MAGA Republicans Move to Punish Democrat Who Protested Trump Speech

Democratic Representative Al Green’s protest during Donald Trump’s address to Congress Tuesday night went too far for his Republican colleagues, who are now calling for his censure. 

The far-right House Freedom Caucus posted on X Wednesday that it plans to introduce “a censure resolution against Rep. Al Green today.” Other Republicans not in the caucus, including Representatives Troy Nehls and Dan Newhouse, have also indicated that they plan to introduce a resolution to censure Green. 

The effort will likely have the support of House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said Tuesday night that Green’s actions were “absolutely shameful. He should be censured.”

“It’s a spectacle that was not necessary. He’s made history in a terrible way, and I hope he enjoys it,” Johnson told The Hill.

Green says he plans to accept the consequences, saying that he shouted at the president “because Medicaid is so important to my constituents.”  

“If I broke the rules, then I have to be prepared to suffer the consequences. You don’t break the rules and then demand that you be treated as though nothing ever happened,” the Houston-area congressman told Axios. 

Green’s fellow Democrats in the House are backing up their colleague, with a leading House member and a centrist from the party telling Axios that they don’t expect anyone from the party to vote for the censure. Green isn’t backing down either, having already said earlier this month that he plans to introduce articles of impeachment against Trump. 

“Let them bring their sanctions. Bring them on,” Green said.

Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede hit back at Donald Trump’s outlandish threat to acquire the Danish territory “one way or the other.”

In his address to Congress Tuesday night, Trump gave conflicting messages to the citizens of Greenland. While he claimed to “strongly support” Greenlanders’ “right to determine [their] own future,” and promised to keep them safe and make them rich, the president also restated that the United States would succeed in acquiring the territory.

“We need it really for international world security. And I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it,” Trump said.

The president said that his administration was “working with everybody involved to try to get it.”

Despite what Trump claimed Tuesday, it seems that neither the leaders of Greenland nor Denmark are actually playing ball with his wild imperialist threat. Egede shut down Trump’s comments in a post on Facebook Wednesday, written in Greenlandic and Danish.

“Kalaallit Nunaat is ours,” Egede wrote, using the Greenlandic term meaning “Land of the People,” or the “Land of the Greenlanders.”

“We don’t want to be Americans, nor Danes; we are Kalaallit. The Americans and their leader must understand that. We are not for sale and cannot simply be taken. Our future will be decided by us in Greenland,” Egede wrote in the post.

Meanwhile, Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said that Trump’s reference to Greenlanders’ right to self determination was the most important part of the speech—especially with the parliamentary elections approaching next week. He stressed that it was important for the election to proceed “without any kind of international intervention.”

But Trump’s outrageous threats to acquire Greenland have become a hot-button issue on the island, and while his attempts at outreach have ranged from frivolous to ineffectual, his rhetoric about making the territory the “fifty-second state” has already electrified the independence movement there.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen insisted that Greenland was not for sale in a television interview after Trump’s address. Last month, Trump made a startling phone call to Frederiksen and was reportedly “aggressive and confrontational,” threatening tariffs against the country unless it does exactly what he wants—flying in the face of his false promises about self-determination.

Despite the fact that leadership hardly seems interested in handing over control of the mineral-rich territory to the U.S, that hasn’t stopped Republicans from letting their imaginations run away with them. Last month, Republican Representative Buddy Carter of Georgia filed a bill to rename Greenland “Red, White, and Blueland.”

Fox News’s Laura Ingraham scoffed at Republicans’ plan to steer clear of in-person town halls after being confronted by angry protesters.

At a private meeting Tuesday, Representative Richard Hudson, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, advised House Republicans to hold virtual town hall meetings or Facebook live events instead so they could moderate feedback from the audience—a feeble attempt to avoid anybody who disagrees with them.

“I thought that was lame. Look, the Tea Party showed up at the Democrat town halls, and we complained that we were thrown out,” Ingraham said on air Tuesday evening. “So now you’re going to say don’t show up—I say let them show up. Let’s see exactly who these people are. When you engage them in conversation … they can’t back up what they are saying with real arguments.”

In recent weeks, Republican town halls have been bombarded by angry constituents, Democratic and Republican alike, who are frustrated with Trump and Elon Musk’s chaos-inducing assault on the government.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who supports the halting of in-person town halls, tried to claim that the protesters were being paid by Democrats.

“Now I’m not saying everyone in these town halls that you’ve seen on television were not from the local area, but look, there are people who do this as a profession,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday. “They’re professional protesters. So why would we give them a forum to do that right now?”

The strategy has been slammed by Democrats, and now by Fox News. Ingraham’s take? Let them argue, paid or not.

“Let’s go … First Amendment, baby.”

The White House has ordered a pause on intelligence sharing with Kyiv, according to Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe. The move is expected to devastate Ukraine’s ability to target Russian forces in its ongoing fight with the dictator-led superpower.

The decision to leave Ukraine in the dark is all part of a larger U.S. withdrawal organized by Donald Trump in the wake of his disastrous meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. During the meeting Friday, Trump and Vice President JD Vance refused to let Zelenskiy speak, allowed a conservative reporter to mock Zelenskiy’s wartime attire, and effectively leveraged the critical meeting for measly political gain by defending Russian President Vladimir Putin at the cost of denigrating former American officials. In doing so, they challenged America’s strongest alliances while ceding the world stage to America’s adversaries.

The fallout has continued into this week: On Monday, Trump suspended military aid to the war-battered nation, in defiance of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the U.S. agreed to defend Ukraine’s borders, along with the U.K., in exchange for Ukraine’s surrender of nuclear weapons.

A senior White House official who spoke with The Wall Street Journal claimed that the interruption would continue until the president is “satisfied” that Zelenskiy is working toward an end of the war.

Speaking with Fox Business on Wednesday, Ratcliffe purported that intelligence sharing could resume in the near future, thanks to a kowtowing letter penned by Zelenskiy, in which the Ukrainian leader wrote that he was ready to “work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts,” despite being practically thrown out of the White House last week.

“I think on the military front and the intelligence front, the pause that allowed that to happen, I think will go away, and I think we’ll work shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine as we have to push back on the aggression that’s there,” Ratcliffe said. “But to put the world in a better place for these peace negotiations to move forward again, President Trump is going to hold everyone accountable to drive peace around the world.”

Trump was reported to have discussed the restrictions during an impromptu meeting with several members of his Cabinet Monday, including Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, and special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, the last of whom met with Russian officials last month regarding a potential peace deal.

During a White House press conference earlier Monday, Trump repeatedly ducked reporters’ questions as to whether his administration’s actions had aligned U.S. policy with Moscow. Rather than saying “no,” Trump went on a breathy rant claiming that the war never would have happened if he was in office at the onset of the conflict.

“I wanna see it end fast. I don’t want to see this go on for years and years. Now, President Zelenskiy supposedly made a statement today in AP—I’m not a big fan of AP, so maybe it was an incorrect statement—but he said he thinks the war is gonna go on for a long time, uh, and he better not be right about that, that’s all I’m saying,” Trump said.

But negotiations have been remarkably lopsided. American officials have effectively folded Ukraine’s hand for them in peace negotiations, rescinding a 2008 promise to add the Eastern European nation to NATO, as well as the potential to return Ukraine to its prewar borders.

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine. The U.S. and Russia opened discussions at a meeting in Saudi Arabia last month, seeking a conclusion to the three-year war, but the assembly conspicuously excluded Ukrainian leadership.

Several of Trump’s former advisers have criticized Trump’s approach to ending the war, including two of his first-term national security advisers, H.R. McMaster and John Bolton.

“Vladimir Putin couldn’t be happier,” McMaster told 60 Minutes on Sunday, sizing up the events of Trump’s explosive meeting with Zelenskiy “Because what he sees is all of the pressure on Zelenskiy, all of the pressure on Ukraine, and no pressure on him.”

McMaster then went on to describe Putin as a “master manipulator” who had successfully worked Trump to Russia’s advantage.

Bolton, meanwhile, has described the administration’s peace deal as Russian propaganda that was practically “written in the Kremlin.”

The MAGA faithful were not happy with how Democrats in Congress reacted to Donald Trump’s speech Tuesday night.

Democrats protested Trump in different ways, whether it was Representative Melanie Stansbury holding up a protest sign as Trump walked into the chamber (which was quickly snatched away), Representative Al Green shouting at the president that he does not have a mandate to cut Medicaid, before being kicked out, or others leaving the chamber mid-speech, wearing T-shirts reading, “No kings live here” and “RESIST.” This was too much for Trump’s devotees.

White House staffers were quick to show their support for Trump on X.

Others in conservative media also attacked Democrats.

It seems that Republicans have short memories. In the past, the GOP has shouted at Democratic presidents during their addresses to Congress, including Representative Joe Wilson shouting “You lie” at President Obama in 2009 or multiple Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, repeatedly interrupting President Biden in 2023. Since the GOP kowtows to Trump, they think everyone else should, as well.

Donald Trump’s laughable first address to Congress Tuesday night was his least popular ever, garnering one of the least enthusiastic reactions for a president’s first address to the chamber in the last two decades, according to a CNN poll,

Apparently, only 44 percent of viewers had a very positive reaction to the president’s address. Twenty-five percent had a somewhat positive reaction, and 31 percent had a negative reaction.

This is not only a low watermark when compared with the first addresses to Congress delivered by previous presidents, whose speeches are typically a victory lap to lay out their agenda, but it’s also a poor showing when compared to Trump’s previous addresses to Congress in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Former President Joe Biden received a very positive response from 51 percent of viewers on his first address to Congress, while Barack Obama received 68 percent, and George W. Brush received 66 percent.

Trump’s first address during his first administration received a very positive reaction from 57 percent of viewers—a whopping 13 points higher than his very positive reactions now.

And it wasn’t just Democrats who were saying this. CNN’s sample group of viewers was weighted to reflect that more people who agreed with Trump would likely be watching, and was made up of 21 percent Democrats, 44 percent Republicans, and 35 percent independents.

Roughly seven in 10 speech watchers said they had a positive reaction to Trump’s address, according to the CNN poll.

That number is slightly more in line with a CBS poll that Trump shared on Truth Social Wednesday morning, which found that 76 percent of viewers approved of Trump’s address, while 23 percent disapproved.

Non-MAGA Americans have been clamoring for a legitimate resistance to Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s haphazard dismantling of the federal government. So when Democrats appeared before the president’s speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night wearing fuschia and waving auction paddles in a mode of protest against the MAGA takeover, the public was a little disappointed.

MSNBC’s Symone Sanders-Townsend torched liberal lawmakers for silently flipping paddles that read missives directed at Trump while the president prattled on about endless falsehoods: “False,” “Musk Steals,” “Save Medicaid,” the signs read.

“They are not taking back the House with these visuals,” Sanders-Townsend posted on X.

But the visuals were hardly there. Viewers watching live at home would never have known that Democrats were silently paddling their way through the speech, or that a handful of them had stood up and walked out of the chamber in protest, as TV cameras never bothered to pan to their mute, undisruptive spectacle.

In a letter issued Monday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries urged his party to make a “strong” and “dignified” presence at Trump’s speech, rather than run away. During Trump’s address, a large collection of Democratic women on the left side of the aisle were seen wearing pink, while men wore blue and yellow ties in quiet opposition to Trump’s agenda.

“Democratic leadership did not do their members any favors by stifling their desires to speak out,” Sanders-Townsend wrote in another post.

Meanwhile, the meaningless show became instant fodder for late-night comedians, who were all too eager to point out that the Republican trifecta in Washington would not be slowed down by some bright attire.

“He barked out one appalling claim after another, but don’t you worry: Democrats are getting ready to fight back with their little paddles,” said The Late Show host Stephen Colbert.

“That is how you save democracy: by quietly dissenting,” he continued. “Or bidding on an antique tea set. It was hard to tell what was going on.”

Colbert then brought out his own paddle, which urged Democrats to “Try Doing Something.”

At least one spontaneous protest by a Democratic lawmaker was more profound. Texas Representative Al Green made waves from the onset of Trump’s opening remarks, interrupting the president by yelling, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!”

That got Green ousted by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called on the sergeant of arms to remove the 77-year-old from the chamber against a backdrop of jeers from Republicans.

“Some people have questioned why so much muscle was needed to remove one old man with a cane. But it turns out it was for a serious reason: When security searched him, they found that he had smuggled in a spine,” Colbert quipped.

Democrats spent days deciding how to protest Trump’s address. A small faction decided not to attend. That included Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Patty Murray, the latter of whom said Monday that the true state of the union saw Trump “spitting in the face of the law.”

The Supreme Court denied Donald Trump’s emergency bid to cancel nearly $2 billion in government funding to the United States Agency for International Development.

In a 5–4 vote, the court on Wednesday rejected Trump’s attempt last month to freeze funding to USAID already approved by Congress.

Conservative Justices Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts sided with the court’s liberals to shut down the Trump move.

The court did not immediately say when the funding must be released, and the debate will now move back to lower courts.

Upon taking office, Trump and Elon Musk launched an assault on USAID, the largest global provider of foreign aid, gutting funding to the agency, firing thousands of workers, and refusing to pay contractors for work that was already completed.

On February 25, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ordered the government to pay “all invoices and letter of credit drawdown requests” for work done at USAID prior to February 13, enforcing a temporary restraining order he issued earlier in February. The Trump administration was given a deadline of midnight on Wednesday to fulfill his request.

The president then filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.

“Given that the deadline in the challenged order has now passed … the District Court should clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order,” the high court’s ruling reads.

Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh dissented the decision.

“The District court has made plain its frustrations with the Government, and respondents raise serious concerns about nonpayment for completed work,” Alito wrote in his dissent. But the relief ordered, is quite simply too extreme a response.”

The decision is among the first of many Supreme Court rulings to come as Trump’s attack on the Constitution continues to unfold.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump said, during his address to Congress Tuesday night, that “the days of unelected bureaucrats are over,” referencing his mass purge of federal employees.

Democrats in the chamber immediately laughed, and were quick to stand and point at an unelected bureaucrat in attendance who was given sweeping powers by Trump: Elon Musk. Others pointed out Trump’s blatant hypocrisy on social media.

Since Trump’s inauguration, Musk has used his pet project, the pseudo–Department of Government Efficiency, to overhaul the federal government and claim that billions of dollars in wasteful spending was being cut. In reality, government spending has gone up, DOGE has had to correct some of its own false numbers, and Musk has personally benefited from the government takeover. The greedy welfare billionaire and world’s richest man has gotten even wealthier as one of the most powerful unelected bureaucrats in history.

The president revealed who’s really running the Department of Government Efficiency, days after his administration offered a cozy alternative in order to salvage the group’s work as it’s interrogated in the courts.

While discussing DOGE in his speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday evening, Trump mentioned that the unofficial agency is “headed up by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight.”

But that wasn’t the administration’s story last week. In a court declaration filed Monday, the White House asserted that Musk’s official title is “senior adviser” to Trump. That title offers the unelected billionaire “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” the administration claimed, and leaves him with no formal responsibilities to run DOGE as either an employee or an administrator, as a mere employee of the White House.

The administration claims the real head of DOGE is Amy Gleason, a low-profile, first-term Trump official with experience in health care tech. Mere weeks before her name came up as the chief of the controversial organization, attorneys for the Justice Department didn’t know her, and even DOGE staffers were unaware that she had been fronting the operation as recently as one day before her role was announced.

The explanation came as Musk faced growing legal scrutiny for his role in dismantling federal agencies and firing thousands of federal employees. The Trump administration had argued that Musk was not the head of DOGE in order to defend the group’s work from several lawsuits.

On Friday, confusion over Musk’s role led to a tense back-and-forth between Judge Theodore Chuang and Justice Department attorney Joshua Gardner, with Chuang noting that the administration’s sudden excuse was “highly suspicious” and “raises questions.”

“There’s an affidavit saying he’s a senior adviser of the president,” Chuang said. “But there’s a ‘strange disconnect’ where he has referred to himself in public as affiliated with DOGE and not as a senior adviser to the president—until recently, after these lawsuits were filed.

Trump’s Freudian slip Tuesday night could warrant further interrogations into the nature of Musk’s involvement in DOGE.

In a press conference last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt falsely claimed that Gleason’s appointment had been common knowledge for weeks and that the Trump administration had been completely “transparent” about her appointment. (By Wednesday, Gleason’s LinkedIn had not been updated to reflect her new role.)