Republican Congressman Faces Backlash at Town Hall Furious at Trump

A Republican congressman was booed and heckled incessantly at his own town hall Thursday, as Trump’s sweeping federal cuts have begun to hurt the very same Republican constituents who voted for them.

At his town hall in Suwanee, Georgia—in a district Trump won by 22 points—Representative Rich McCormick was faced with hundreds of voters who were deeply disturbed by his complicity—as well as the rest of the Republican Party’s—in allowing Elon Musk and DOGE to transform the federal government in just weeks.

One person told McCormick he had done a “disservice” to his constituents. “You don’t think I’m going to stand up for you?” the lawmaker replied, as the town hall booed him. Another pressed McCormick on what he’ll do to “rein in the megalomaniac in the White House.”

McCormick’s comments on Medicare and Medicaid also drew immediate backlash. “If you don’t do something with Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which is 75 percent of our budget—”

This comment, a far cry from the Republicans’ earlier promise not to touch these programs, led to an uproar from the crowd, as some constituents even yelled out “no it isn’t” in response to the 75 percent line McCormick rattled off. Others implored him to tax billionaires rather than cut programs that people use every day.

“If you cut all of your military, and all of your discretionary spending, you still have a shortfall. We are heading towards a cliff,” McCormick continued before being overpowered by angry citizens again. “Google it right now,” he implored.

When asked about the hundreds of Atlantia-based CDC employees working on bird flu recently fired by DOGE, McCormick had the gall to tell the crowd that many of them were easily replaced by AI.

“Why is a supposedly conservative party taking such a radical, and extremist, and sloppy approach to this?” one constituent asked pointedly.

“I’m in close contact with the CDC,” McCormick replied. “They have about 13,000 employees…. In the last couple of years, those probationary people, which is about 10 percent of their employee base … a lot of the work they do is duplicitous with AI.”

This led to another string of boos and jeers from his constituents. McCormick got to be so bothered by the heckling that he compared his own base to January 6 insurrectionists, telling the crowd they were similar to “Jan. 6ers who are yelling just as loud as you.” This led to another round of boos.

Scenes like this one may become more and more common as Trump and Musk sign checks that lower level Republican politicians have to cash.

Even the nation’s most salacious conservative tabloid can’t get behind Donald Trump’s recent Kremlin talking points.

The New York Post issued a front page rejection Friday to the president’s recent claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy—a democratically-elected wartime leader—is a “dictator.”

“This is a dictator,” the Post headline read, pasted over an image of a deflated Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Post’s multipage spread focused on 10 “Ukraine-Russia war truths” that the paper claimed Americans were ignoring “at our peril.” They included facts that Putin started the three-year war, that Putin “invaded” Ukraine in pursuit of “conquest,” that Ukraine is fighting for its independence, that Zelenskiy is not a dictator, and, perhaps most importantly, that Putin is.

“Putin is a dictator,” reported the Post. “Putin has ruled Russia with an iron KGB fist since coming to power in 1999. He has ruthlessly quashed independent media, ended free and fair elections, crushed civil society and killed his political opponents. And not just inside Russia, but around the world. People who live inside Russia and express any opposition to the war are imprisoned.”

Over the last week, the White House has continued to relegate Kyiv to the sidelines of a potential peace deal that will decide Ukraine’s future. The U.S. and Russia opened discussions at a meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday seeking a conclusion to the bloody conflict, but the assembly conspicuously excluded Ukrainian leadership.

While speaking at a NATO summit last week, 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. 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 pre-war 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.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Steve Bannon decided to perform a Roman salute, commonly associated with Nazi Germany.

Bannon subtly made the gesture during his speech at the conference, raising his right arm with his palm outstretched, facing downward to cheers from the audience.

“The only way that they win is we retreat, and we’re not going to retreat, we’re not going to surrender, we’re not going to quit. Fight, fight, fight!” Bannon said, extending his arm into the salute. “Amen!”

The move is a reminder of Elon Musk’s own apparent Nazi gesture at Donald Trump’s inauguration last month. Like Musk, Bannon supports far-right political movements around the world, including the AfD party in Germany. But unlike Musk, Bannon is on the outside of the Trump administration, and is in fact in the midst of a feud with the tech mogul, even calling Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant” in a recent interview.

“He wants to impose his freak experiment and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, tradition or values,” Bannon told the conservative website UnHerd on Tuesday.

So why did Bannon make the gesture Thursday at CPAC? Is he worried that Musk is stealing some of his neo-Nazi followers? Is he sending the message that he’s the real neo-Nazi, unlike the DOGE leader? It remains to be seen what Bannon’s angle is, but one can be sure it’s based a racist, fascist worldview.

Just one month into his presidency, Donald Trump appears to be imagining an extended stay at the White House.

Speaking at the Republican Governors’ Dinner Thursday night, Trump underscored the significance of the 2026 midterm elections and claimed that he’d “raised $608 million in three weeks”—funds that he implied he could use to support “some of his friends” for reelection.

But in the midst of the overt nod, the president also suggested that a third term could still be on the table.

“So we’ve got that money, and I got to spend it somewhere, and they tell me I’m not allowed to run,” Trump said. “I’m not sure. Is that true? I’m not sure.”

The MAGA leader would be 82 years old in 2028. It’s currently unclear if Trump was telling the truth or bluffing when he said he had raised more than half a billion dollars for other Republican candidates, but Federal Election Commission reports for the first quarter of the year will be due in March.

Conservative lawmakers have already started to pave the way for the unconstitutional takeover. In January, Representative Andy Ogles filed a joint resolution to amend the Constitution’s 22nd Amendment so that the executive branch leader could serve “for up to but no more than three terms.”

Trump “has proven himself to be the only figure in modern history capable of reversing our nation’s decay and restoring America to greatness, and he must be given the time necessary to accomplish that goal,” the Tennessee Republican said in a statement at the time. “He is dedicated to restoring the republic and saving our country, and we, as legislators and as states, must do everything in our power to support him.”

Also on Thursday, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon issued his own missive to keep Trump in power for an additional four years.

“The future of MAGA is Donald Trump!” Bannon said to a roaring crowd. “We want Trump in ’28. That’s what they can’t stand. A man like Trump comes along only once or twice in the country’s history. We want Trump! We want Trump!”

Staying in power longer than legally allowed is a pipedream that Trump has already mused about several times. In a private meeting with the House Republican conference in November, the 78-year-old openly joked about running for a third term, telling the crowd that they could “figure something else out.” He also suggested at the National Rifle Association convention in May that he could follow in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s footsteps, asking the crowd, “Are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?”

Still, the idea has an almost zero percent chance of becoming reality. As outlined in Article V of the Constitution, any such change requires at least two-thirds of the Senate and the House to agree on the modification, with that change then requiring ratification by a minimum of three-quarters of states in the nation.

A second approach to repealing the term-limiting amendment could be via a Constitutional Convention, though two-thirds of states would need to support the motion to have one at all, and any proposed changes to an amendment would still require ratification by three-fourths of the states.

No matter how many times he tries, Donald Trump just can’t seem to get this one geography question right.

During an address Thursday evening at a dinner for Republican governors, Trump once again exposed just how geographically challenged he is.

“How about BRICS, you know the BRICS states—there are like six of them? And they were trying to destroy our dollar,” Trump said.

Trump continued, saying that BRICS wanted to establish their own currency, perhaps the “won,” which he suggested was Chinese currency (but is actually South Korean), and that Joe Biden had been unwilling to do anything about it.

“So when I came in, the first thing I said is, ‘Any BRICS state that even mentions the destruction of the dollar will be charged a 150 percent tariff. And we don’t want your goods, we don’t want to partake,’” he said.

“And the BRICS states just broke up. I don’t know what the hell happened to them. We haven’t heard from them lately.”

This is the third time Trump has attempted to complain about BRICS while revealing that he doesn’t actually know anything about it.

Last week, Trump claimed that the BRICS nations were “breaking up very rapidly” after he’d threatened them with a 100 percent tariff if they did anything to undermine the dollar (interesting that the number has since magically increased.) The president listed China before adding, “I don’t even know that they’re a member of BRICS,” which it is.

Last month, just hours after entering the Oval Office, Trump falsely suggested that the ‘S’ in BRICS stood for Spain.

Trump still seems confused about how many member states there are, and which ones. The members of BRICS are Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and new additions Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, UAE, and Iran.

BRICS did not break up. In fact, Trump’s America First isolationism could serve to strengthen groups such as BRICS, who can fill the power vacuum left by the American absence from international forums—like the 2025 G20 Summit, which the U.S. has already declined to attend.

A federal judge has just cleared the way for Trump to continue his federal employee purge.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper decided against the National Treasury Employees Union and multiple other unions who sued the Trump administration last week to stop them from terminating thousands of federal workers. This is a huge early win for Trump, as the firings had been on hold since the suit was filed.

The unions, which included the United Auto Workers, the National Treasury Employees Union, and the National Federation of Federal Employees, argued that DOGE’s slashing of the federal workforce—and offering buyouts—went against the constitutional separation of powers, which givesCongress the power to fund federal agencies. The lawsuit aimed to stop layoffs at the Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Department of Veterans Affairs.

The argument didn’t seem to matter to Judge Cooper, who ruled the unions must instead file their complaints with the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) rather than a federal court.

This is one of at least 70 lawsuits that has been filed against the Trump administration since he came into office. Each court decision will serve as a barometer for just how much the judiciary will fold to the president.

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has sent a threatening letter to Representative Robert Garcia after the California Democrat mocked Elon Musk last week.

Garcia joined other House Democrats at the first House Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee hearing last Wednesday in attacking the tech mogul’s gutting of the federal government. Garcia displayed a large picture of Musk, calling it a “dick pick” and jokingly referring to the tech mogul as president.

That picture seems to have attracted the ire of the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, who has vowed to stop anyone who threatens or attacks Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Specifically, Martin took issue with an interview Garcia gave on CNN later that day, in which he said, “What the American public wants is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight. This is an actual fight for democracy.”

Martin sent Garcia a letter on Monday asking for clarification regarding that comment, telling Garcia, “This sounds to some like a threat to Mr. Musk - an appointed representative of President Donald Trump who you call a dick - and government staff who work for him.” Martin’s letter asked for a response from Garcia by February 24.

Garcia posted the letter to his X account Thursday, asserting that “members of Congress must have the right to forcefully oppose the Trump Administration. I will not be silenced.”

Martin has already targeted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for supposedly inciting violence against conservative Supreme Court justices five years ago. Martin has also threatened to investigate former special counsel Jack Smith, who was pursuing criminal investigations against Trump. It seems that Martin, a defender of Trump’s election fraud lies and the January 6 Capitol riots, wants to use his prosecutorial power to punish anyone who dares to oppose the president or Musk.

A prosecutor who works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Dallas, Texas. has been outed as running a racist, white supremacist X account. 

The Texas Observer reports that the “GlomarResponder” on X is run by James Rodden, an assistant chief counsel for ICE. A review of the account’s posts along with public documents, other social media accounts, and Rodden’s biographical details led to the Observer’s report. 

GlomarResponder’s profile on X is full of racist assertions. Last month, the account wrote “America is a White nation, founded by Whites.... Our country should favor us.” Last September, he wrote, “All blacks are foreign to my people, dumb fuck.” In May, he posted,  “Freedom of association hasn’t existed in this country since 1964 at the absolute latest,” later clarifying that he was referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

His views of immigrants aren’t great, either: In August, the profile wrote, “‘Migrants’ are all criminals,” and posted an image in October that read, “It is our holy duty to guard against the foreign hordes.” GlomarResponder also describes himself as a “fascist.” The X account has since been made private, although the Observer has archived the posts cited in its article, said its author Steven Monacelli. 

The Observer saw Rodden in court, where he often represents ICE in deportation hearings, appearing to post on X at the same time as GlomarResponder’s posts. The X account also opposes Covid-19 vaccination, which corresponds to views that Rodden has expressed on his Facebook profile under his actual name. 

Rodden was once a Marine, a litigation clinic student at the public defender’s office, and a U.S. Border Patrol agent—all jobs that would require a background check and a security clearance. His racist views and account seem to have gone undetected before now. According to the Observer, GlomarResponder claimed to be under consideration for a Trump administration job requiring Senate confirmation, although the Observer could not confirm the veracity of that post.

Rodden now is the subject of an investigation, and could not only lose his job, but be disbarred and have his prior cases be challenged in court. Will the Trump administration and ICE take action, though? Racism isn’t just tolerated by the president, but seems to make up his entire worldview.

Elon Musk went straight to the slurs after being called out yet again for saying that astronauts have been stranded on the International Space Station by the Biden administration for “political reasons”—a lie that astronauts themselves have repeatedly debunked.

“What a lie,” Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen wrote on X Thursday, in reply to Musk parroting the talking point yet again on Fox News. “And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media.”

Musk exploded.

“You are fully retarded. SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago. I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused,” he replied. “Return WAS pushed back for political reasons. Idiot.”

“Elon, I have long admired you and what you have accomplished, especially at SpaceX and Tesla,” Mogensen kindly replied. “You know as well as I do, that Butch and Suni are returning with Crew-9, as has been the plan since last September. Even now, you are not sending up a rescue ship to bring them home. They are returning on the Dragon capsule that has been on ISS since last September.”

Musk is trying to gain easy points with MAGA by peddling that the Biden administration sticking to its previous plan instead of accepting his offer is equal to leaving the astronauts in space to die.

“We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck,” astronaut Sunita “Suni” Williams, told CNN last week. “Help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative. Let’s change it to ‘prepared and committed.’”

Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore’s trip was extended due to technical difficulties.

Texas lawmakers instituted a sweeping six-week abortion ban in 2021, using the threat of criminal conviction to sway providers against offering the medical procedure. The law offered a controversial $10,000 cash incentive for citizens to report medical practitioners in defiance of the ban, and left little room for emergency scenarios in which the pregnancy threatened the life of the person carrying the fetus.

But the result of the ban has only proved to make pregnancy dramatically more dangerous in Texas, according to a report published Thursday by ProPublica, which found that the rate of sepsis—the body’s extreme response to an infection—skyrocketed by 50 percent after the law went into effect for women who were hospitalized after losing their pregnancies during the second trimester.

Sepsis is one of the leading causes of death in hospitals. For those who survive, it can lead to permanent kidney failure, brain damage, and blood clotting. In order to avoid the risk of sepsis, the standard procedure for miscarrying patients in the second trimester is to evacuate the uterus. A patient’s risk of infection and eventual sepsis climbs with every hour after their water breaks, or their cervix opens, reported ProPublica.

The risk of sepsis was even greater for patients whose fetus may have still had a heartbeat when they arrived at the hospital, according to the investigative nonprofit. At least two people have died from sepsis since the ban. Both had miscarried but died due to politically caused medical delays in inducing what would have been considered an abortion. Their deaths prompted a coalition of 111 Texas OB-GYN’s to plead with state lawmakers to allow them to provide lifesaving care for pregnant patients on the verge of death.

Under Texas law, medical professionals who provide abortions could face sentences of up to 99 years.

Federal agencies and state-appointed review panels have yet to analyze the consequences of abortion bans on mortality rates for pregnant people, making ProPublica’s analysis the first of its kind.

In 2021, 67 patients who lost their pregnancy in the second trimester were diagnosed with sepsis, according to Texas hospitals’ discharge data obtained by the publication. But by 2023, that number had climbed to 99.  ProPublica also noted that its analysis was on the conservative side and likely missed some sepsis cases. Patients whose fetus was still found to have a heartbeat were much more likely to develop sepsis.

“What this says to me is that once a fetal death is diagnosed, doctors can appropriately take care of someone to prevent sepsis, but if the fetus still has a heartbeat, then they aren’t able to act and the risk for maternal sepsis goes way up,” Dr. Kristina Adams Waldorf, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UW Medicine and an expert in pregnancy complications, told ProPublica. “This is needlessly putting a woman’s life in danger.”

Texas’s draconian abortion restrictions do provide an emergency abortion clause for life-threatening situations, but accessing the loophole isn’t cut and dry—even for some women who appear to overtly qualify for it.

In May, the Texas Supreme Court unanimously rejected a challenge to the state’s abortion laws, overturning a lower court’s decision that would have allowed women in Texas to actually access abortions granted within the confines of the state’s ban. The Center for Reproductive Rights, which brought the suit in 2023, argued that while the state’s laws technically left room for abortions in urgent circumstances, they were also so vague that they practically restricted all medical practitioners from actually considering the procedure as an option. Specifically, people could undergo abortions during complicated pregnancies so long as their doctor made a “good faith judgment” that it was medically necessary. 

Some women in the state, such as Kate Cox, have been forced to flee for care after failing to legally obtain access to abortions under the state’s emergency clause.

Still, despite the legal confusion, Governor Greg Abbott doesn’t believe the law needs clarification.

“There have been hundreds of abortions that have been provided under this law, so there are plenty of doctors and plenty of mothers that have been able to get an abortion that saved their lives and protect their health and safety,” Abbott told the Houston Chronicle on Tuesday, adding that his intention when the law was signed was to protect the lives of mothers. “So I know as the law as it currently exists can work if it is properly applied.”

By and large, most Americans support abortion access. In a 2023 Gallup poll, just 12 percent of surveyed Americans said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Meanwhile, 69 percent believe that it should be legal in the first trimester of pregnancy.