A Serious Question About Hazard Pay

It has come to my attention that certain federal employees are required, as a condition of their employment, to stand within arm's reach of Donald Trump for extended periods of time.

^Satire.

I am speaking, of course, of the United States Secret Service.

These are trained professionals. They have taken an oath. They have passed rigorous physical and psychological evaluations designed to weed out anyone who cannot remain calm under pressure, maintain situational awareness in a crowded room, or process the sight of a 280-pound man eating a McRib with the focused serenity of a monk illuminating a manuscript. They are prepared, we are told, to take a bullet for the president of the United States.

What nobody apparently told them, at any point during their training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, was about the smell.

Multiple credible sources, including former staffers, journalists granted rare and clearly traumatic access, and at least one person who claims to have ridden in the presidential limousine and has since adopted a mostly outdoor lifestyle, have described the olfactory environment surrounding Donald Trump as a majestic, almost geological layering of KFC original recipe, bronzing aerosol of uncertain provenance, hair product that appears to have been discontinued sometime during the first Bush administration, and something underneath all of it that one former aide described only as “the Oval” in a tone that suggested she had filed it away in a part of her memory she does not visit anymore.

Experts in industrial hygiene would classify this as a compound volatile environment. Experts in sensory psychology would call it a significant stressor. A golden retriever, presented with these conditions, would simply leave. Secret Service agents cannot leave. They signed a thing.

I think we owe it to these brave and apparently anosmic men and women to ask: is there a line item in the federal budget for this? A differential? A supplemental? Some form of official hazard classification that acknowledges, in the sober and measured language of federal labor law, that sustained proximity to the Commander in Chief presents occupational risks not covered under standard government compensation packages?

The Department of Labor has classifications for chemical exposure, extreme temperatures, biohazardous materials, and high-decibel environments. There is a federal category for workers who handle asbestos. There is a federal category for people who work in sewage treatment facilities, who at least get to go home.

I am simply asking where the paperwork is for the man who has to stand at parade rest for four hours in a enclosed room while the 47th President of the United States delivers a 90-minute monologue about his own ratings to a roomful of increasingly motionless NATO ministers.

These agents stand there. For hours. Motionless. Expressionless. Professionally blank in the way that only people who have survived truly extraordinary professional circumstances can manage. The ambient conditions develop around them slowly, organically, like a weather system that stopped at a Wendy’s and never fully recovered. Their eyes remain fixed on the middle distance. Their breathing, one assumes, has been adapted. Evolutionarily. Out of necessity.

Some of them have families. Children who ask what they do at work. These agents presumably say something vague about public service and then stare out the window for a moment longer than expected.

They deserve a medal. A substantial one. Possibly laminated for easy cleaning.

They probably cannot wear it near him. The metal might react. But they deserve one.

Congress should convene a subcommittee. There should be hearings. Witnesses should testify under oath about what it is like to spend eighteen months orbiting a man whose personal atmosphere has been compared, by people in a position to know, to a Cinnabon inside a tanning bed inside another, larger Cinnabon.

This is a matter of federal employee welfare. It is a matter of basic human dignity.

It is also, and I cannot stress this enough, a matter of science.

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