How the humble town hall became a battle arena for the Trump resistance

Extract from The Guardian

Across America, a growing number of people are using this small-scale forum to make their voices heard, drawing comparisons to the Tea Party movement

Constituents during a town hall event in Branchburg, New Jersey. People have been showing up in large numbers to congressional town hall meetings across the nation. Photograph: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images

Jamiles Lartey in New York

Sunday 26 February 2017 23.00 AEDT 

In more than 300 cities and towns in 49 US states this week, citizens unhappy with the Trump administration flooded to congressional town halls and activist meetups billed as “resistance recess”. In all, advocacy groups estimated more than 40,000 Americans participated in these meetings, taking place during a break in the schedules of lawmakers that many use to return home and interact with constituents.

“People are not just clicking on online petitions, they are changing their habits forging relationships,” said Ben Wikler, the Washington director for MoveOn. “It’s not something where once people go home from a march they go back to civilian life. This is people making anti-Trump activism a part of their daily lives.”
Already the efforts are having concrete political impacts. On a Friday morning radio appearance Republican representative Mo Brooks said: “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to repeal Obamacare now because these folks who support Obamacare are very active, they’re putting pressure on congressmen and there’s not a counter-effort to steel the spine of some of these congressmen in toss-up districts around the country.”
Jeremy Haile, one of the authors of Indivisible, a Practical Guide for Resisting Trump said this was strong proof the tactics of town hall engagement could be effective. “That’s straight from a member of Congress saying how this organizing and hearing from constituents is really changing what Congress is doing,” Haile said.
Indivisible was written and launched after Trump’s election by a collection of former progressive congressional staffers who watched President Obama’s presidential agenda largely stalemated by Tea Party protests in 2009. “We saw these [Tea Party] activists take on a popular president with a mandate for change and a supermajority in Congress. We saw them organize locally and convince their own MoCs to reject President Obama’s agenda,” the group explains on their website. Indivisible recommends using similar tactics to oppose Trump’s agenda, like overwhelming engagement at congressional town halls.

“Every member of Congress wakes up in the morning thinking about how to get re-elected. We think that gives constituents a lot of power,” Haile said.
Comparisons to the 2009 rise of the Tea Party, similarly spawned after a transition of presidential power, have been unavoidable, and commentators have rushed to explain why the phenomena are or are not comparable.
“This makes the Tea Party look like pre-school.” said film-maker and liberal activist Michael Moore in an MSNBC appearance on Wednesday night.
At this week’s meetings, representatives and senators, especially Republicans, who elected to hold town hall meetings during their time in their home district were bombarded with contentious questions, boos and protests throughout the week. In places where legislators did not hold events, people gathered anyways, sometimes holding events billed as “people’s town halls” or even addressing questions to propped-up empty suits, like constituents of Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey did on Tuesday.
Many of the most tense and emotional moments around the country this week came when citizens shared their concerns about healthcare in light of Trump’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act without any clear plan in the works to replace the coverage it affords to previously uninsurable patients.
“Without the coverage for pre-existing conditions, I will die. That’s not hyperbole,” said Kati McFarland at a town hall hosted by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, according to reporting from the Democrat Gazette.

A town hall meeting in Van Nuys, California. Hundreds turned up to voice their concerns about the Trump administration. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

MoveOn.org, a grassroots progressive advocacy group and one of the primary organizations behind the action said more than 42,000 people had RSVP’d for events throughout the week on their website in 49 states and Washington DC.

Wikler said the number of people attending events was surely even higher, and that the webpage set up for coordinating the events had seen more than 1 million hits in less than a week.
Making the comparison to the Tea Party that much stronger, many conservatives have accused the recess resistance protests of being “AstroTurf”, or fake grassroots activism sponsored by powerful benefactors. Democrats lodged similar charges against the Tea Party eight years ago.
“It’s not these organic uprisings that we’ve seen through the last several decades – the Tea Party was a very organic movement – this has become a very paid, AstroTurf-type movement,” said Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer.
There is no evidence that the recent upwelling of protest is being fueled by paid activists, though they have for the most part been coordinated – a distinction some conservatives have apparently not been willing to make.
It is difficult to say just yet how this 2017 round of town hall protests will compare to those in 2009 that effectively launched the Tea Party. One of the features that made the effort so effective eight years ago was that they were sustained over a period of months.
Organizers are hopeful though, that momentum is building and that the resistance movement is only growing stronger. “We really haven’t seen the kind of grassroots energy that’s unignorable right now ever before, at least in my lifetime,” Wikler said. “People who’ve never been involved in politics are coming out of the woodwork and telling their stories. It’s staggering.”