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?”
Sure, I didn’t perform deep background checks into the protesters attending GOP Congress members’ town halls in any of the viral videos I’ve seen. But there sure are a lot of things to be angry about right now. Hoards of social media users have come forward to say they voted for Trump, but have since lost their jobs because Musk and DOGE defunded their federal programs. Just last week, the Washington Post profiled one woman who hoped to start a family with IVF (after Trump made his bullshit campaign promise to make IVF free), only to lose her job as a federal park ranger. In fact—and, again, this is purely anecdotal—many, if not most, of the posts I’ve seen from people who’ve lost their jobs or access to vital resources self-identify as Trump supporters.
Also: The “everyone who’s angry at me or begging me to do my job is a crisis actor” bit is a tried-and-true strategy among Republicans at this point. The Women’s March in 2017? Crisis actors. The masses of sexual assault survivors and advocates who tried to stop the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court? Crisis actors. (Dr. Christine Blasey Ford herself? Crisis actor!) The teenage Parkland shooting survivors? Crisis actors. It’s almost insulting that, all these years later, for Trump’s second term, Republican leadership didn’t even bother to whip up a new playbook.
Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.), one of the first Republicans supposedly ambushed by crisis actors at a town hall event, told HuffPost he hasn’t been formally prohibited by GOP leadership to stop hosting town halls, and that he’d only been advised against this. But what, really, is the difference? At the end of the day, Republicans are still trying to hide from their own constituents.
On Tuesday evening, Trump is set to hold his first joint Congressional address. GOP Congress members are universally rolling out the red carpet for him—even though he’s spent the last month-and-a-half severely undermining their power, defunding federal programs that they themselves voted to fund.
In any case, even if your representative—paid by your taxes and currently playing games with your livelihood—won’t host town halls and face you, no one should feel shy or guilty about confronting their representatives any time and anywhere they go. In light of reports about the GOP’s new directive to members, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) encouraged people across the country who are being ignored by their representatives to host their own town halls. He tweeted on Tuesday afternoon: “If your Republican representative won’t meet with you because their agenda is so unpopular, maybe a Democrat will. Hell, maybe I will. If your congressman refuses to meet, I’ll come host an event in their district to help local Democrats beat ’em.” More of this, please.
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