GOP congressman gets mercilessly booed by prescreened audience
Republican Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida held a town hall on Monday where his staff prescreened attendees to make sure they lived in his deeply conservative southwestern Florida district, an attempt to prevent being heckled like his fellow Republican lawmakers have been.
Yet Donalds—who is running for governor in Florida with President Donald Trump's endorsement—still got mercilessly booed and jeered by constituents who were angry over Trump and co-President Elon Musk’s destructive Department of Government Efficiency, whose cuts are imperiling critical services like Social Security, weather forecasting, and medical research.
“Elon Musk and DOGE have been authorized by the president of the United States—" Donalds said, and then was drowned out by boos.
“Do you want to yell, or do you want to hear?” he said to the audience.
Donalds is not the first Republican lawmaker to have faced testy town halls as constituents rage over DOGE cuts and other destructive Trump administration policies.
A number of House Republicans have brushed off the anger, falsely claiming that those who show up were paid protesters who aren’t from their districts.
“The videos you saw of the town halls were for paid protesters in many of those places,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN in late February. “These are Democrats who went to the events early and filled up the seats.”
Yet Donalds cannot make this claim for his event because, according to information from his own office, attendees had to show proof that they lived in his district before they were let in.
“Only voting constituents of Florida’s 19th Congressional District are eligible,” reads the event page on Donalds’ House website, which added that attendees had to show identification that had an address within the district.
“Non-voting constituents will not be allowed to enter the event,” the event page added.
Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried made this point to explain why Donalds' town hall was an abject disaster.
"This is actually worse than it looks,” Fried wrote in a post on X, above a video from the town hall. “There was room for 700 people, you had to be a resident of the district and could only sign up a certain amount of people per family. Byron pre-screened the audience in deep red Lee County and this is still what he got. Angry constituents.”
Town hall events have been so ugly for Republicans that GOP leadership has advised their members not to hold in-person events at all—a way to avoid video images of Republicans being challenged by their voters.
And it’s no wonder Republicans are worried. The last time Republicans faced such rowdy town halls was in 2017 and 2018, before Democrats romped their way back to the House majority in the midterms during Trump's first term.
Now history appears to be repeating itself.
Yet, instead of trying to stem the bleeding, Republicans are defending Trump at all costs, even as his destructive economic policies threaten to send the country into a recession.
If Republicans are similarly decimated next November, they will have only themselves to blame.