their jobs, and bar them from traveling, Collins championed.
Joe Biden hit the ground running in his effort to use his presidential powers to ensure traveling in America is tedious, demeaning, and uncomfortable.
On Biden’s second day in office, he signed an executive order mandating travelers wear masks on all modes of public transportation — airplanes, trains, buses, etc. As if in a cruel joke, the executive order starts off with “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered …”.
Now comes word that Biden administration officials are planning a mandate that, for anyone to travel by airplane in America, he must first have a long stick stuck up his nose to undergo notoriously inaccurate testing for if he is infected with coronavirus.