Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Walnut Creek, held a town hall meeting Thursday evening to a rather subdued crowd at a school gym in Concord, despite the event being filled to capacity.
Politicians across the country have been met with angry constituents for the past few weeks following myriad executive orders and other policy changes put forth by President Donald Trump’s administration in what DeSaulnier referred to Thursday as “flooding the zone.” In short, introduce so many changes so fast that people can’t keep up with them and feel dazed and shocked.
Here in the Bay Area, most all elected politicians are Democrats, so town halls have been filled with people alarmed at things such as possible cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and they want to know what their elected officials plan to do about it.
The town hall was held in the gymnasium at Mt. Diablo High School, with a huge red devil mascot painted on the wall behind the congressman as he spoke.
For most in the room, the “red devil” was Trumpism.
Dealing with DOGE
Thursday’s town hall began with Concord Mayor Carlyn Obringer, who said that Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — run by billionaire Elon Musk — had led to things like freezing $20.6 million that had already been earmarked for the city to pay for “nonpartisan things like road repair, like tree planting, like replacing our streetlights with LEDs.”
Obringer said she knows federal workers who are being “Doged,” or laid off in the estimated 25,000 firings that have occurred. She asked for a show of hands of how many people in the audience worked for the federal government, and multiple hands shot up.
The mayor seemed to hint at using the power of the dollar to fight back against Musk by not buying vehicles from Tesla, a company he serves as CEO for, without explicitly saying so.
“I came here tonight in an electric vehicle. It’s a Nissan Leaf,” she said. “In Concord we have Mach-Es available, Ioniqs at the Ford and Hyundai dealerships,” referring to the electric vehicles made by both companies. “So I just want to encourage folks, let’s use our people power, our dollars, so that we can take back our democracy.”
DeSaulnier began his town hall with 30 minutes of what he and the Democrats are working on or had accomplished, he said, in fighting back the Trump administration, though most of the things he listed as victories took place in the courts, such as pushing back on Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship, giving DOGE access to taxpayer data, and firing federal workers — all of which have been at least temporarily halted.
DeSaulnier then addressed questions from the audience that had been written on cards. The first question was from Val and Gloria in Richmond, according to the moderator.
“All our friends are in panic mode. Is there a plan, is there hope?” DeSaulnier referenced Thomas Jefferson, saying that now is not the time for “sunshine patriots.” “This is hard,” said DeSaulnier. “You have to be engaged. I talked about civic engagement, voting, reading your voter’s pamphlet. I think you need to … express your feelings. You have to do it in a way that doesn’t hurt other people physically.” He said that “we can be passionate in the streets” and that he’s been down at the Tesla dealership at least three times. The group Indivisible has been coordinating “Tesla Takedowns,” which are protests that have occurred in Vallejo and every Saturday at the Walnut Creek dealership.
“I do it for therapy. I tell people every time I go down there, they ask me to speak. I say, ‘I come back here to realize that there are people who are fighting.”
DeSaulnier said it is working, because the richest man in the world — Musk — has lost between 20 and 25% of his wealth.
According to Forbes magazine on Thursday, Tesla’s stock had fallen 52% since December, although it closed up nearly 5.3% on Friday. Musk owns about 12% of Tesla, excluding options, but has pledged more than half of his shares as collateral for personal loans up to $2.5 billion, Forbes reported. He lost nearly $23 billion in one day on March 10 after Tesla stock plummeted along with the rest of the market on tariff concerns.
Civil unrest, not civil war
Another person who gave the name Joel from Concord, asked, “If Trump and the Republicans do not care about the rule of law and consistently break it, what are the consequences? When will the average person use their defying of a judge’s order as president for their reason to break the law?”
To this, DeSaulnier brought up Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., who broke laws that were unjust.
“We’ve got two models out there about how you break the law and confront people in a way that wins people over, because you are being strategic,” said DeSaulnier. “You aren’t running around the street, breaking windows and losing people.”
He said that as an elected official he is barred from organizing marches, but he encouraged his constituents to do so, and to get involved with groups like Indivisible, which is a progressive movement formed after the first election of Trump. What he advised against was “attacking each other, then we’re back to the Civil War.”
DeSaulnier said he feels anger and frustration when he is in the House of Representatives and sees what is happening. He also said that he was one of the last members of Congress to be evacuated during the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I’m pretty angry and pissed off about what I see. We’ve just got to be focused and forceful, and that may require breaking laws, but we’ve got to do it in a way that gets us to our ultimate goal, which is to stop this.” Rep. Mark DeSaulnier
“I’m pretty angry and pissed off about what I see,” he said. “We’ve just got to be focused and forceful, and that may require breaking laws, but we’ve got to do it in a way that gets us to our ultimate goal, which is to stop this.”
The questions were all drawn at random, so no questions about attacks on Medicare or Social Security were raised at the town hall — though many in the audience were of retirement age.
DeSaulnier said that everyone who wrote a legible question would get a response from his office later. He also said he has more town halls planned.
“We’ll keep doing these, we’ll do longer ones,” he said, adding that they are looking at holding one at the Concord Pavillion.
“We want to do more, we want to hear from you,” he said.
