New Jersey Democratic Sen. Andy Kim implores town hall to 'please stay engaged'

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EGG HARBOR CITY, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim implored a standing-room-only town hall on Thursday to get involved in politics as a way to push back against President Donald Trump's agenda.

The freshman Democrat opened a three-day tour of GOP-held House districts on Thursday, visiting a town in the southern New Jersey district not far from where Trump's casino empire in Atlantic City rose and fell decades ago.

“Please, I just — I am here to just say please stay engaged, stay with me, stay with others and help me try to build the kind of movement that we need to be able to mobilize,” Kim said near the end of the roughly hour and 40-minute Q&A at a Teamsters union hall.

Kim's meetings come as the out-of-power Democrats struggle to find a message and a method for pushing back on the president's quick-paced policy rollouts. It also coincides with word from the Republican House speaker to his members to skip town halls after an onslaught of protests, though some GOP members are forging ahead with constituent meetings.

Many of the questioners expressed frustration at cuts to government agencies and the prospect for cuts to Medicaid in particular. An emotional moment unfolded when Susan Coll-Guedes of Galloway said she worried her 24-year-old son with Down syndrome who relied on Medicaid to cover nursing could lose care if the service is cut. Kim approached her and gave her a hug after she finished speaking.

“We are not bad people. This is not waste. It’s not fraud. It’s real,” she said.

Other speakers called on Democrats to more forcefully push back against the president and Elon Musk in particular.

“I understand the ins and outs and the right way to do things,” said Heather Ogden of Camden County. “They have tossed all of the rules out of the window.”

Kim cited the legal challenges against the administration as a component of responding but also criticized how the executive branch was using its authority.

“So much of what we believe in this country to be checks and balances honestly gets brought down and exposed as just norms and behavior. And, and we see what happens when some people are just unwilling or uninterested in behaving in a way that is befitting of our country,” he said. “That’s what’s so scary.”

Not everyone at the meeting was frustrated or angry with the administration.

A man wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat asked Kim why he didn't clap when Trump honored people in the House gallery during his recent speech to a joint session of Congress.

Kim responded that he did clap when a boy with cancer was honored, but that otherwise the president had set a tone of “disrespect” in the room.

Kim was elected last year but took office early because of the seat opened by Bob Menendez's resignation after he was convicted on federal corruption charges. Kim was first elected to the House in 2018 in a GOP-leaning district that Trump carried twice.

The town hall had an estimated capacity of 150, according to the senator's office. There were about two dozen people outside, watching on their phones. Some of them had been turned away at the door because of a lack of space.