People take part in a protest before a town hall meeting on health care with Republican New Jersey Congressman Leonard Lance - This content is subject to copyright.
Wild scenes are unfolding from town hall meetings all over the country as Republican senators and congressmen travel back to their districts and are confronted by angry constituents both Democratic and Republican.
Videos were going viral on Wednesday night of senator Tom Cotton, a Donald Trump ally, being grilled over plans to repeal Obamacare and the wall with Mexico in the very red state of Arkansas among others.
During the rowdy event, held in a pocket of relatively liberal voters in the north west of the state, the audience routinely screamed at the senator.
One of the most heated moments came when a woman challenging the senator on repealing Obamacare.
Kati McFarland praised the Affordable Care Act and outlining how without it, show would die "This is not hyperbole."
As Cotton attempted to move on from her question about how he would replace Obamacare, the crowd erupted in support of McFarland.
Another woman, who said her husband suffers from dementia, asked, “I have three members of my family who would be dead, dead! And homeless, if it was not for ACA…. What kind of insurance do you have?”
"If you can give us better care than this, go for it," she told the senator to huge cheers.
A woman opened by stating "I'm not a paid protester," referencing unsubstantiated claims made by the US president and repeated by White House press secretary Sean Spicer.
"They have every right to do that. Don't get me wrong, but I think that we need to call it what it is. It's not these organic uprisings that we've seen through the last several decades. You know, the tea party was a very organic movement. This has become a very paid, Astroturf-type movement."
Another passionate group of pre-screened constituents and protesters greeted representative Marsha Blackburn at a meeting in Fairview, Tennessee.
After initially deflecting the question she said that she personally had no problems interacting with Mr Bannon, added, “I am not aware that he’s taken anybody’s place on the NSC.”
The crowd booed in reply, “It’s all over the national media,” the man asking the question replied.
When asked whether it is right to "prioritise people based on their religion," in reference to Mr Trump’s statement that he wants to prioritise refugees who are Christian, Ms Blackburn prompted another chorus of boos "I know that Christians have seen incredible persecution."
Other elected Republicans are avoiding these events altogether during this short congressional recess.
Experts say that avoiding town halls is a tactic used by incumbents to dodge being berated in widely publicised local events.
"If you're there at a town hall meeting and there's hundreds of people there yelling at you, it's going to be a media event," said Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver "They're calculating that the bad press they're going to get from not having a town hall is not going to be as bad as that."
One month in, anti-Trump movement shows signs of sustained momentum
Posted 24 Feb 2017 19:10
Anti-Trump protesters march towards the White House during the "Not My President's Day" rally in Washington, U.S., February 20, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
BRANCHBURG, N.J./VIRGINIA BEACH, Va.: U.S. Representative Leonard Lance, who has held more than 40 town hall-style meetings with constituents in his central New Jersey district, has never faced a crowd like he did on Wednesday.
The Republican endured catcalls, chants and caustic questions from more than 1,000 residents at a local college, while hundreds of others outside brandished signs with messages like "Resist Trump."
Parallel scenes have played out across the country this week during the first congressional recess since Donald Trump became president. Republican lawmakers returning home confronted a wave of anger over a spectrum of issues, including immigration, healthcare and Trump's possible ties to Russia.
The raucous meetings are the latest in a relentless series of rallies, marches and protests that shows no signs of abating more than 30 days into the new administration.
The anti-Trump energy has prompted talk of a liberal-style Tea Party movement, in reference to the protests in 2009 that helped reshape the Republican Party and arguably laid the groundwork for Trump's surprise electoral victory last year.
"Some of the lessons to draw from that are persistence, repetition, not taking 'no' for an answer," said Victoria Kaplan, the organising director for the grassroots progressive group MoveOn.
Since the day after Trump's inauguration, when millions of protesters joined women's marches worldwide, left-wing organizers have sought to harness that anger to fuel a lasting political campaign.
Hundreds of progressive groups have sprung up across the country - some affiliated with national organizations like Indivisible or MoveOn - to help coordinate.
At town halls in New Jersey and Virginia this week, constituents came armed with red "disagree" signs they held aloft to register their disapproval of what they heard from their representatives.
Some U.S. senators, such as Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, have faced weekly protests outside their offices, and a Pennsylvania healthcare network set up a "town hall" this week with an empty suit in place of Toomey, who declined to attend.
More marches are scheduled across the country in the coming months, including several major events in Washington, tied to gay rights, science and a push for Trump to release his tax returns.
The sheer volume of protests - last week, there were three nationwide calls for action within a five-day span - has some political observers wondering how long it can last.
But several experts who study protests said the level of outrage may be increasing, rather than subsiding, after a tumultuous first month in which Trump's words and actions created fresh outrage among liberals almost daily.
"We're not anywhere near reaching a saturation point for protest," said Michael Heaney, the author of "Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11" and a University of Michigan professor. "If anything, it's just getting started."
The key for organizers is to convert large-scale protests into sustained action by building databases of names and encouraging locally based events, experts said.
"You can't just have the diehards," said Dana R. Fisher, a University of Maryland professor who studies collective action. "And then you need to channel them into new types of activism."
When Fisher surveyed participants at the women's march in Washington, she found one-third were attending their first protest - the highest percentage she has ever observed.
"This is unprecedented," she said. "But there's nothing that's not unprecedented about the Trump presidency."
Some Republicans have dismissed the protests as manufactured. Trump on Tuesday tweeted that "so-called angry crowds" in Republicans' districts were "planned out by liberal activists."
But Kaplan of MoveOn said the vast majority of actions were "organic." A weekly conference call the group hosts to discuss the movement has attracted a bigger number of participants each week, with 46,000 people joining the latest discussion.
"We are firing on all cylinders to catch up" with grassroots protests, she said. "That is a demonstration of energy and sustainability."
Experts also said social media has made it far easier to organise mass protests quickly and efficiently.
In what Kaplan said was a sign the protests are having an impact, many Republicans have eschewed town halls this week to avoid confrontations. There were fewer than 100 in-person Republican town halls scheduled for the first two months of the year, compared with more than 200 in the same period in 2015, according to a Vice report.
In Louisiana on Wednesday, residents shouted down Republican Senator Bill Cassidy as he tried to explain his healthcare proposal. Scott Taylor, a freshman Republican representative in Virginia, sparred with hundreds of impassioned constituents on Monday at his own event.
Like Lance, whose district voted for Hillary Clinton over Trump, Taylor is already a midterm target for Democrats. Taylor said in an interview after the town hall that he recognised many of the attendees from the local Democratic Party.
"It's not like they're just some new organic people who just came about and are concerned," Taylor said.
But not everyone was a Democrat. Austin Phillips, a 22-year-old Trump voter, told Taylor at the town hall he was worried about losing healthcare coverage if Obamacare is repealed.
"Trump has talked about wanting to repeal it," Phillips, who is self-employed and purchased insurance through an exchange created by the law, said in a later interview. "If they quickly repeal it with no replacement lined up, then theoretically everybody would lose their insurance."
(Additional reporting by Steve Bittenbender in Louisville, Kentucky; editing by Frank McGurty and Jonathan Oatis)
Donald Trump has set about attacking the established geopolitical system and has the power to cause serious damage to it. Americans must stand up to the threat and defend their democracy.
By
Sandra Navidi
Published on
Donald Trump and his administration's senior team in the Oval Office of the White House. Source: Reuters
American democracy is a complex, self-organizing system. In terms of network science, President Donald Trump is a “superhub”: the most well-connected human “node” located in the center of the network. While Mr. Trump does not have control over the entire system – he himself is subject to its systemic forces – he has enough influence that he could cause it to fail.
Complex systems don’t fail easily. They are generally adaptive and self-correcting. When they become too skewed, circuit breakers kick in to restore balance. But if circuit breakers are disabled, the system will ultimately self-destruct.
The likelihood of such an outcome is hard to predict. But in situations of absolute uncertainty, it is advisable to assume the worst, and many indicators seem to point to a potential “hostile takeover” of liberal democracy by Mr. Trump and his cohorts.
The most effective way to destroy a complex system is, first, to manufacture chaos. Within a month of taking office, Mr. Trump’s administration has already employed shock tactics to paralyze and distract the electorate, while antagonizing allies, provoking enemies and creating new alliances with dubious partners. He has gone so far as to create a parallel universe using “alternative facts.”
The longer we allow Mr. Trump to distort our system, the more difficult it will be to limit or repair the damage.
Mr. Trump has not taken these steps, as some claim, entirely out of ignorance or irrationality. In a 2014 speech, Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, cited the Fascist Italian philosopher Julius Evola, who argued that “changing the system is not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.”
It is also a question of applying “divide and conquer” tactics. The “divide” part has been well underway since Mr. Trump launched his presidential campaign, which was based on divisive rhetoric, sowing mistrust and polarizing policy promises.
Now comes “conquer,” through the dismantling of democracy’s institutional underpinnings. Mr. Trump has launched aggressive attacks on institutions intended to hold him accountable. This includes U.S. institutions such as the judiciary and the media, as well as the international institutions that underpin our geopolitical and economic order, including the United Nations, NATO and the European Union.
So far, democratic institutions, particularly the press and the judiciary, have proven resilient. But Mr. Trump’s willingness to abide by the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court decisions is far from certain. He seems to have no plans to adhere to basic rules and norms relating to his own conflicts of interest. And his fascination with autocratic leaders, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, has already translated into an eagerness to adopt their tactics and symbols of power, evident in his (unfulfilled) request for tanks and missile-launchers at his inauguration.
What if Mr. Trump openly defied a court decision and ordered civil servants to act in violation of it? What if he declared martial law, a possibility he seemed to be intimating when he threatened to “send in the Feds” to Chicago to deal with crime there.
Mr. Trump’s contempt for the law extends beyond the United States. He has casually suggested that the U.S. should commit war crimes, such as pillaging countries’ oil resources and torturing prisoners. He has also casually suggested defaulting on the national debt as a way to reduce it – a strategy he has employed with his companies.
Because the judicial system’s design assumes that everyone will operate within it, a powerful actor operating outside of it – and, indeed, actively undermining it – could produce a system failure. Even if the judiciary remains uncompromised, America’s international soft power and status as an economic safe haven may not.
Of course, Mr. Trump did not inherit a perfect system. But, rather than working to strengthen its resilience, he is exacerbating its weaknesses – and creating new ones.
Consider income inequality, already at record levels in his country. If Mr. Trump’s tax proposals are enacted, experts agree, the income of the top 1 percent of earners will increase by 13.5 percent, while middle-income household incomes will rise by just 1.8 percent. Financial deregulation will further enrich the wealthiest Americans, while making the financial system more fragile.
Trade protectionism won’t help, because trade is not a zero-sum game, and most U.S. manufacturing jobs have been lost to automation, not trade. Worse, given the implications of trade for geopolitical and financial-system dynamics, the net consequences of protectionism will likely be negative.
Given his penchant for oversimplification, Mr. Trump not only fails to deal effectively with the problems at hand; his short-sighted policies will likely trigger unintended consequences, and possibly even the so-called butterfly effect, whereby remote minor events can trigger the failure of complex systems.
Although resistance has been forming, it is not yet loud enough. Mr. Trump’s administration – comprising largely white male billionaires – lacks the diversity and experience to advocate for policies needed to sustain a more equitable and stable system. Republicans in Congress have quickly fallen into line behind Mr. Trump, as have chief executives, even those who once vociferously criticized him. While the public is pushing back, complacency is already beginning to take hold, with previously unimaginable actions and events being rationalized, normalized and accepted.
Eventually, network dynamics will kick in to recalibrate the U.S. democratic system. Whether they produce gradual and orderly corrections or sudden, uncontrollable chaos remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that, the longer we allow Mr. Trump to distort our system, the more difficult it will be to limit or repair the damage. All Americans are part of the system and, with their individual actions, they have the power to contribute to large-scale effects in defense of their liberal democracy.
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