Voters at a town hall meeting in Missouri demanded that their Republican congressman denounce President Donald Trump’s “lies”—and told him to get his head “out of Trump’s a--.”
Rep. Mark Alford was the latest GOP lawmaker to host a contentious live event during the August recess despite party leaders advising their caucus to avoid in-person meetings with constituents. Other Republicans have been savaged with boos, jeers, and profanity.
The crowd at Alford’s Monday town hall—which was held at Southwest Baptist University campus in Bolivar—was largely civil, but the voters were no less scathing than those who drowned out his colleagues in other states with chants of “Lie! Lie!”
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“You are not helping me. Believe me, you are not helping me,” said one older man who identified himself as Fred Higginbotham. “You need to take your head out of Trump’s a-- and start doing your representation of us,” he added, drawing some of the night’s loudest whoops and cheers.
Higginbotham also called Trump a “dictator” who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
“I listened to him for about a half-hour today and I got sick at all the lies he brought up,” he said. “I would appreciate you taking your father’s U.S. Constitution book, read it, study it, make your own lines underneath it, and get Trump out of office!”
Other voters also called out Trump’s “lies” and demanded that Alford respond to them.
“I just wondered if you had shared with President Trump that Vladimir Putin was the aggressor, because he keeps saying Ukraine did it. And we all saw what happened, but he continues to lie and lie and lie,” one woman said.
“I never heard him say that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky was the aggressor in this. Did he say that? I don’t believe he has,” Alford said, as audience members scoffed.
The woman who asked the question shook her head and laughed, before nodding to say that, yes, Trump did say that.
In February, Zelensky criticized peace talks between Russia and the U.S. for excluding Kyiv. Trump responded by telling reporters, “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” The Guardian reported.
A few months later, in April, the president again explicitly blamed Zelensky for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying, “When you start a war, you gotta know that you can win the war. You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” the BBC reported.
Another constituent pointed out that Alford had talked about abuses in the Medicare and Medicaid system, but that Trump had pardoned someone who defrauded the Medicaid system for about $1.3 billion.
“I find that curious,” the man said to applause.
At the end of his first term, the president commuted the 20-year prison sentence of Philip Esformes, a nursing home magnate who was convicted in 2019 of bribing doctors and ripping off Medicare and Medicaid to the tune of $1 billion.
The White House justified the commutation by saying that Esformes, who was 52 at the time, had spent his time in prison “devoted to prayer” and was in “declining health,” PBS reported.
On the topic of immigration, Alford said that Trump had secured the border and “fixed the hole in the boat,” leading to loud booing along with scattered applause.
He also took Republican leaders’ advice and tried to rebrand the president’s widely hated “Big Beautiful” spending bill, referring to it by its legislative designation of “HR1.”
When Alford tried to claim the bill’s tax cuts would benefit the working class, the audience groaned and laughed. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has found the legislation to be regressive overall, with most of the benefits going to high-income households.
