Baumgartner faces angry, disruptive town hall following two months of Trump’s presidency

U.S. Rep. Michael Baumgartner was confronted by a disruptive, angry crowd that demanded answers for the freshman Republican congressman’s voting record and recent actions in President Donald Trump’s White House – and regularly interrupted each answer during a town hall Monday evening at Whitworth University.

It may be the last in-person town hall in the near future, Baumgartner told reporters after the event, suggesting he may turn to telephone town halls to cut down on disruptive behavior and safety concerns.

There were 800 tickets distributed for the event, including 500 general- admission tickets that were snatched up two hours after they were publicly posted. Another 200 tickets were reserved for students, with the remainder saved for the college president and the nearby Rockwood retirement community.

Despite this, hundreds of seats remained empty for the event.

Almost everyone in the crowd appeared displeased with the White House, judging by the scale of disruptions and a poll of attendees’ most pressing concerns, especially with the Department of Government Efficiency and the loss of checks and balances within the federal government.

At one point, before answering a question, Baumgartner asked for a show of hands for those who voted for Trump. Around a dozen hands went up amid loud jeering from the rest of the crowd.

Upwards of 60 protesters without tickets gathered outside of the Whitworth auditorium, a relatively muted turnout compared to the hundreds who have recently protested Baumgartner’s Spokane office.

Protesters derailed the meeting at a few points, more so when Baumgartner expressed appreciation for some of Trump’s actions or disdain for some of former President Joe Biden’s policies.

It was a much more disruptive town hall than the one hosted in Ritzville on Monday morning – the Spokane crowd expressed contempt, disgust and displeasure with Baumgartner, and the shouting was nearly constant.

Baumgartner continued to maintain the reason the crowd was so angry was because they did not vote for Trump, or him, he said in a media conference following the town hall.

Spokane resident Mary Ellen Gaffney-Brown asked questions about the Social Security Administration and shared her fears about benefit cuts following swift changes, such as the resignation of acting Commissioner Michelle King, who stepped down over DOGE privacy concerns.

Gaffney-Brown said she believed the administration is on its way to privatizing Social Security and wants “billionaires to pay their fair share,” she said. As she was speaking, she was interrupted by the moderator. She replied, “Be quiet” – and the hall erupted into cheers.

“You go, girl!” someone yelled back. Nearly the entire audience stood up and clapped for her.

More questions that led to an uprising in cheers were, “What will you do to stand up to democracy?” and, “Where do you draw the line in the sand?”

Baumgartner responded that he values the Constitution, and did so long before his days in the foreign service. He was then interrupted by more jeers. Following another question about free speech, the crowd began chanting, “January 6th!”

Some turned their backs on Baumgartner; others waved red handkerchiefs.

When Baumgartner was asked about cutting health care benefits, about which Reuters reported congressional Republicans have been somewhat at odds , he said he didn’t wish to “touch” Medicare, although he did not answer about the slashing of Medicaid. A man from the back of the crowd yelled in response, “You’re a fraud!” and another yelled, “Liar!”

As more jeers swept the audience, Baumgartner asked, “Can you all just stand up, be loud and get it out of your system?”

Others shouted at him to “answer the question” when he started to explain the background of his stance on an issue. The crowd often erupted into boos and shouted “tax the rich!” when he discussed the budget, or “He’s a convicted felon!” when talking about Trump defying federal court orders.

“You have a perception that America is spiraling to some kind of constitutional crisis,” Baumgartner said towards the end of the town hall. He was met with more shouting and more boos – but much, much louder.

Ultimately, Baumgartner believed the town hall went “well,” he said afterwards, but called the crowd “rude” and disruptive.

“I knew I’d be walking into a room where 99% of the people hadn’t voted for me,” he said.

John Scherling was one of the few conservatives at the Monday town hall and was dismayed at the tone and rhetoric of most of the audience.

“Never in my life have I seen so many older folks act so disrespectful, so rude, childish and ignorant,” he said after the town hall.

About 60 protesters stood outside the auditorium Monday. They called on Baumgartner to do more to stand up to Trump’s decisions to bypass Congress and ignore an order of a federal judge and they objected to Baumgartner’s call for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to resign.

Amid threats to their legal status by the president, Baumgartner will meet Tuesday evening with Ukrainian refugees in Spokane at Thrive International.

It wasn’t the first time protesters gathered to express their contempt for their Eastern Washington lawmaker – a week ago, hundreds of people stood outside his Spokane office, calling for more action.

One man Monday played the Canadian national anthem at full volume. Another led chants with a megaphone.

Dave Strand, a veteran who served a year in Vietnam as a Seabee, was there to express his anger and dismay with the Trump Administration’s cuts of thousands of Department of Veterans Affairs jobs. And he wants Baumgartner to know it.

“I came home from Vietnam, betrayed,” Strand said. “I’m being betrayed again.”

Strand said Trump has proved to him that “he doesn’t give a damn” about those in the military.

“I have been pissed off and I’m still pissed off … I want Baumgartner to represent his people. Especially because we are being dismantled from the inside,” Strand said, referring to Elon Musk’s unprecedented access to the White House and government programs, despite not being an elected official.

Dave Strand’s wife, Lois, held a sign with Musk’s face in the middle that read, “This is the immigrant that stole your job.”

She said she feels like the country is “moving backwards.”

“Erasure of women, erasure of Black people, folks from government websites,” she said, “it’s plain wrong.”

Protester Allan Binnie, a Quaker, calls this era of American politics “the era of lawlessness” and “unprecedented.”

There’s nothing to compare it to, he said. Former President Richard Nixon resigned in the face of controversy and his party accepted it – but the Republican Party, Binnie said, is “now inept.”

“It’s sad to see so many of them sacrificing their values,” Binnie added, who said he has voted as a Republican in the past. “Republicans used to have integrity. It’s clear Trump does not.”

American imperialism

Cindi Miraglia grilled Baumgartner about the rhetoric from “this insane president” regarding annexing Canada, Greenland and retaking the Panama Canal, prompting someone in the audience to wave a large Canadian flag to raucous applause.

Baumgartner broadly expressed support for the annexation of foreign, sovereign territory – so long as it wouldn’t hurt Republicans election chances.

“Canada is much more liberal and left wing than the United States … taking Canada would be like taking another California,” Baumgartner said, adding that its inclusion in the United States would prevent Republican majorities from being elected in the future.

“If we could get Greenland peacefully, I’m all for it,” Baumgartner continued. “And we should never have given up Panama.”

If he intended to follow up on this answer, it was drowned out by an angered crowd.

In a media conference after the town hall, Baumgartner clarified that his comments regarding Canada were an attempt to “have a little fun with the crowd,” joking that the angered crowd would have a stronger political power if the United States did, in fact, annex Canada. He also later said that he also wouldn’t support taking over Canada because the country has been a good neighbor.

Trump has previously declined to rule out using military force to annex territories, including Greenland and Canada.

Baumgartner said while “I don’t know this for fact,” the president’s interest in Greenland and Canada seemed to be motivated by a desire to expand hydropower in order to provide energy for dominant American artificial intelligence development.

“We’re in a real arms race versus China on artificial intelligence,” Baumgartner said. “But the AI stuff takes an immense amount of power … so where you have snow pack and elevation change, that makes hydro a lot more valuable. And so I think this is the reason that Donald Trump is so interested in talking about Greenland and Canada …

“America has had strategic benefit from being imperialistic in the past,” he said. “It’s how we had western expansion.”

ICE raid

Last week Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents broke a car window, dragged out and arrested two Spokane Valley residents and green card holders. A third passenger, a seven-month pregnant U.S. citizen, also was removed from the car against her will .

The group were on their way to a court hearing at the Spokane County Courthouse. The two men in the car had been earlier charged with threatening to kill a family member in December, according to court documents. A video of the incident later went viral on Facebook.

German immigrant Michaela Kelso, who has previously run for state Legislature as a Democrat, said she believed she needed to ask Baumgartner what he would do to protect the rights of these constituents and other immigrants in the country lawfully.

“What will you do now that you have been made aware of this unconstitutional, violent and illegal act by ICE and HHS agents?”

In response, Baumgartner asked the booing crowd how many of them voted for Donald Trump in the last election. Less than a dozen hands raised out of the hundreds of attendees.

“So you’re not going to like my answer but it would be far better for the security of the state of Washington and for immigrants in the state of Washington if Washington was not a sanctuary state,” the congressman said.

Baumgartner added that he is going to try to “make that happen.” He did not respond to a later question during a press availability to clarify what he meant with this statement.

Kelso and others yelling in the crowd would not let him move on to the next question. Eventually, Baumgartner said he was not aware of the case and did not want to comment until he had more information.

After the event Kelso said his answer betrayed a “lack of empathy” for immigrants.

“It should have been the easiest question for him to answer. Anybody with half a heart would have answered. He refused to give even a modicum of empathy towards a family that was violently torn from their car,” she said.

Kelso admitted that her and other attendees’ behavior during the town hall was “absolutely not appropriate” but it was needed given the dire situation the country is in.

“I’m from Germany. I know what fascism looks like. We are rapidly approaching 1939,” she said.

Checks and balances

Perhaps the most dominant question of the night, in one form or another, was based on concerns Trump was attempting to unconstitutionally expand the power of the executive branch and ignoring checks and balances.

The first question of the night touched on this running theme, asking what the congressman would do if the Trump administration ignored judicial orders. In February, Vice President JD Vance suggested that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” and in recent days the administration has allegedly ignored a judge’s order stopping deportation flights.

It was not entirely clear where exactly Baumgartner drew that line.

“It’s not healthy for the republic to have court orders that are not being obeyed,” he said. “It’s also not healthy for the republic when you have district judges, that probably don’t have the authority, issuing nationwide injunctions.”

Baumgartner argued that the nation was confronted with a similar constitutional quandary when former President Joe Biden attempted to unilaterally eliminate student debt – at which point he was repeatedly drowned out until he moved on to the next question.

Pressed by other attendees about the actions of DOGE and the Trump administration’s push to unilaterally cut spending which conflicts with the White House’s political priorities, Baumgartner voiced broad support for cutting government spending but asserted that this authority should ultimately rest in Congress, not the presidency.

“I think it’s inevitable that the Supreme Court is going to have to decide a lot of this stuff,” he said, once again referencing prior actions by the Biden administration to waive student debt. “You’ve always had these tensions with the executive branch.”

Health care

Baumgartner said Social Security and Medicare should not be cut and there would not be cuts under Republican control. But he would like to see Medicaid work requirements.

A Republican budget plan passed by the House earlier this month would reduce federal spending by $2 trillion and cut taxes by $4.5 trillion over a decade. It specifically instructs the House Energy and Commerce Committee to cut $880 billion. By far the biggest chunk of money in that panel’s jurisdiction goes to health care and Medicaid specifically.

“Medicaid right now is a broken system that needs to be improved to protect the truly most needy. There’s going to be no reduction in overall dollars to Medicaid. There may not be the rapid increase that some folks may have would like,” he said.

Generally, Baumgartner said government should not be in the business of health care.

“I’m guessing this crowd thinks universal health care or socialized medicine would be great,” he said.

The crowd roared their approval for a single -payer health care system.

“Well, we will have to agree to disagree on that issue,” Baumgartner said. “I don’t think we should be putting the U.S. government more in charge of things.”