Terrifying town hall: Goldman warns that Trump, Musk plan to shut government down
Rep. Dan Goldman. Photo: Craig Ruttle/AP
In a wide-ranging virtual town hall on Wednesday, Rep. Dan Goldman (D-10-Western Brooklyn, lower Manhattan) didn’t mince words.
“The one thing that I consistently hear from constituents is fear and real concern and uncertainty about what’s coming next,” Goldman told the crowd of roughly 550, most of whom stayed logged on for the entire hour.
Though he had warned about Project 2025 before the election, “I don’t think anyone anticipated it would be this dramatic, this quick and this severe,” he said. “What is really happening is that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are trying to effectively shut down the federal government.”
Goldman spent most of the hour fielding questions from nervous constituents about topics ranging from the possible collapse of Social Security and the evisceration of Medicaid and the Department of Education; freedom of speech; Senate’s leadership issues; and Democrats’ messaging problems.
But the biggest questions with the hardest answers were the grimmest.
What if Trump ‘goes rogue?’
Attendee Nancy Thorn asked what happens if Trump “goes rogue” and refuses to follow the decisions of the courts.
“I’m very worried about it,” Goldman said. “What is happening right now is he continues to claim that they are complying with court orders.” The cases are in courts right now, and the country is not in a constitutional crisis yet, he said.
“To be quite honest, we’ve never faced that before, and I think a lot about what can we do if we get to that point, and if the Republicans in Congress don’t do anything,” Goldman said.
“If Donald Trump decides that he’s above the law and he will do whatever he wants, honestly, we have to take to the streets. All of us. Everybody,” he said. “Not in a violent way, but we need to be out there protesting and we will need a hundred million people out there saying this is not okay.”
This is not a hypothetical
Judges are being threatened, including with threats of impeachment, Goldman said. “You can take solace that none of these judges are actually going to be impeached. Even if they were impeached in the House, they would be acquitted in the Senate because you need two-thirds, and that’s not going to happen. But even just the threat, and the effort to intimidate anyone who disagrees with him is what makes [Trump] so dangerous.”
“This is not a hypothetical,” Goldman said. “Donald Trump is trying to take over the federal government. He is trying to undermine and effectively eliminate our democracy. He’s doing it for his own personal gain through corruption, to make money, to help his buddies, to get revenge and retribution against people who challenge him, But that is what’s happening. We cannot dance around it. That is what is happening and we all need to recognize it and stand up to it.”
Social Security may be interrupted
Another audience member asked what the possibilities are of Social Security benefits being interrupted.
“Unfortunately, I fear there’s a very real possibility,” Goldman said, citing the shutdown of numerous Social Security offices around the country and large staff cutbacks. “And they are now trying to require in-person visits for routine things that traditionally could be done over the phone or online even … To combine a requirement that you have to go into offices when they are shutting offices and eliminating staff is a cute way of effectively cutting benefits.”
He also described significant cuts in Medicaid that were hidden in the recent continuing resolution. “If you read the bill, you would think there was nothing in it about Medicaid, and so they thought they could get away with that.”
Some of the New York Republicans have about a third of their constituents on Medicaid, Goldman pointed out. “New York Republicans and other moderate Republicans will lose their election if they cut Social Security or Medicaid, and they know it. That’s why they are doing everything possible to dance around it.”
Disagrees with Schumer about botched continuing resolution
Another audience member asked, regarding the recent Continuing Resolution controversy (where the House Democrats voted one way and the Senate Democrats another), how Goldman would make sure that “Schumer and Gillibrand don’t stab you in the back again.”
“I disagreed with Senator Schumer‘s assessment because I thought that it incorrectly assumed that we would lose the messaging battle if there were a shutdown,” he said. “There were a lot of front-line Democrats that took dangerous votes, risky votes to stay united against what was a terrible, terrible bill, and now they got the rug pulled out from under them. To be direct with you, they are going to be much more reluctant to do that the next time.”
Another byproduct of the vote, he added, is that the Republicans “are going to dare us to do this again. They are going to expect that we will cave, and they are going to put on the floor something that is bad.”
The ‘Signal’ issue and why it matters
Goldman said it is necessary to communicate to the average, busy American why Trump’s attacks on the rule of law are important. He used the recent massive security breach by top administration officials discussing secret war plans over the Signal messaging app — with a journalist listening in —as an example.
“Pete Hegseth [was] distributing classified information on an unsecure messaging app that almost certainly was being surveilled by our adversaries,” Goldman said. “We are just lucky that American servicemen and women were not killed because the Houthis didn’t get the military plans in time.”
This revelation is going to have a dramatic impact on our ability to collect intelligence from our allies or from other sources, he said. “And what’s important for people to understand is if we don’t collect reliable intelligence, we are jeopardizing our national security — and what that means is the chances of a significant terrorist attack on U.S. soil go up dramatically. In fact, I think if it continues on this pace at some point over the next four years, there will be a serious terrorist attack on U.S. soil.”
This was the second virtual Townhall that Goldman has held. See the full video here.
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