Delayed RNC attendees put up in Chicago migrant hotel

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

A global IT meltdown seemingly caused by a glitch in the CrowdStrike platform caused members of Congress, members of the media and Republican Party operatives of all ranks to suffer together as they scrambled to get to their home bases across America after the conclusion of the RNC. Most were stuck either in Milwaukee or in one of Chicago’s bigger airports. The “RNC 2.0 is happening in the Chicago airport currently,” one attendee who made it out of Milwaukee quipped. 

In order to make up for the mass delays and cancellations, airlines attempted to be generous, but many offerings ended up reinforcing several of the messages that came from the RNC: that America’s borders are wide open and that the cost of food remains out of control. Multiple RNC attendees told The Spectator that United Airlines gave them vouchers to a Chicago-area Holiday Inn “that’s now a migrant shelter and closed to the public. You can’t make it up.” One added that “it’s sick that we, the taxpayers, are paying to house these people. We’re paying and not allowed to stay at these hotels. American citizens are left out to dry.”

Another stranded passenger told The Spectator that “United only gives out a $15 credit for your meal, and the only place I could get a full meal for less than $15 was McDonald’s.” 

Flights, hospitals and stores alike were impacted by the CrowdStrike outage, but the Milwaukee-to-Chicago corridor received outsized attention due to the sheer quantity of powerful people trying to get home. The cancellations impacted lawmakers and laypeople alike. Representative Chuck Fleischmann saw his Delta flight home canceled and couldn’t find a rental car, so the congressman, his wife and several others split a taxi home for almost $3,000.

Another Delta “horror story” relayed to The Spectator saw one group of Republican staffers make it from Milwaukee to Atlanta “after standing in line for three hours to check our luggage.” Upon their arrival down south, their flight home was canceled. “Delta’s website crashed and there was a six-hour wait time to get customer service so we are unable to book a new flight. Every single hotel within a five-mile radius was booked. Every single rental car is taken, except for one for $900. We are now driving fourteen hours from Atlanta back to DC and we don’t have our luggage.” The group has no idea when its members will see their luggage again.

While some travel delays were caused by errors due to the CrowdStrike update, there were other reasons. One traveler’s plane was delayed for hours because “both toilets are broken. The maintenance crew? Working on the plane in the gate next to us with the same exact situation.”

Representative Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota told The Spectator that he “was supposed to fly from Milwaukee to Grand Forks at 9 a.m. to watch my kid’s baseball tournament.” The problems started almost immediately. “Instead, I booked a 3 p.m. out of O’Hare back to DC, which was delayed until 7. We boarded at 7:20. Sat on the tarmac for over an hour because they couldn’t get the paperwork right. Took off at 8:30. Couldn’t burn enough fuel to land at Reagan, so we diverted to Dulles” and he Ubered back to his car. “I’m a long way from Grand Forks,” he lamented.

Julie Fedorchak, who will likely succeed Armstrong in Congress next year, “had to take the Amtrak to Minot. She will get there tomorrow morning just in time to walk in the State Fair Parade,” Armstrong told The Spectator. “But pretty cool that she took a fifteen-hour train ride to make the parade.”

There were, however, two groups of travelers who had an easy go of things: those who flew private and those who left early. In the former case, the cast of the Ruthless podcast dunked on those who were “stuck flying scheduled during this CrowdStrike nonsense,” host Comfortably Smug chided, posting a picture from a private jet. 

“I don’t know if we’ll ever get out of Milwaukee,” a senior GOP staffer told The Spectator. “I’m just gonna drink until I get home.” Armstrong’s bartender isn’t the only one who thanked their lucky stars for these travel outages. If Trump’s no tax on tips policy were already law, America’s bartenders would be the happiest people on earth right now.