Last night, RANGE had a balcony-level seat to freshman Congressman Michael Baumgartner’s first Spokane Town Hall meeting since President Donald Trump’s inauguration. It was hosted by Whitworth University as part of their “Democracy & Discourse” series. Baumgartner, a Republican representing Washington’s 5th Congressional District, faced a tough crowd of around 800 people, the majority of whom were upset with him, Elon Musk, Trump, Republicans and the current state of the country.
First, for an early indicator of the vibes at the Town Hall: groups of protestors stood at both the street corner nearest to the main road and in front of Whitworth’s Cowles Memorial Auditorium (named for a patriarch of the Cowles family, which owns The Spokesman and KHQ-6) where the event took place. They held signs with slogans like “Resist,” “Hands off Social Security” and “Grow a spine, Baumgartner!”
(The Spokesman reported there were around 60 protesters.)
After Baumgartner was introduced, the crowd gave him a respectful round of applause, but the energy quickly shifted. Throughout the night, attendees chanted “Liar!” “January 6th!” and “Answer the question!” at the representative. They came prepared to peacefully but loudly protest, kitted out with red and green squares of fabric that they would wave in sync: red when Baumgartner said something they didn’t like, green when he said something they agreed with. Green saw a lot less play.
One person produced a Canadian flag when Baumgartner discussed Trump’s threats to take over Canada and another person held up a Palestinian flag when Baumgartner talked about free speech for student protestors.
Someone waves the Canadian flag as Baumgartner addressed Trump’s threats to annex Canada. Photo by Erin Sellers.
At times, the shouting was so loud and sustained that Baumgartner just moved on to the next question. And at the end of the meeting, as he tried to give closing remarks, nearly the whole crowd stood in unison and turned their backs to him before they left the auditorium.
Baumgartner complained that, while he represents Eastern Washington, “ this room is different than the rest of Eastern Washington.”
The crowd turns their back at the end of the meeting. Photo courtesy of Sarah Dixit.
Though Baumgartner frequently chose not to answer direct questions and other times was shouted down as he gave background or context before he could get to an answer, he was able to say a few things of note and make a few promises to his constituents.
Baumgartner’s public promises
Health care
While the most pressing concern for the constituents at the meeting was Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), according to a poll posted throughout the building that asked attendees to rank their top three issues, another big worry was health care.
The House’s budget reconciliation bill — which Baumgartner voted for — would direct the House Energy and Commerce Committee to cut more than $880 billion over the next decade. Republicans have signalled that Medicare is off the table for cuts, a position Baumgartner reiterated at the Town Hall, which leaves Medicaid representing 93% of the funds under the committee’s purview.
Both at the Town Hall he held in Ritzville yesterday morning and at Spokane’s evening Town Hall, constituents pressed Baumgartner on Medicaid’s future. It’s a fair question: 230,100 people in Congressional District 5 are on Medicaid — representing an incredible 29% of Baumgartner’s constituency.
A Whitworth student told Baumgartner it’s “really scary” to look at her future working in healthcare and asked how he plans to protect his constituents. Baumgartner promised “Medicare and Social Security are not being touched.” But the crowd wasn’t buying it as someone shouted “You are straight up lying!”
“Medicaid is a broken system that needs to be improved to protect the truly most needy,” he added. “There’s going to be no reduction in overall dollars to Medicaid but there’s not going to be the rapid increase that some people might like.”
A recent report found it was “likely impossible” to reach the $880 billion number Baumgartner voted in favor of without cutting Medicaid significantly.
Watch his response in full:
At a private press conference after the event, Baumgartner offered more information on his stance. He said fear of Medicaid cuts were like “Olympia math,” referencing the Washington state Senate, where he served eight years.
“Olympia math is if you spend $100 today and there’s a program that says next year you’re going to spend $130 but [the money] actually hasn’t been budgeted yet.” If instead of spending $130, you spend $110 on the program, that would be a $20 decrease in Olympia math, but a $10 increase in actual math, Baumgartner said. This is what he thinks is going to happen with Medicaid — no real reduction, but a massive slowing of planned expansion.
He also described Medicaid as “a broken and strange system” that allows states like Washington to “game the federal government on reimbursement rates.” As evidence for this, he pointed to Washington’s Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
According to data from 2024, about one-third of individuals enrolled in Medicaid in Washington’s 5th Congressional District are enrolled under the ACA expansion, which amounts to 76,700 people.
“I’m not on the budget committee. I don’t think we will get to the point where we look at doing what would be called block grants or uniform spending — treating everybody the same on Medicaid,” Baumgartner said. “But I think we will do some work requirements.”
Able-bodied folks enrolled in Medicaid would be required to work, Baumgartner said, and if they didn’t, they’d no longer be allowed on Medicaid, which would result in a reduction of Medicaid spending.
In his district, 87,800 of the total people enrolled in Medicaid are children — who famously do not work. Another 16,300 are seniors, and 25,100 are individuals with disabilities. It’s unclear how many of the adults on Medicaid in Baumgartner’s district work, but in Washington it’s 59%.
More Town Halls?
To his credit, Baumgartner is one of the only Republican legislators actually hosting Town Halls for his constituents after party leadership told lawmakers to maybe hold off on those pesky in-person events. Like other GOP lawmakers who did in-person Town Halls despite this guidance, Baumgartner faced a room mostly full of mostly angry constituents.
Despite the much-less-than-favorable reception at both the Spokane Town Hall and the Ritzville Town Hall in a more rural area, Baumgartner said he was still committed to holding Town Halls in every single one of the 12 counties he represents.
At the press conference after, though, he admitted those events won’t all be in person — the next on his calendar will be a telephone Town Hall. Still, he did reiterate that he was open to more in-person events “as long as they can be safe.”
Big takeaways
Baumgartner mostly stayed away from making any promises and commitments, but here are three major takeaways from what he did say.
A tempered defense of DOGE
Even though it seemed everyone else at the Town Hall hated DOGE (it was the top ranked issue on the poll), Baumgartner isn’t necessarily on the same page.
“It is appropriate, just like Bill Clinton and every other president has done, to look at trying to cut waste, fraud and abuse from government,” Baumgartner said. “And what’s important with the DOGE cuts is that they need to, that money doesn’t go away just because DOGE identifies it. It has to come back to Congress that has the power of the purse.”
Baumgartner was one of only two Republicans to cosponsor a bipartisan bill that would have protected the probationary status of employees who were wrongfully terminated.
In one of the only moments of the night where the crowd was kinda sorta on his side, he said, “ If the Congress says that the Executive Branch should spend money, then they need to spend that money.”
Sayonara, sanctuary status
One of the most emotional moments of the night came when Michaela Kelso pressed Baumgartner about the violent no-warrant arrest of two Nicaraguan immigrants in Spokane. On March 10, the men were driving to a court hearing for a harassment charge — they’d been accused of firing a gun outside of a family member’s apartment building — and ICE pulled them over and blockaded them in with six unmarked vehicles.
The agents did not have a warrant to search their truck, and the migrants protested that there was a pregnant woman in the car and that it was illegal for them to search it without permission. The agents broke through the windows, opened the doors and dragged the men from the vehicle, Tasering one and hitting the other in the head with a rifle. They detained the men and sent them to an ICE facility in Tacoma for processing for deportation.
Kelso, who is a German immigrant herself, repeatedly asked Baumgartner if he was aware of the situation. In response, Baumgartner asked the crowd how many people voted for Trump. For 16 seconds, the room exploded in a chorus of anger as maybe a dozen people raised their hands.
Then, Baumgartner said that Washington would be safer for everyone, immigrants included, if it was not “a sanctuary state,” which means local and state law enforcement are barred by state law from helping federal agents enforce immigration policy.
When ICE isn’t allowed to “get into jails to nab these guys,” Baumgartner said, the agency has to “make apprehensions in the street,” which is more dangerous for everyone.
He then tried to move to another question, but Kelso moved toward the front of the room and demanded that he actually answer her question: did he know about the violent arrest of his constituents? Finally, he replied, “ I am not aware of the details of that case, but in general It will be better if Washington state were to work with federal immigration authorities.”
“That is one of the things that I’m going to do, is attempt to make that happen,” Baumgartner said, stating his intent to go after the Keep Washington Working Act, the law preventing state and local police from helping ICE.
Western expansion and AI
Is American imperialism good actually? Baumgartner seems to think so.
During the Town Hall, Baumgartner joked about Trump’s threats to annex Canada, calling our northern neighbors “more liberal and left-wing than the United States.”
“ Taking Canada would be like taking another California,” Baumgartner said. “ If we took Canada, the Republicans would never have control again. So we don’t want that to happen.”
He also gave a more serious answer: “I don’t support us absorbing Canada; Canada’s been a good neighbor.”
Greenland, however, is fair game, *if* the US could get it peacefully, he said. And, “we should never have given up Panama,” Baumgartner added, referencing the US’s 1977 treaty with Panama to give up control of the Panama Canal at the end of 1999.
Baumgartner attributes Trump’s interest in taking Canada and Greenland to an “arms race versus China on artificial intelligence.”
“ The AI stuff takes an immense amount of power … much more than we can supply now,” Baumgartner said. “ And so what I think is the reason that Donald Trump is so interested in talking about Greenland and Canada is because it’s with an eye on the immense amount of power that’s going to happen to all highways and to the hydro resources.”
During the press conference, Baumgartner had a testy exchange with reporter Alexandra Duggan from The Spokesman about the imperialistic ideals behind expansion talks. It went like this:
Duggan: “Claiming Greenland, how would that not be the return of imperial America? We’ve seen this in history, why would that be a good thing?”
Baumgartner: “I think it would be America’s strategic benefit if we had Greenland. America has had strategic benefit from being imperialistic in the past. That’s how we had Western expansion.”
Duggan: “That’s also how we had white nationalism, so how would you —”
Baumgartner: “Is that really your question? The Spokesman?”
Duggan: “I’m just saying, just imperial America —”
Baumgartner: “You’re weaving white nationalism into a question about Greenland?”
Duggan: “No, I’m just saying typically claiming other territories —”
Baumgartner: “ I don’t want to take over Canada. If we were able to, if the people of Greenland wanted to join the United States, I think it would be in our benefit.”
Baumgartner then moved on, choosing not to spend any more time on the realities of America’s “strategic benefit from being imperialistic.”
Jalapeño highlights
If you’re familiar with our regular spice ratings, you might have guessed that this one cleared the charts. If there were a ghost pepper emoji, we’d swap those in for this one. It was the spiciest meeting this RANGE reporter has ever been to (a close second is the one where Matt Shea supporters tried to serve Spokane City Council communion). If the first sections of this piece don’t already have your mouth on fire and your eyes watering, here’s the part you’ve been waiting for: a quick rundown of the spiciest moments from the Town Hall. Have your milk handy.
In no particular order:
The death of civil discourse?
A point Baumgartner reiterated constantly throughout the night was the need for civil discourse.
“Do we want to be a civil country that can disagree passionately without being so vitriolic and angry and rude to each other?” Baumgartner asked, at one point.
Time and time again, the room burst into raucous shouts, cheers, chants and cries. About 15 minutes into the meeting, Baumgartner asked, “ Can y’all just stand up and yell real loud for a little while and get it out of your system a little bit so we can have a conversation?”
The crowd responded by yelling for 20 seconds. Reader, they did not, in fact, get it out of their system; things didn’t get any easier for Baumgartner over the course of the evening, and when he finally gave his closing statement, which was also about civil discourse, the crowd turned their backs to him.
‘You go, girl!’
When the moderator tried to cut off a woman asking a question, she responded loudly “I timed it, it’s 45 seconds. Be quiet.” The audience whooped: “You go, girl!”
Free speech on campus
A few of the question slots were reserved for Whitworth students, one of whom wanted to know how Baumgartner planned to protect free speech on college campuses. Another woman asked a similar question earlier in the meeting; she was concerned about the Trump administration’s attacks on free press and threats to pull funding from colleges that allow protests.
Baumgartner stressed that he supported peaceful protesting, making a comment that “ this is sincerely a good example of that here tonight.” But he repeatedly stressed that some recent student protests across the country crossed the line into violence and “support for terrorist regimes.”
“I don’t think that’s particularly complicated,” he said.
The student pushed back, asking him if would “ condemn the actions of different civil rights organizers throughout history who, such as in Montgomery, disrupted everything about the city’s finances and their ability to operate.”
“Martin Luther King wasn’t a hero until he died,” the student added.
Baumgartner replied that comparing the civil rights movement to the pro-Palestine protests on college campuses across the country is “a false equivalence.”
“I just don’t accept the premise,” he said. The crowd booed.
District judges?
Folks brought up Trump’s deportations of immigrants to a work camp in El Salvador, despite a judge deeming them unconstitutional and lacking due process.
Baumgartner said it was bad for the administration to ignore court orders, but he also said, “It’s not healthy for the republic when you have district judges that probably don’t have the authority issuing nationwide injunctions.”
He then tried to pivot to talking about former President Joe Biden’s approach to student loan debt, and how Biden stretched the powers of the executive branch to relieve debt, but he was booed so loudly and repeatedly that he never got to finish that thought.
What Americans want, according to Baumgartner
Baumgartner repeatedly echoed that the concerns of the people in the Town Hall were not the concerns of most Americans. He said both he and Trump won their elections by large margins — Baumgartner got 61% of the vote in the November election, and Trump won by 55% in Congressional District 5 — and they have largely stuck to their campaign promises.
Here’s what Baumgartner thinks Americans want:
“In general, the American people want government to be downsized. They want gangbangers and people that shouldn’t be in the country — and they’re here — to leave. They want fairness. They want fairness. They want fairness for girls in college sports, in high school sports. They want fairness.”
While that final set of quotes reads like a particularly boring cheer squad routine, the repetition in Baumgartner’s answer came because he was trying to speak over a crowd that was shouting.
And while Baumgartner’s opinions about American desires may have been true when Trump narrowly won the popular vote, recent polling shows Trump’s approval rating is plunging. And, of course, if not-voting was a political candidate, it would have gotten more votes than either Trump or Vice Present Kamala Harris. So it’s pretty unclear if what Baumgartner described is *actually* what the American people want.
Fringe leftists
Baumgartner said one of the things he’s been most proud of in his first months in office is how available he’s been to people in his district.
When pressed by a reporter about complaints from constituents who couldn’t get through to his office or who “feel a disconnect,” Baumgartner said his office is most often contacted by “the most left wing and radical fringe of Eastern Washington.”
“They can make their thoughts heard,” Baumgartner said, “But again, we’re 75 days into this. We got a nearly record amount of the vote, and we’re doing exactly what I said I was going to do on the campaign trail.”
News to his wife
In perhaps the loudest moment of the night, a questioner read from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
“ Non violent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue,” the speaker said. “ That being said, how will you respond to the allegations that you’ve been using the LGBT dating app Grindr in secret?”
The crowd exploded with gasps and laughter. Baumgartner responded, “That would be news to my wife.”
No constitutional crisis here, folks
With Trump ignoring a judicial order, and experiencing no repercussions from it so far, some have argued that America is in a constitutional crisis.
Toward the end of the meeting, Baumgartner said those fears are unfounded: “by and large, what people in America, what people in Eastern Washington see, is President Trump delivering on his promises.”
He also said he takes his oath to uphold the Constitution “very seriously.” That was met with eight seconds of unadulterated anger.
And that’s your Town Hall update! If you’re looking for more of a play-by-play, we live-posted the event on Bluesky: read the thread here. Or you can watch a full recording of the roughly 75-minute event here. You can also listen to our audio from the post-event press conference here or read our transcript of it here.
