A town hall full of Georgia residents expressed outrage against Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) for supporting President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
McCormick, who represents Georgia’s 6th congressional District, gathered with hundreds of constituents during a town hall meeting Thursday evening.
But the event quickly went off the rails for the congressman, who begged the raucous crowd to stop “screaming” as they repeatedly interrupted him, booed him for backing the “megalomaniac” in the White House, and criticized his support for DOGE’s actions to downsize federal agencies.
“Why is the supposedly conservative party taking such a radical and extremist and sloppy approach to this,” one attendee said of DOGE’s federal workforce cuts as they pressed McCormick.
“If we continue to grow the size of government and we can’t afford it, it’s going to have shortfalls in your Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security,” McCormick said in defense of Musk’s department.
Furious attendees shot back, accusing the lawmaker of doing them a “disservice” and failing to “stand up for us” by supporting the cuts while claiming Musk had too much power in Washington. The Trump administration is taking a “chainsaw approach” with the DOGE agenda, and the layoff effort was being “jammed down the pipe, so rushed and sloppily,” residents said.
McCormick has praised DOGE for investigating concerns that funds from the United States Agency for International Development were used to rig elections in Brazil and revealing that FEMA sent $59 million to reimburse New York City hotels for housing illegal immigrants.
The Georgia representative tried to rein in the audience on Thursday, saying at one point he thought it was “funny” that the residents were screaming as loudly as “those January sixers.” But the crowd continued to drown him out, with residents yelling out they were “pissed.”
Another angry resident referenced a recent social media post from Trump where he referred to himself as a monarch in a statement attached to an AI-generated photo of the president wearing a crown.
“Tyranny is rising in the White House, and a man has declared himself our king, so I would like to know, rather, the people would like to know, what you, congressman, and your fellow congressmen are going to do to rein in the megalomaniac in the White House,” a woman asked McCormick as fellow attendees cheered and gave her a standing ovation.
“When you talk about tyranny, when you talk about presidential power, I remember having the same discussion with Republicans when Biden was elected,” McCormick said to boos. “I don’t want to see any president be too powerful.”
McCormick isn’t the only Washington lawmaker in the hot seat over supporting the Trump administration.
Proposed cuts to Medicaid in a budget bill spearheaded by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and endorsed by Trump have some politicians worried they could face backlash from their districts if they back the legislation. Musk, who leads DOGE, has said that “big money fraud” is happening in Medicare.
WHAT IS DOGE? WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY
“Slashing Medicaid would have serious consequences, particularly in rural and predominantly Hispanic communities,” wrote eight House Republicans in a letter to Johnson.
In the upper chamber, Republicans representing states with high per-capita Medicaid recipient rates, such as Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), have come out swinging against the legislation.