GOP Leaders Warn Republicans to Avoid Their Own Constituents
“They’re professional protesters. So why would we give them a forum to do that right now?” Speaker Mike Johnson said, falling back on Republicans’ ol’ reliable playbook for when people get pissed at them for ruining our lives.
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You know things are going great when lawmakers of the party in power are advised to avoid their own constituents.
On Tuesday afternoon, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and other House GOP leaders held a caucus meeting where they instructed rank-and-file Republican members to cancel town halls and keep away from their constituents for the time being, the Wall Street Journal reported. Top Republicans claim angry constituents are merely, ahem, “professional protesters.” This is because GOP members across the country—including deep-red districts that overwhelmingly voted for Trump—are being confronted at town halls by residents of their own districts who are outraged by the Musk-Trump administration’s rapid and senseless cuts to federal programs. During the past few weeks, several videos of such heated confrontations and protests, as members held town halls during recess and on weekends, have gone viral.
Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, reportedly led the closed-door meeting on Tuesday. Before that, on Monday, President Trump wrote off the heated town halls as the workings of “paid troublemakers.”
At a Tuesday press conference, Johnson made similar claims about supposed crisis actors posing as real human beings whose lives have been ruined by Trump. “Democrat activists who don’t live in the district very often will show up for these town hall events, and they’ll go in an hour early and fill all the seats, and so the constituents and the people from the community that are actually represented don’t even get the seat,” he told reporters. “There are people who do this as a profession. They’re professional protesters. So why would we give them a forum to do that right now?”