Florida Republican Representatives Carlos Gimenez, Mario Diaz-Balart, and Maria Elvira Salazar aren’t missing. So why were their faces featured on missing persons’ posters? To draw attention to the fact that these Representatives have been hiding from their constituents. How? By dodging town hall events. 500 Miami residents gathered to attend an empty chair town hall over the weekend in protest both against Donald Trump and the Representatives who have abandoned their people. The politicians might not want to listen, but the people have only just begun to speak.
Florida Republicans Absent From Town Hall
While some conservatives compare Trump to God, many Americans can’t even get their representatives to appear for a town hall meeting. Miami is far from the only city to have an empty chair town hall. Silence, capitulation, and empty symbolic protests have been unfortunate hallmarks of the Democratic response to Trump. Many elected Republicans, meanwhile, have been active participants in the concentration of governmental power under Trump and Musk.
A Reddit post by u/External-Pea-2210 about the empty chair town hall drew many comments condemning the absent politicians. “Grifters. All three of them,” one commenter said. Another offered some words of encouragement for those standing against the Trump regime, saying,
Keep the energy Miami. Hold the line, remind the old generation of the terrible choice they made, remind the ignorant imbeciles that thought the dems were Cuban communists and pro maduro sympathizers starting in 2015, remind the recently turned green card holders that they can be deported as well. FAFO [sic]
The empty town hall in Miami wasn’t the first of its kind, and it won’t be the last. It’s also becoming increasingly common for law enforcement to detain people at such events for voicing their dissent. Whether elected officials are ignoring those they represent or are watching them get dragged away by secret police, it’s clear they have little to offer the people. It now falls to the people of Florida and throughout the U.S. to resist the rising tide of fascism or be swept beneath it.
