OPINION — Two years ago, during the inaugural address, few imagined that “this American carnage” that Donald Trump was pledging to end would someday extend to the family finances of 800,000 unpaid federal workers.

Equally unfathomable was the idea that January 2019 would morph into “Have You Hugged a TSA Worker?” Month. Once derided as the front-line symbols of ineffective Security Theater, these low-wage federal workers are now rightfully hailed for keeping the planes flying as they work without paychecks and worry about car payments.

Demonizing most federal workers has been part of the Republican playbook dating back to the New Deal. And Trump has extended this vitriolic hatred to the Justice Department, the FBI and the national security establishment.

This right-wing view of the federal workforce was best expressed recently by an anonymous “senior Trump official” in a brutal op-ed in the Daily Caller. This Trump loyalist — who works somewhere in the non-funded part of the government — flatly announced, “We do not want most employees to return, because we are working better without them.”

This anonymous Trump figure sounds like he or she stumbled on a box of leftover quotes from the Ronald Reagan administration. Anyone who can remember the 1980s has heard variants of the claim, “On an average day, roughly 15 percent of the employees around me are exceptional patriots serving their country. … But 80 percent feel no pressure to produce results. If they don’t feel like doing what they are told, they don’t.”