Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who helped stoke a wave of paranoia over so-called "death panels" back in 2010, got a sense at his town hall Monday of just how well Donald Trump's month-old administration is playing in the Midwest.
"It's like taking a shower in bad news every day," one woman told New York Times video reporter Thomas Kaplan, "it's exhausting."
The woman—who had never before felt compelled to attend a town hall—not only expressed terrible disappointment in how inaccessible Grassley had been, she was also frustrated with Republican lawmakers' total disregard for providing checks on Trump's power. Asked if she thought Sen. Grassley had "stood up" to the administration, she responded:
I don't think he's stood up to the administration at all. It feels to me like he used to be a moderate Republican, but that seems to be over now. He's definitely toeing the party line, which is disturbing.
In fact, the main reason she made the 100-mile trek to the Iowa Falls town hall was to hold Grassley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to account on investigating Trump's ties to Russia—an action the GOP has been stonewalling.
The primary interest that I have today is to make sure the senator is on record in supporting an independent investigation into Donald Trump's connection with Russia and the election.
But she also sounded a cautionary note about how Trump's policies are playing in the state’s agricultural and manufacturing communities.
Congress is on February recess. If your member is refusing to hold a Town Hall, click here to attend (or start) a rally in your community.
A lot of people who originally thought that they were going to help get better jobs and all that are starting to realize that it's not working out that way at all. That actually, it's driving business away, and they're very concerned about what's going to go on in Mexico if there's a trade war. We have pork, we have corn—it's a big deal around here.
Iowa exports through the Trans-Pacific Partnership—the deal Trump swiftly pulled out of via executive order—totaled $7.8 billion in 2015.
But beyond the TPP, a trade war could disrupt the state's entire export market, which is one of the foundations of Iowa's economy. The interview suggests that it’s not just Iowa’s industry representatives who are fretting about job losses.
In all, Iowa exported $13.2 billion in goods in 2015, with about 12 percent coming from farms, U.S. data shows. About 56 percent of Iowa goods were manufactured machinery, food and chemicals.
As a second woman said in a separate interview:
Maybe we can get through to [Sen. Grassley] that everything the current president wants is not everything that we want.
Or maybe not. So far, Republican congressional leaders like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are sticking to Trump like glue. The more they ignore their constituents (as McConnell did Monday and GOP members sitting in Clinton districts have been doing all along), the higher the price Republicans will pay in 2018.