'Why is he not out there?' Trump shamed for throwing rank-and-file Republicans to wolves
Republican Rep. Mike Flood returned to his home district in Nebraska to face a hostile crowd at a town hall Monday — and MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said the reception was an ominous sign for the GOP's chances in next year's midterm elections.
The Nebraska Republican was booed repeatedly and sharply questioned about President Donald Trump's "big beautiful bill," and the "Morning Joe" host panned Flood's efforts to defend the White House agenda as constituents chanted "tax the rich" and accused him of supporting fascism.
"Just a couple of quick comments here," Scarborough said. "First of all, he says we don't have unlimited money and yet he brags about giving billionaires and multinational corporations and the richest of the rich an extension of $10 trillion worth of tax cuts, while saying that Medicaid is not going to be – no, no, Medicaid is getting slashed and it's going to impact rural hospitals directly and indirectly.
"That's one part of it, but it seems to me that all of those clips prove just what we were saying before, that it's about the economy, stupid, because, you know, he's sitting up there and he's talking about what framed the last election."
"People are exploding and yelling. It reminds me a lot of the Obamacare town hall meetings in 2009, and what that led to the avalanche, political avalanche for Democrats in 2010," Scarborough added. "This seems so much like that that, Republicans should be listening to Karl Rove here, and they should be listening to those crowds booing because, yeah, I mean, there's always a back-and-forth it seems every two years, and right now things are looking kind of rough for Republicans."
Politico's Jonathan Martin wondered why Flood agreed to hold the event against the advice of House GOP leadership, and he also wondered why the president wasn't defending the bill he demanded from Republicans.
"You can see now why the House leadership has told their members to do tele town halls instead of in-person town halls because, of course, you know you're going to get that kind of response," Martin said. "You go to a place like Lincoln, you have obviously a strong Democratic presence, and you have passionate people who are fired up about the issues, and they're going to show up and get in your face politically and get clips like that."
"Secondly, the question I have is, why is Mike Flood, a good rank-and-file member from Nebraska, the one out there trying to sell this bill and not getting air cover from the leader of his party?" Martin added.
"You know, Donald Trump, you know, demanded a lot of elements of this bill, certainly some of the stuff that he promised on the campaign trail. Why is he not selling his bill? Has he done one event in any congressional district in America that's competitive to sell this bill? He signed it on July 4, a federal holiday when nobody's paying attention to the news. The next week, he started doing tariff threats again, and basically for the last month, that's been the bulk of his policy efforts, is doing tariff threats and negotiations.
"He has not done any salesmanship. The 'Art of the Deal' author is not selling – why is he not out there selling this bill?"
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