OPINION: A Brief Trip Out Of The MAGAverse Sends Meuser Into A Snit

Dan Meuser’s official title is congressman for our district, but like most other GOP lawmakers, he sees his real job as Trump administration puppet/cheerleader.

He seems to spend every spare moment trying to put a positive spin on Donald Trump and his Project 2025ers’ attacks on democracy, freedom, truth and decency.  And he’s lobbed some whoppers at defenders of those ideals that really made America great.

He’s claimed we activists are funded by liberal philanthropist/right-wing bogeyman George Soros. (False! Soros never approached us.) He’s also said we bus people in from New Jersey for our events. (False! We can sound the alarm by ourselves.)

After an impromptu appearance on Tuesday at our pop-up demonstration across the street from his Pottsville office, Meuser all but said we’re crazy.

That’s hilarious, given what’s come out of the White House he touts to any media outlet that will host him. But first, here’s what happened:

About 20 demonstrators asked Meuser to talk to them just before he left for the nearby Farm Store to hand out gift cards and talk up Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill (for billionaires). (That PR stunt was “hosted” by Americans for Prosperity (for billionaires), which the billionaire Koch Bros. founded in 2004 to lobby hard for tax cuts and against laws making life more livable for everyone else.)

I only caught the end of what WFMZ-TV called a tense exchange, but I saw all seven minutes in the 75-minute livestream recorded by Philip Ebersole, a constituent from Lebanon County (which is part of our district).

With reporters in attendance, Meuser probably decided that facing the group looked better than ducking it. Still, the signs saying “People Over Profits,” “Save Democracy From Trump’s Autocracy” and “Legislate. It’s Your Job” clearly showed he wasn’t in a MAGA bubble anymore.

For their part, the demonstrators were surprised that Meuser and two aides approached them, given how he spent most of his 6½ years in office avoiding public confrontations with those who oppose the destruction Trump is wreaking.

The group brought up touchy subjects that included stock trades by Meuser and his family, the Epstein files, Trump’s Alaska summit with Russian dictator/war criminal Vladimir Putin and cuts to health care programs expected from the One Big Beautiful Bill (for billionaires) —  and which Meuser denied.

He left in a huff when someone mentioned the iconic photo of a Secret Service agent helping him flee from MAGA terrorists who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to help Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election. (That night, he objected to certifying his own state’s electoral votes.)

That Crazy White House

“Nobody ever said that if you get elected to Congress, you’ve got to meet with every lunatic that wants to yell at you or point their finger in your face,” Meuser told the Pottsville Republican Herald during the Farm Store photo op. “… They’re showing signs of being out of control.” 

(Ebersole’s video shows no such finger-pointing. Some demonstrators shouted questions at the same time, as throngs of reporters sometimes do when they query public officials.)

As for lunacy, here are several examples of Trump administration moves that make no sense:

– Putting the leading anti-vaxxer in charge of public health

– Keeping an unqualified defense secretary in his job after gobsmacking security breaches occurred on his watch

– Crippling or demolishing programs to prepare for and respond to disasters

– Believing Putin is an ally and a pal

– Using presidential power for petty vendettas against people who held Trump accountable for his bad acts or whose views clash with his

– Haphazardly setting and resetting tariffs while expecting consumers to believe we won’t end up paying more for imported goods

 – Deploying the military to Washington, D.C., where violent crime is at a 30-year low

– Promoting data centers that consume massive amounts of electricity and water while hamstringing efforts to tap renewable energy and fight the climate change that’s making droughts worse  

– Setting arbitrary quotas for rounding up taxpaying immigrants whom businesses depend on. Not to mention subjecting them, without due process, to torturous conditions in corporate-owned concentration camps

That said, I don’t think Meuser is crazy, just opportunistic. But if what he’s pushing is MAGA-style sanity, I’ll take lunacy any day. 

Lisa Von Ahn is an experienced columnist previously published in the Pottsville Republican Herald newspaper.

Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.

Want to be a columnist with Coal Region Canary? Contact us at newscanary@gmail.com.

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