Concerns about democracy — and impatience about how Democrats are responding to President Donald Trump — dominated a town hall staged by Second District U.S. Rep. Seth Magaziner on Thursday night at the Swift Community Center in East Greenwich.
More than 200 people attended the event, and while the crowd appeared broadly supportive of Magaziner, there were expressions of anxiety about the nation as a whole.
“Every day, every day, the MAGA regime is inching closer to authoritarianism,” said Tony Perratta of East Greenwich, referring to Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan. “Anger is palpable — we see it in town halls all over America and I’m sorry to say that Congress is impotent right now and the Supreme Court is complicit.”
Joanne Ferchland-Parella of East Greenwich said citizens need more tools to respond to Trump initiatives “as all this stuff [is] unraveling.”
“And I don’t think the Democratic National Committee is doing more than arranging the deck chairs,” she said, “so if you could carry that back to your leadership if you can carry that back to the DNC, I think it would really be helpful.”
When Perratta called for a new constitutional union, Magaziner said his loyalty is to the existing Constitution. Ferchland-Parella asked the congressman to name GOP counterparts who are open to dissenting views, and he reeled off a string of names.
Other participants at the town hall expressed concern about due process, particularly the case of Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk, who is being detained in Louisiana for pro-Palestinian activity.
“I’m just so distraught and frustrated by the backsliding of American freedoms and everything I care about,” said Paula Hodges of Providence.
On the brink of tears, Hodges said the mother of her fiance is a green card holder presently in Iran, “and I am really devastated that if she tries to come back [to the U.S.] she is going to be detained in a prison.”
“I am sick and tired of Rhode Island’s delegation not standing up in the way it should as a progressive state,” Hodges continued. “You have a role to play in Rhode Island to do more and to engage in civil disobedience.”
She asked what Magaziner would do to stop representative democracy from being stripped away.
“Listen, I’m going to do everything I can think of to save our democracy,” Magaziner responded, adding that he was open to suggestions. “I am committed to that … Every day I’m in Rhode Island, I have been doing some sort of event, something in the media, something to call attention to what is happening.”
Magaziner said he plans to attend an anti-Elon Musk rally planned for noon Saturday in Providence.
Since Democrats are in the minority in Congress, there are limits to what the party can do procedurally, he said, and there is no single step that can undo various actions by the Trump administration.
But Magaziner noted how courts have stopped a number of Trump initiatives, and he said it’s important for people opposed to the administration’s actions to speak up, whether at protests or on social media.
Many of the administration’s actions are “not only wrong but illegal,” he said since Trump has usurped the spending authority of Congress. If Elon Musk has good ideas for improving efficiency, Magaziner said, he should present them to the GOP-controlled Congress.
He said it was important to look for “unusual allies” — Republicans who might find common cause with Democrats on some issues.
A few East Greenwich police officers were posted around the premises during the town hall.
Magaziner recently revealed on WPRI-TV’s Newsmakers that he does not plan to honor a previous pledge to move into the district he represents — something that is not legally required.
The congressman, who lives about a mile away from CD2, said he changed plans in part since his wife now commutes to a job in Cambridge and since renovations at a planned home proved more extensive than expected.
One person at the town hall tweaked Magaziner about his change in course.
Kara Tibbetts called herself an independent voter from the district, “the one that you don’t even live in.”
She said she was concerned about “your constant attacks on President Trump, someone that almost half of your district voted for. You spent most of this town hall attacking him and calling him and his supporters extremists.”
Other people attending the town hall expressed concern about the Supreme Court, college debt and cuts by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Suzanne Colby of Warwick, a professor of behavioral health and social sciences at Brown University’s School of Public Health, described how the elimination of grants are affecting research at Brown about tobacco — something she called a non-partisan issue.
“I think there is an element missing from the public discourse,” she said. “And that is, the cuts that DOGE is making — education, libraries, Health and Human Services, CDC, FDA, NIH — are going to cost more than they save.”
Magaziner agreed. He said personnel cuts to government agencies constitute a tiny amount of federal spending, and that the vast amount of taxpayer dollars go to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and defense. He said Republicans continue to consider cuts to Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the rich.
