Republican Lawmaker’s Town Hall Goes Sideways Thanks to Trump and Musk

Republican lawmakers across the country are coming face-to-face with droves of angry constituents in the wake of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s upending of the federal government. 

Representative Mark Alford held a town hall in Belton, Missouri, Monday, where he was met with jeers from the crowd as he attempted to justify Musk’s power over government personnel, days after the unelected bureaucrat told federal employees to report five things they accomplished in the last week, or be fired. 

“Why is an unelected person allowed to hire and fire federal employees?” Alford read from a piece of paper, in a video from the Kansas City Star. 

Alford struggled to respond to the question as his constituents shouted him down. “The reason is ... he was hired.… Elon Musk was hired by the executive Donald Trump, and he has given him that authority—”

The room erupted into loud booing. 

Alford’s limp support for the massive layoffs recommended by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was peppered with interjections about the billionaire technocrat’s blatant conflicts of interest and lack of oversight, according to a video posted to Facebook by Daniel Scharpenburg, a union labor activist.

The Missouri Republican really stepped in it by suggesting that if his constituents weren’t happy with Trump’s appointment of Musk, they could vote for someone else in the next election. 

“We didn’t elect Elon!” one person screamed.

“You don’t represent us, you represent Elon Musk!” cried another. 

In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Republican Representative Glenn Grothman also came face-to-face with his angry constituents in an overflowing town hall Friday morning, according to Wisconsin Public Radio. 

Like Alford, Grothman attempted to downplay Musk’s unchecked power when asked how he felt about the unelected bureaucrat’s role in government. 

“He does not have the ability to do any actions on his own,” Grothman said, echoing Trump.

“We did not elect him!” one man shouted. 

When faced with one constituent voicing her disgust with Musk’s incendiary rhetoric about assistance programs, Grothman fled. 

“Calling those people with different abilities ‘leeches’ and ‘losers,’ and that they’re ‘leeching off the system,’” the constituent said. 

“I don’t think so,” Grothman said.

“Yes, I’ve heard it from their own posts,” the constituent responded. 

“I don’t believe it,” Grothman said, walking away. 

“You don’t believe it—you can read it! You are in denial,” the constituent cried. 

“I’ll google it,” Grothman said over his shoulder as he continued out of the room.   

Earlier this month, Musk reposted a meme on X calling out the “parasite class” who use the federal programs Trump intends to slash.

And in Trinity, Texas, Republican Representative Pete Sessions also heard criticism from dissatisfied constituents during a town hall in a community center Saturday, according to The New York Times. 

Veteran Louis Smith told Sessions that while he supported cuts to government spending, Musk was not the guy for the job. 

“I like what you’re saying, but you need to tell more people,” Smith said, per the Times. “The guy in South Africa is not doing you any good—he’s hurting you more than he’s helping.”

Over the weekend, a woman was dragged out of a Republican town hall in Idaho for questioning whether the event was meant to be a public forum or a “lecture.” A former NFL player was also carried out of a City Council meeting in California by police officers last week after protesting the installation of a MAGA plaque at a public library.

A prank played in the cafeteria of America’s housing agency should be cast as a warning sign of malcontent with Elon Musk’s sudden takeover of the executive branch.

On Monday, an AI-generated video of Donald Trump kissing and rubbing Musk’s feet streamed over the televisions in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s cafeteria.

“Long live the real king,” read the text superimposed over the disturbing image, referring to one of the president’s Truth Social posts last week, in which he wrote, “Long Live the King!”

It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the stunt.

“Another waste of taxpayer dollars and resources. Appropriate action will be taken for all involved,” HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett said in a statement to The Hill.

The news comes one day after it became apparent that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was eyeing seismic cuts to HUD, according to an internal memo obtained by The Washington Post.

Some 4,000 employees are expected to lose their jobs at the federal housing agency—about half of HUD’s workforce. The mass layoffs are likely to upend the already fragile U.S. housing market and complicate mortgage transactions, as many of the cuts are expected at the Federal Housing Administration, “one of the largest mortgage insurers in the world,” per the Post.

Other cuts proposed for the federal agency would shutter field offices in rural areas across the nation, and practically eviscerate the Office of Community Planning and Development, which among other things provides housing for homeless veterans. The cuts would slash that office’s budget by 84 percent within the next two months.

The stunt also comes after weeks of mounting criticism of the president’s close relationship with the Tesla CEO.

Musk has visually dominated Trump in all of their recent joint appearances. Trump was interrupted and spoken over by his biggest campaign donor during an interview last week with Fox News’s Sean Hannity.

The week before that, Musk spent more time talking to reporters than Trump did during a joint Oval Office press conference announcing an executive order that would require federal agencies to bow down to the unelected bureaucrat’s bidding.

The image to the rest of the world was clear: While Trump hunched over the Resolute Desk, the world’s richest man took the reins. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell measured the time spent talking by each administrative figurehead and found that Musk had spoken 3,666 words at the executive order signing, whereas Trump spoke 2,487 words.

Musk’s constant presence at the president’s side stands in stark contrast to the role that Trump’s vice presidents play in his political realm: Former Vice President Mike Pence never spoke more than Trump did at a Trump-centric event during his first term, and Vice President JD Vance likely never will, either (in part because Vance has been conspicuously absent from many major events so far). That discrepancy calls into question what power Musk, who donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump’s presidential campaign, really has in the administration.

Elon Musk is already being sued over the ultimatum he issued to federal workers over the weekend. 

The Associated Press reports that the State Democracy Defenders Fund filed a newly amended lawsuit in a federal court in California on behalf of unions, businesses, veterans, and conservation organizations saying that Musk’s instructions for federal workers to list and explain five accomplishments from the previous week, or risk losing their jobs, violated the law.  

The lawsuit was originally filed last week but was updated Sunday after Musk’s threatening email. Musk’s instructions on Saturday came both in an X post and an email from hr@opm.gov, an email address set up by the tech mogul’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative to blast out messages to federal workers through the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal workforce.

“No OPM rule, regulation, policy, or program has ever, in United States history, purported to require all federal workers to submit reports to OPM,” the lawsuit states, calling the threat of mass terminations “one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country.”

Early Monday morning, Musk escalated his threats, posting on X, “Those who do not take this email seriously will soon be furthering their career elsewhere,” despite the fact that several agencies, including those dealing with national security, told their employees not to respond. Meanwhile, the H.R. email address was inundated with fake responses making light of the tech mogul–fascism enthusiast’s demands. 

Musk and DOGE suffered one legal setback on Monday when a federal court in Maryland blocked the Department of Education and OPM from sharing sensitive information with the pseudo-agency. Federal workers are hoping this lawsuit similarly goes well, unlike a lawsuit that failed to stop the mass employee purge last week.

Elon Musk’s open-reply “What did you do last week?” email to federal employees invited a flood of fictionalized fireable offenses that hilariously undercut the unelected bureaucrat’s ultimatum to reply.

An unwelcome email arrived in the inboxes of workers across the federal government Friday, prompting them to send “5 bullets of what you accomplished last week” to an email address that appeared to be for human resources at the Office of Personnel Management.

The recipients were asked to copy their managers on their replies, not to send any classified information, and to respond by the end of the day Monday. Although it did not explicitly state it in the email, Musk later posted on X that a failure to respond would be considered a resignation.

It wasn’t immediately clear how seriously anyone should consider Musk’s email, or his subsequent threat to fire the noncompliers. But, as it turns out, a lot of people did respond—just not federal employees. And they certainly didn’t take the prompt seriously.

The email quickly circulated online, providing the internet with what they understood was a direct line to Musk and the team at the Department of Government Efficiency.

Journalist Jon Schwarz replied with a weekly roundup that might’ve looked eerily familiar to the billionaire technocrat.

“Honestly, I think I should be fired for this, but that’s your call,” Schwarz wrote at the end of the email addressed to OPM.

Schwarz sent in another, even more absurd itinerary, just to prove that one could email Musk “as many times as you want.”

Lawyer George Conway also got in on the fun of fabricating fireable offenses under #Emails2DOGE, and posted a list on X Saturday detailing his own week, which included the bullet point, “Made this list and encouraged other people to make and post lists of their own to mock Trump & his boss Elon.”

Conway also instructed Grok 3, X’s artificial intelligence, to search up “five stupid things Donald Trump did this week.”

The meme and news account Washingtonian Probs collected a number of responses that were slightly more crass, but I’m sure Musk appreciated the candor.

Others kept their rejoinders simple.

Federal employees filed a lawsuit Monday, in part responding to Musk’s email, alleging that the DOGE czar’s threat of sweeping firings was “one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country.”

Republicans are starting to crack down on their own constituents for voicing their frustrations with the Trump administration.

A woman was forcibly removed from a Republican town hall in Idaho on Saturday after asking whether the event was meant to be a “lecture or a town hall.”

In a video circulated widely on X, the woman, Teresa Borrenpohl, is seen sitting in the crowd before being approached by two men without badges. They stand over her while she asks them to identify themselves. They don’t, instead yanking at her arms in an effort to force her up from her chair for shouting at a town hall—a very normal and protected right in the United States. When she refuses, the men increase their force, to the point that Borrenpohl yells out to the sheriff that “this man is assaulting me!!! Is this your deputy? Is he a deputy?” 

A third man appears, and they all grab Borrenpohl and drag her by her arms out of the town hall. She loses a shoe and has her shirt almost ripped off. 

The Kootenai County Republican Central Committee posted a heavily trimmed video after the event stating that Borrenpohl was arrested for trespassing and biting a security guard. Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White also later confirmed that the men who dragged Borrenpohl out of the town hall were from a private security firm called LEAR Asset Management. 

“This is deeply concerning. It appears that this woman was sitting PEACEFULLY, and had exercised her first amendment rights when people without badges forcibly removed her. The below tweet is spin after she was assaulted by three men,” an X user noted in response to the KCRCC’s tweet. 

Borrenpohl herself has spoken up as well. 

“Nobody was telling people cheering to stop cheering, but any time there was a negative reaction, we were scolded,” she told the Coeur d’Alene/Post Falls Press. “I felt comfortable expressing displeasure because people were very openly expressing their appreciation for the legislators there.

“I screamed—out of turn, admittedly—‘Phil Hart stole timber from public land,’” Borrenpohl said. “That’s when they seized on me.”  

“They came and took her by the arms and pulled her and then took her by her feet and pulled her into the aisle,” said fellow town hall attendee Mary Rosdahl. “They laid her face-down on the floor. Two of them were on top of her, holding her down, and then eventually they boosted her up on her feet and dragged her out the door. I was worried about their handling.”  

County Sheriff Bob Norris claims that Borrenpohl’s removal was simple protocol. “She was asked to leave.… The reason why that occurred was because people came to disrupt.” 

But even White—the county police chief— took issue with this framing. 

“I don’t care what your message is, especially in an open town hall like this,” he said. “We have to respect everybody’s First Amendment rights, regardless of what side of the aisle you happen to sit on. I know there’s some people up here who probably disagree with me and would like us to take action and maybe try to silence a voice that’s in opposition to theirs at a town hall, but there’s very little we can do with regard to First Amendment protections. We have to make sure people have the protections afforded them under the Constitution.” 

“It was really violent and really traumatic,” Borrenpohl said. “They had grabbed my wrists. They contorted my body. They lifted me up and dropped me down. My only thought was to maintain my airway. They were forcing me down on the ground. I just wanted to make sure I could still breathe.”  

Borrenpohl confessed that she did bite a security guard while being dragged out, and White confirmed that Borrenpohl was cited and released for a misdemeanor battery.

This comes as Republican lawmakers have been hit with a barrage of angry and confused constituents as the Trump administration tears through the federal apparatus that people across this country depend on—especially in deep-red states. 

“I think that my civil rights were stripped from me in that moment in a really embarrassing way,” Borrenpohl later said. “Admittedly, I spoke out of turn. But do we live in a country where you speak out of turn and the result is three men assaulting a woman?”

Russia will get practically everything it wants so long as the Trump administration is overseeing the peace talks over the Ukraine war.

Over the past several weeks, Trump’s officials have negotiationally ceded land and military protection for Ukraine—but words fail them when pressed about what exactly Russia will have to give up in order to end the war.

Real estate developer turned U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff spoke with Russian officials last week regarding a potential peace deal. While speaking about the meeting with CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Donald Trump’s longtime friend couldn’t detail one thing that Russia would actually have to compromise on in the arrangement.

“What concessions will Russia have to make?” prompted CNN host Jake Tapper.

“Well, I think, in any peace deal, each side is going to make concessions, whether it’s territorial concessions, whether it’s economic concessions. I think there’s a whole array of things that happen in a deal,” Witkoff said.

“And you’ll see concessions from both sides,” Witkoff continued, not naming a single item that Russia will have to concede. “And that’s the president’s—that’s what he does best. He brings people together. He gets them to understand that the pathway to peace is concessions and consensus-building. And I think you’re going to see a very successful result here.”

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine. But in a jarring attempt to rewrite history, Witkoff also denied those facts.

“The war didn’t need to happen. It was provoked. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was provoked by the Russians,” Witkoff told CNN. “There were all kinds of conversations back then about Ukraine joining NATO. The president has spoken about this. That didn’t need to happen. It basically became a threat to the Russians.”

While speaking at a NATO summit earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explicitly outlined that the Trump administration’s peace talks with Russia had taken several bargaining chips “off the table.”

That included Ukraine’s possible NATO membership (something the military alliance had promised in 2008), the possibility of a U.S. military presence in Ukraine to enforce postwar security guarantees, and the end of NATO missions to Ukraine. He also added that it would be “unrealistic” for Ukraine to return to its prewar borders, effectively ceding land to Moscow.

The announcement came as a complete 180 on American and NATO policy regarding the Eastern European country, and left U.S. allies and defense experts reeling. The deal, per Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, amounted to Russian propaganda and was practically “written in the Kremlin.”

On Friday, Politico noted that Trump had caved to Russian talking points several dozen times, closely aligning the U.S. president with the foreign dictator.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth admitted Sunday that he’d fired top military lawyers so that Donald Trump’s administration can get away with whatever it wants.

During an appearance on Fox News, host Shannon Bream asked Hegseth to respond to a post on X from Georgetown Law Professor Rosa Brooks criticizing his decision to fire three judge advocates general, or JAGs, Friday. 

“Trump also firing the Army, Navy and Air Force JAGs. In some ways that’s even more chilling than firing the four stars,” Brooks wrote Friday. “It’s what you do when you’re planning to break the law: you get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down.”

Hegseth responded dismissively and tried to offer a different explanation, but ended up just saying the same thing.  

“Yeah, I don’t know who Rosa is, and what her hyperbole is all about,” Hegseth said. “Ultimately, we want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice and don’t exist to attempt to be roadblocks to anything.”

Hegseth continued, describing his problem with experts elevating other experts in the field of defense: “Traditionally they’ve been elected by each other, or chosen by each other, which is exactly how it works often with the chairman as well. Small group of insulated officers who perpetuate the status quo. Well guess what? Status quo hasn’t worked very well at the Pentagon.”

Hegseth never made contact with any of the three lawyers he claimed had upheld the status quo, Lieutenant General Joseph B. Berger III, Air Force Lieutenant General Charles Plummer, and Rear Admiral Lia M. Reynolds, according to The New York Times.

And while the Department of Defense is rife with corruption, and likely the most ripe target for massive spending cuts in the U.S. government, it’s clear from Hegseth’s own limp denial that he fired the three JAGs for the purpose of replacing them with MAGA loyalists who won’t stop the Trump administration from doing whatever it wants.

On Friday, Trump fired Joint Chiefs Chairman General Charles Q. Brown, to be replaced by Air Force Lieutenant General John Dan “Razin” Caine, who is not only retired but also not a four-star general. 

Trump also dismissed Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti and General James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force. The dismissal of the lawyers was not included in the Pentagon’s official announcement. 

In another post on X, Brooks made a fitting reference to Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV: “‘First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ If you plan to commit crimes, best to get rid of any lawyers who might try to stop you,” Brooks wrote. 

Donald Trump’s war on the media rages on. This time, it’s MSNBC drawing his ire.

The president posted a lengthy, angry message at 11:18 p.m. Sunday night, in which he used the news of anchor Joy Reid’s show getting canceled to excoriate the network for essentially not being as nice to him as he’d like them to be.

“Lowlife Chairman of ‘Concast,’ Brian Roberts, the owner of Ratings Challenged NBC and MSDNC, has finally gotten the nerve up to fire one of the least talented people in television, the mentally obnoxious racist, Joy Reid. Based on her ratings, which were virtually nonexistent, she should have been ‘canned’ long ago, along with everyone else who works there,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

He went on to attack the ratings and intelligence of Rachel Maddow and “low IQ con man” Al Sharpton, before pivoting to what the network owed him. “This whole corrupt operation is nothing more than an illegal arm of the Democrat Party. They should be forced to pay vast sums of money for the damage they’ve done to our Country. Fake News is an UNPARDONABLE SIN!”

Reid’s firing was announced on Sunday, to the surprise of many casual MSNBC watchers. Her 7 p.m. show, The ReidOut, will be replaced with a panel that includes former senior Biden adviser Symone Sanders, never-Trump Republican Michael Steele, and author Alicia Menendez, the daughter of the corrupt (and currently incarcerated) former Senator Bob Menendez.

Trump’s angry rant comes as he banned the Associated Press—an international news organization—from the White House Press Corps over its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” as Trump named it in an executive order. He is also in the midst of suing CBS for very basic editing of a Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes. It’s clear that Trump is very sensitive to any negative coverage on the airwaves, regardless of how accurate it is.

At least one Republican lawmaker is openly admitting that he’s interested to see how Donald Trump’s unconstitutional challenges to the federal government will “play out.”

During an interview on CBS’s Face The Nation Sunday, Utah Senator John Curtis appeared to encourage a constitutional crisis by suggesting that the president’s decision to freeze congressionally appropriated funds to agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development should be welcomed as a test to the Constitution.

“Do you believe the president has the unilateral authority to cancel funds appropriated by Congress?” asked CBS’s Margaret Brennan.

“Well what we’re seeing play out is this wrestle between the three branches of government,” Curtis said. “We’ll find out.”

“You don’t have a point of view?” pressed Brennan.

“Well, listen, I believe in the Constitution, right? I believe this is how we test the Constitution,” Curtis continued. “And people have said, ‘Oh this is a constitutional crisis.’ And I say exactly the opposite. It’s proving to work. We have the courts play in, we have Congress who will play in.

“Let’s let this play out by the Constitution, and then Congress—let’s step up. Right? I’ll be the first to say it, this is a problem that Congress has, in many cases, given the American people,” Curtis added.

The Trump administration’s prerogative, however, seems less inclined to follow the law on this particular issue.

The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 grants Congress the authority to reexamine executive branch withholdings from the budget. In a 1985 memorandum, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts argued that the executive branch has no authority to block such spending and that “impoundment is not a promising avenue for resolving budget disputes with Congress on any significant scale.” He also urged that the power could not be wielded under “normal” circumstances.

“Our institutional vigilance with respect to the constitutional prerogatives of the presidency requires appropriate deference to the constitutional prerogatives of the other branches, and no area seems more clearly the province of Congress than the power of the purse,” Roberts wrote at the time.

But when asked during his confirmation hearings if he would obey the Impoundment Control Act, Trump’s then-nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget (and Project 2025 architect), Russell Vought, claimed that the law itself was unconstitutional and that he would defer to the Trump administration as to whether his office would act in accordance with the law.

Former lawmakers haven’t been shy about criticizing the current state of the Republican Party for failing to stand up to Trump’s overbearing administration.

Speaking with MSNBC earlier this month, former Florida Representative David Jolly argued that the country is in a “constitutional crisis,” and his party has been “facilitating it.”

“The constitutional crisis is because the Republican Congress has collapsed,” the Republican told the network.

“It is listless and meaningless, it is not providing the check that the Constitution suggests it should in this environment,” he said, arguing that the only existing check that remains on the “lawlessness and corruption” of Trump and Elon Musk’s power is in the courts, which “takes time.”

“But the immediate ability to rush to the fire is the Congress, and they’ve just laid down and said, ‘Hey, Donald Trump is running this place, and Elon Musk is as well, and we’re giving up any authority,’” Jolly said.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency effort experienced a setback in court Monday when a federal judge blocked the Office of Personnel Management and Department of Education from sharing sensitive information with the pseudo-agency.

U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman noted that DOGE has been granted access to information including “Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home address, income and assets, citizenship status, and disability status—and their access to this trove of personal information is ongoing. There is no reason to believe their access to this information will end anytime soon because the government believes their access is appropriate.”

Boardman denied the plaintiffs’ motion to block the Treasury Department from sharing information with DOGE, noting that another judge had already done so.

DOGE has already sought access to taxpayers’ personal information right in the midst of tax season—and it hasn’t exactly been careful with sensitive data in the past. Its own website was hacked because its developers made coding errors, left open too many vulnerabilities, and hosted the page outside of government servers.

Musk has attempted to gain access to other sensitive government agencies as well, such as the Social Security Administration, leading some top officials to resign rather than hand over data. What the tech mogul plans to do with his new trove of sensitive information is unclear, although some Democrats think he’s trying to train his AI model Grok 3. There are also numerous benefits from that data for his business ventures, including ending government investigations into his activities.

This story has been updated.