Brooks: Comfort Plus is what it took to get Washington to care about the shutdown

A government shutdown is a roulette wheel of pain. Today, the pain landed at the airport — and maybe your flight did not.

Anxious travelers arrived at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport hours early on Friday only to watch the arrival and departure boards light up with bad news.

Canceled: Flight 3597 from Green Bay.

Canceled: Flight 5281 to Denver.

Canceled: Flight 3629 out of Minot.

Canceled: Flight 3534 bound for Sioux Falls.

Flight after flight canceled. Travel plans thrown into disarray by the Trump administration. The FAA ordered 1 out of every 10 planes out of the sky at the nation’s largest airports, trying to ease the workload of air traffic controllers they haven’t paid in more than a month.

“We’re going to take care of our people,” the president said. “There are some people who really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”

Now faced with angry travelers and angrier voters, the president urged Republicans this week to give negotiation a try.

“If you read the pollsters, the shutdown was a big factor, negative for the Republicans,” Trump told Senate Republicans the morning after Democrats swept local races across the nation.

Senate Democrats had said all along they would not vote to end the shutdown unless Republicans agreed to extend expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies before millions of Americans lose their insurance and millions more see their health care premiums double. The GOP’s counteroffer, for the most part, was a refusal to negotiate, full stop.

The shutdown left 42 million Americans unsure where their next meal will come from. It stiffed the people who make sure we get our Social Security checks, veterans services, student loans and passports.

Trump campaigned as the champion of the working class. That’s not how he governs.

As the shutdown choked off food assistance to 1 out of every 8 Americans, Trump presided over a “Great Gatsby”-themed Halloween party in a golden ballroom at Mar-a-Lago.

Women performed slinky fan dances around the president’s table as his administration battled in court against states pleading with them to restore SNAP benefits to millions of Americans — most of them children, seniors or people working jobs that don’t pay a living wage.

Maybe he was just taking a page out of “The Great Gatsby.”

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy —” wrote Minnesota’s own F. Scott Fitzgerald, “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”