Trump’s Transportation Department Brings Back Shaming

The Trump administration’s Department of Transportation has brought back shaming, and anyone who flies even just once per year should fully support it.

Back in December 2021, aboard American Airlines to Cancún for a Christmas-time family vacation, I asked the flight attendant if the airline had started serving alcohol again. “No,” he said, “not until the passengers start acting right.”

I felt so bad for the dude. I knew exactly what he meant. He was referring to the blow-up of in-the-air confrontations that took place in the immediate aftermath of totalitarian, pandemic-era lockdowns, as seen on social media — travelers screaming at each other and fighting with the air crew. (Spirit Airlines flyers, you know who you are.)

He said those problems were largely caused by drunken passengers, many of whom would drink in excess at the airport before boarding their flights. “I wish there was some accountability for the bars and restaurants,” he said, “because that’s where they’re getting drunk.”

A new ad this week from the DOT addresses the tragedy in spectacular fashion. “Flying was a bastion of civility,” a voiceover says in the video, which strings together older clips of a not-too-distant past when people felt no entitlement to berate flight attendants for simply requesting that they not show up an intoxicated mess or physically accost others for being a minor nuisance. And then it fast-forwards to recent weeks, months, and years with clips of belligerent high-fliers now unbothered to be seen letting their odious butts hang out for a national audience, or otherwise behaving on commercial flights like feral animals.

“Things aren’t what they used to be,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says at the end of the ad. “Some would call it the golden age of travel. Let’s bring civility and manners back. Ask yourself — are you helping a pregnant woman put her bag in an overhead bin? Are you dressing with respect? Are you keeping control of your children? Are you saying thank you to your flight attendants and your pilots? Are you saying please and thank you in general?”

What makes the ad so effective, ironically, is that the viewers necessarily feel a sense of embarrassment, if not for themselves, then for other air travelers they have to associate with, even if just by proximity. That such conduct has become so common — a 100 percent increase in “unruly passenger events” in 2024 compared to 2019, the Federal Aviation Administration says — is a humiliating truth.

How did we allow ourselves to get here? This is the United States of America, not the deserts of Niger. Show some class, even if it’s not first.

Shame for tasteless air travel is back. That’s a good thing.