If you tuned into CNN and/or MSNBC on Thursday morning, the message was clear based on their coverage of supposed “anger” at congressional Republicans over the Trump agenda and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and hits from the left at Democratic town halls: Blue wave incoming!
Nevermind these protests at GOP town halls — including one Wednesday night they were warm and fuzzy inside over out in Wyoming for Congresswoman Harriet Hageman (R) — have been stacked with the bluest of blue partisans and organized by far-left groups, including some with ties to George Soros.
MSNBC’s Way Too Early host Ali Vitali boasted: “Republican Congresswoman Harriet Hageman, in deep-red Wyoming, faced a rowdy crowd during a town hall there last night. Almost 500 constituents packed the room and aired their frustrations, with the loudest reaction coming when Hageman spoke about her support for DOGE...A lot of anger there on the ground in Wyoming.”
MSNBC’s Morning Joe was unsurprisingly the most invested with five live discussions on the Hageman town hall as an “incredible” harbinger of “what’s happening out there” to the point it’s an “organic eruption.”
The Hageman hecklers even led the show with co-host Mika Brzezinski exclaiming: “Wow...It continues the trend of contentious meetings with constituents for Republican lawmakers...There was this incredible town hall in Wyoming...It really is a sign of what’s happening out there.”
Co-host Willie Geist later blasted anyone claiming this wasn’t a data point in a nationwide groundswell for Democrats (click “expand”):
GEIST: And, by the way, this brings it all the way back to how we came into the show when you had Harriet Hageman, the congressman in Laramie, Wyoming getting screamed at, loudly booed with chants of “deport Elon Musk from her Republican audience, people in that room. That’s what happens you —
BRZEZINSKI: That’s — it’s there.
JONATHAN LEMIRE: Yes.
GEIST: — cut 20 percent of the VA. That’s what happens when you cut 50 percent of the Department of Education and that’s what happens when you talk about cutting Medicaid. These are real cuts that impact real people’s lives, whether they’re Democrats or Republicans. And every time we see one of these Republican town halls, they have an excuse. They say, well, they’re busing in Democrats to yell at us. At some point, you can’t say that when it’s town hall after town hall of your voters, of your constituents screaming at you.
ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: Yeah. And, you know, I just it’s March 20. We’re exactly two months into this administration[.]
The insufferably pompous pricks opened up the 6:30 a.m. Eastern half-hour with sarcasm as co-host Joe Scarborough joked “Wyoming is a very progressive state” and longtime liberal hack John Heilemann remarked Wyoming is a “hard” place “to bus people in” and the Democrats are currently “not organized enough” to astroturf anything.
Geist further declared the mob to be real because “no state...gave more of its vote as percentage to Donald Trump than did Wyoming” and blasted claims by Hageman and her team it was a stacked room, arguing the University of Wyoming is “not exactly...a hippie school, necessarily.”
To briefly pause for a reality check and before continuing on with the liberal smugness, conservative strategist Tim Murtaugh flagged a few telling passages from a local news article about the hullabaloo:
Back to the quackery, Heilemann reveled in Hageman being booed since “she’s the woman who beat Liz Cheney in the primary...so there’s a particular kind of poignance[.]”
“When you’re telling your voters to calm down you may not be winning. Wow,” said far-left, pro-rioting pundit Anand Giridharadas.
Scarborough, as usual, made it about himself, twice arguing his time as congressman showed it’s actually quite easy to hold town halls and win over any audience (click “expand”):
SCARBOROUGH: I’m telling you, there’s nothing that — that your constituents like more than when you show independence and you say, as I did, I disagree with Bill Clinton here, here, here, here and here. It’s not good for you. I disagree with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole and Republicans and all of these different places. I mean, if it’s all about helping constituents, this is actually an easy call and you actually can stand up to Elon Musk and live to tell about it. The perfect example of it politically — he lived to tell about it perfect example was in the transition. Elon Musk came out and I think Donald Trump did too, came out and told Republicans, you are going to vote for this CR or we’re going to target you. Elon said this, we’re going to destroy you and you will not be elected in Congress. Something along those lines. 38 voted now and they said, basically, screw you. I know my constituents better than you know my constituents. I’m going to do what I need to do. I mean, that’s the thing. If you have relationship with your constituents, you can talk to them, you can go to those meetings and you can go, I agree with you. Veterans should not have, you know, their VA benefits slashed. I agree with you. Veterans that have served in — in our country’s uniform for 20 years should not be fired randomly by a billionaire immigrant from South Africa who doesn’t seem to understand the most basic concepts of Madisonian democracy. You can say that and win.
SCARBOROUGH: Yeah, that’s your job.
LEMIRE: That’s the example of Republicans who have defied them so far, but it can’t be overstated. There’s real fear —
SCARBOROUGH: Yeah.
LEMIRE: — among Republicans on Capitol Hill of — it’s always been, you don’t want to cross Trump. You don’t want to, you know, get the tweet taking you down or endorsing your primary opponent and — but now it’s also Musk because he has the money —
MIKE BARNICLE: He’s got the checkbook! He’s got the checkbook.
LEMIRE: — to bankroll it[.]
(....)
SCARBOROUGH: I can tell you, I held about 100 town hall meetings a year. I never once talked down to my audience. In fact, if they got upset, I got off the stage. I went down, and I sat down and I started talking to them. You don’t do it that way. I will tell you something else. That these Republican congressmen and congresswomen are learning, like the federal government in red state America, for a lot of these people, it ain’t way off in Washington, D.C. It’s the doctor that takes care of their child. It’s the nursing home that — that — that protects their parents and their final years of life, because that’s funded by Medicaid, that’s funded by the federal government. I mean, it’s a Social Security check that comes in every month that allows them to continue living their lives the way they deserve to live their lives and when Elon Musk calls Social Security the greatest ponzi scheme, I mean, that — that — that — that is somebody that doesn’t understand that red state America gets more tax dollars proportionally than blue state America.
Perhaps the most disturbing part came next when Giridharadas declared “[n]o one in America voted for apartheid-era Elon,” who’s been granted the power of “slashing and burning...the Republic.”
Heilemann made sure Wyomingites were also smeared as modern-day fans of apartheid: “Do not — do not discount the Afrikaner vote in — in Laramie.”
In the second hour, fellow faux Republican Mark McKinnon declared the angry mobs at GOP town halls to be “so significant” and “something’s happening here” to the point of an “organic eruption.”
Vitali joined the set and offered predictable talking points that not only was the Hageman crowd a genuine sample of the state’s political mood, congressional Republicans are far more anti-Trump and anti-DOGE than they let on out of fear of both Musk and Trump.
Frequent Morning Joe panelist and serial plagiarist Mike Barnicle shared a prediction he claimed he heard from the now-late former Senator Al Simpson. After more Scarborough chest-thumping, McKinnon wrapped things up (click “expand”):
BARNICLE: You know, Joe about a month before he died, I called our old pal Al Simpson out in Wyoming — in Cody, Wyoming. Just having a conversation with him about how things were going and he raised the possibility that all of his neighbors who he knew voted for Donald Trump twice. They voted for him in 2016 and they certainly voted for him last fall that they would not know what to do when they went down to the local Social Security office — and he said in the spring or early summer and the office was no longer there, he said and then there’s going to be hell to pay. Well, hell is already arrived, I think.
BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.
SCARBOROUGH: Yeah and again. And you know this, Mark, you don’t — you don’t — you don’t run away. You don’t run away from unpopular issues. You run into them, I remember in 1995, we had to slow down the rate of Medicare. Medicare trustees said that it was going bankrupt in seven years, so we had to slow down the rate of Medicare.
MCKINNON: Right.
SCARBOROUGH: And — and Republicans ran away from it. They lost. I think it was one of the only Republicans who ran straight into it. And when somebody tried to demagogue it, I said, this is all I’m going to talk about the entire campaign and it is all I talked about the entire campaign.
MCKINNON: Yeah.
SCARBOROUGH: And I said, ask me a question about education. I’m going to talk about why we had to slow down the rate of Medicare. Well, we had to cut Medicare to save medicare and Mika has heard me say this before, at the end of the campaign at Glen Bolger at Public Opinion Strategies, say, we’ve done 130 districts. I got to ask, what did you do with seniors? And I was like, oh God, why? I said, because you had the highest approval rating by far of anybody that any Republican out of the 100+ we did with seniors. What did you do? I said, I told them the truth. I told them why we had to cut Medicare and he was like, oh my God.
MCKINNON: Voters can take the truth.
SCARBOROUGH: They can take the truth, and these people aren’t giving it to them, are they?
BRZEZINSKI: They really don’t like —
MCKINNON: Yeah, no — it’s interesting too, Joe, is that, you know, for years, sort of the Republican mantra, particularly his backbenchers, has been government sucks. We’re going to shut it down. Government’s just unpopular and so, they ran against it. Well, now they’ve caught the car and they’re — they’re shutting down stuff and 80 percent of these jobs are not in Washington. They’re out in red states. And just as a — just one example, think about the National Parks where they basically cut out all the rangers. Those are the guys that clean the toilets, so wait till everybody —
BRZEZINSKI: — right.
MCKINNON: — goes to the national parks this summer and tries to go to the restroom.
Though less incendiary, the lie was still spread far and wide on CNN. CNN News Central co-host Sara Sidner gushed over “anger and frustration boiling over at town halls across America, officials on both sides of the aisle drawing large crowds and harsh critique from constituents. Republicans continue to be blasted by voters demanding answers about President Trump and Elon Musk’s gutting of federal jobs and programs and agencies.”
After a soundbite from Democrat Sean Casten’s (IL) town hall that descended into chaos and cut short by “pro-Palestinian protesters,” she said Hageman crowd for “showering” her “with boos after seeming to downplay the sweeping cuts to federal jobs at the hands of Elon Musk and DOGE.”
Correspondent Arlette Saenz didn’t even suggest there were any partisan shenanigans afoot and instead called it proof of “a lot of frustration” whereas those at Democratic town halls are demanding their people get tougher.
For good measure, Saenz returned in the show’s second hour and again for The Situation Room.
On the latter show, co-host Pamela Brown said “lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are feeling the heat as fiery constituents derailed town halls nationwide” yet demanded they continue because “these lawmakers need to be talking to their constituents.”
Following Saenz’s report, co-host Wolf Blitzer called these protests “very interesting” while Brown argued “you do have to give credit to these lawmakers for continuing to go out in person and confront their constituents who are upset and have a lot of passion in this environment.”
To see the relevant CNN and MSNBC transcripts from March 20, click here (for Way Too Early), here (for Morning Joe), here (for CNN News Central), and here (for The Situation Room).
