A man who identified himself as a veteran was escorted out of the building after he shouted in protest during North Carolina Rep. Chuck Edwards’ town hall in Asheville, North Carolina. The shouting happened after Edwards’ comments about voting for the House budget resolution.
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00:00Remember when House Republican leadership told their members not to do town halls?
00:06Well, North Carolina's Chuck Edwards didn't listen, and he had an earful.
00:12I happen to believe very much that President Trump supports our Constitution.
00:23And that was just one of the more tame moments, by the way, because things quickly went off the rails.
00:29President Isabel Rosales was in the room for all of it.
00:33Isabel?
00:35It was a packed house inside, the auditorium reaching a max capacity of 300 people.
00:41But there were several hundred others here outside that were waiting for hours to get in, only to be turned away,
00:47so loud at times that you could hear them from inside of the town hall.
00:52The questions ranged from everything from Ukraine to DOJ, the federal workers that have been fired.
00:58That certainly struck a nerve, many of those jobs held by veterans.
01:03The congressman pressed time and time again about those cuts that many of his constituents were worried
01:09could impact Hurricane Helene recovery efforts.
01:13Then there was this heated exchange from a man who identified himself as a veteran shortly after the town hall began.
01:20Listen.
01:21You're lying! I'm a veteran and you don't give a f**k about me!
01:25Cut the f**k up!
01:34You don't get to f**king do anything for us!
01:36You don't get to take away our rights!
01:38You don't get to pull back on me! Get off of me!
01:40You don't get to do anything!
01:42Come on, you guys!
01:44F**k you! F**k you!
01:52And right after the town hall, the congressman took questions from reporters and just feet away,
01:58this moment of people pounding on the glass doors, shouting shame on you and other chants,
02:05extremely loud, yelling, wanting their voices to be heard.
02:09But I did also hear from other constituents saying thank you to Congressman Edwards
02:14for even holding an in-person town hall to begin with.
02:18Laura.
02:19Isabel, thank you so much.
02:20I want to bring in CNN analyst and New York Times White House correspondent, Zolan Cano-Youngs,
02:25former senior advisor to the Trump presidential campaign, Brian Lanza,
02:30and former special assistant to President Biden, Michael LaRosa.
02:33Thank you all for being here.
02:34I'll begin with you, Zolan, because we know the president has paid attention in the past,
02:37particularly when it comes to veterans.
02:39Will this resonate with him?
02:41I mean, we'll have to see.
02:43I think for the White House right now, it's not going to be an individual town hall,
02:49but more so what that represents broadly.
02:52Now, I do think what could resonate is right now, I believe it was a CNN poll that found this week
02:58that the perception of Trump's handling, that the approval rating of Trump's handling of the economy
03:05essentially mirrors his overall approval rating right now, about 44, 45 percent.
03:10That's a difference from the first term.
03:12In the first term, when he came into office, consistently the approval rating of his handling of the economy
03:18was higher than his overall approval rating.
03:20I say that and I connect it to this event because when you have economic frustration,
03:26you have to wonder if the patience will start to lower for some of the actions that we're seeing in Washington.
03:32We've mentioned often that this upending of the federal bureaucracy does not just impact people in D.C.,
03:38but people throughout, jobs throughout the country.
03:41If you add that to economic frustration, potentially, it's early, higher consumer prices as you see more tariffs,
03:49well, then will you start to see more examples of town halls like this?
03:54Well, Republicans have been told not to do these for town halls.
03:57I don't know that that's the solution to kind of cover your ears to what's happening,
04:01but what do you make of an evening like that where they're obviously hearing it from people about their frustrations?
04:08Listen, town halls are tough, and Republicans should hear it, and they should hold it.
04:11I mean, they should get in front of as many people and make their case.
04:14I mean, President Trump made his case in November of why he should get elected.
04:18He wanted to shrink government. He wanted to focus on the economy. He wanted to end the war.
04:22He is doing those things. The things that he's doing are defensible.
04:25He can actually talk about what the progress they're making with respect to these things.
04:28He has to have these conversations, and the best line of defense is going to be those House members that are doing those.
04:33So I think it's a disservice that we're asking them not to do it.
04:36I think they need to get there. They need to prep, and they need to have the smart questions.
04:39But I also think the theatrics plays into our hands.
04:42The veterans, he has a strong voice. He should say something.
04:45But he has to be respectful in this conversation because the vast majority of the people in town halls are respectful,
04:50and we've seen over the years it's gotten this disrespectful tone, and it actually helps President Trump.
04:54That's what I think, and I think you have to answer the tough questions.
04:58And the reality is you're right.
05:00The CNN poll earlier this week or last week, I think it showed that people had less confidence in President Trump with respect to consumer prices.
05:07What did we see this week? We saw inflations now going down.
05:10We saw the prices of gas and eggs go down.
05:13So, I mean, you can't measure it week after week. You have to measure it month for month.
05:17And in one month's time, President Trump, we've seen him now drop the prices of eggs.
05:21We've seen the gas prices go down. Those are good things.
05:24I mean, interestingly enough, to ask some of the people in these town halls to be respectful, I understand the premise,
05:29but they feel as though they are not just being disrespected, that they are being actively harmed.
05:34They're speaking out at these town halls.
05:37Democrats I know now are thinking about holding their own town halls in Republican areas to be able to hear this.
05:43Is that the right way to react to this and perhaps seize on it?
05:47Well, I saw Governor Walz is doing something similar to that in Minnesota.
05:51I would actually agree with Brian, actually, on the response that the congressman had in terms of holding these town halls.
05:58I think it's the right thing to do. You know, Democrats can learn lessons from this.
06:02You don't retreat when you're under attack, right?
06:04You have to, as James Carville once said or Bill Clinton once said, actually, you have to run into the fire.
06:10As Democrats, when it comes to the press, we run away from the fire.
06:14We've been doing that a lot for the last couple of years. We have to run into it.
06:17And so...
06:18Why do they run away?
06:20Well, there is a culture in the Democratic Party right now that has treated the press as a hazard instead of an opportunity.
06:32And I didn't always agree with that approach.
06:35But that was the approach that the Biden White House took and the Biden campaign took all the time.
06:39I never understood it. I came from television.
06:42So my instinct is to always engage.
06:47But too many staffers, too many strategists in our party are too fearful, too skeptical and treat the press with suspicion,
06:57which doesn't engender the trust you need on both sides to get the job done.
07:00And it doesn't help Democrats sell their message.
07:03It's been more than just press relation.
07:05Caution with the press, too, when it comes to Democrats.
07:07It also seems like there's an intentional strategy right now by Democrats, up until this point,
07:13to be really, really cautious about choosing what to swing at when it comes to the Trump administration.
07:18Well, they're swinging at tariffs right now.
07:20And that's one area that I think they believe they're going to be successful in.
07:23But you heard Trump already saying that he is not backing down on this issue,
07:27even though he's been accused of giving everyone whiplash on this very issue.
07:31It's the perfect example of what Carville wrote about in The New York Times.
07:36Play dead, right?
07:37Get out of his way.
07:39The events.
07:40Well, that's different.
07:41Playing dead and getting out of his way are different things.
07:44Staying out of his way, meaning we don't need to do protests at these federal agencies.
07:50The events will be the wind that we need at our backs going into the midterms.
07:56The midterms is the long game, because in order to govern, you have to win elections.
08:01In order to win elections, you have to focus on winning and not trying to win the argument all the time.
08:05And Democrats are too focused on trying to be right.
08:07No, we've got to try to win the election.
08:09So allow these front runners on the DCCC in the marginal districts.
08:16Let them off the hook.
08:17Let them vote with Republicans occasionally.
08:19Let's focus on we're going to take back the House.
08:21There's only a two-seat deficit.
08:23We just can't screw it up.
08:25But that is why we need to focus on—
08:27I mean, that's a high order for some time to think about that, given what's happened recently.
08:32It is, but we did gain two seats in this last election.
08:35The margins are so close.
08:38Republicans need Democrats because Democrats are in better shape than people realize when it comes to money, infrastructure, recruitment.
08:45Now it's going to be can we leverage the events like tariffs?
08:50Can we use that to our advantage?
08:51Because it's very unpopular.
08:52Brian, what's the Republican response if they are going to pick and choose their battles and not have hair on fire?
08:57What are Republicans going to do?
08:59I think it's going to happen.
09:00Listen, I think Republicans are going to watch them lose again.
09:02I mean, listen, we saw every tactic employed in 2016 to try to stop President Trump.
09:08You know, scandal of the week, outrage of the hour, those things didn't work.
09:12At the end of the day, the only way the Democratic Party wins is if it actually has a message for the American people.
09:17It can't be tariffs are bad, tariffs are bad.
09:19Because we've had this whole month of the media saying tariffs are bad.
09:22You know, Democrats and Republicans saying tariffs are bad.
09:24It's going to hurt the economy.
09:25And what did we see in one month's time?
09:27We see inflation go down.
09:29But it's not just the media saying and then reverse engineering a result, right?
09:34The markets are showing, spiraling.
09:37They are having people concerned about their 401K.
09:39You're talking about pensions.
09:40You hear the influx of it.
09:42I mean, the quote in the poll you were talking about, there's a new Quinnipiac poll I want to put on the screen for people to see.
09:48Just 23 percent of voters say the state of the economy is excellent or good.
09:52So despite the idea that Republicans could feel confident about how people feel it, the numbers seem to be very different.
09:59Listen, with the number that's most important is when Donald Trump took his oath of office, inflation rate was at 3.1 percent.
10:06Where is it today? It's at 2.8 percent.
10:08So it's moving in the right direction, which is what we learned from the last election, that the most important number that matters is affordability and matters is inflation.
10:15It doesn't matter what the stock market looks like.
10:17It doesn't matter what unemployment looks like.
10:19The thing that people are feeling the most is affordability.
10:21And if you look at what's happened to gas prices, if you look at what happened to eggs prices, which I was on the show, we were talking about it.
10:27Everybody on CNN was talking about egg prices.
10:29A month into his administration, egg prices are down from when he started.