Lee’s town hall offers chilling reminders of the mess we’re in and a call to action

We tried to approach it as just another Thursday night in Pittsburgh. Buses rumbled up Centre Avenue in a light rain. We entered the Hill District and thought about dinner as we passed Freedom Corner. We made a note to check the scores of the opening-round games of the NCAA tournament.

Then we turned onto Deviliers Street and saw the line of people outside Ebenezer Baptist Church. It extended all the way down the block, then snaked east onto Wylie Avenue. In an instant, thoughts of college hoops vanished, and we remembered our reality: We live in the Year of the Annihilation of Everything Normal and Sane.

The folks lined up outside of Ebenezer were concerned about President Donald Trump’s eight-week destruction of stability. They wanted to make certain they made it into the sanctuary so they could hear what U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, D-Swissvale, had to say about it. And they had some questions. Lee’s town hall meeting was their chance to get some answers.

We streamed inside with everyone else and stood in the back. The place was packed. Then Lee took the stage. She acknowledged that people are worried – about possible cuts to Medicaid, the firing of government workers, cuts to cancer research, deportations, the arrests and “disappearing” of protester Mahmoud Khalil. She asked who feared losing Social Security benefits. Dozens of hands reached upward. What about Medicare? More hands. Veterans benefits? The same. A surprising number raised their hands when Lee asked if anyone was a federal worker who’d lost their job.

The night’s most blunt and chilling moments, however, came when Lee took questions from the audience. One such moment occurred 90 minutes into the session when someone asked if it was safe to fly. This was an apparent reference to plane crashes and near misses that have made the news since Trump and Elon Musk took over the Oval Office.

“This is a really unfortunate time to have to fly twice a week,” Lee said. “I’m horrified. I’m just not going to lie. I am horrified.”

Normally, she said, a president would offer reassurances that the country’s aviation system is indeed safe, and then follow that up by making certain airports had a sufficient number of qualified workers tasked with keeping planes from crashing into each other or flipping upside down on runways. Trump, however, remains fixated on DEI.

Another stunning moment happened when Lee, the state’s first Black congresswoman, talked about her GOP colleagues’ reactions during the president’s address to a joint session of Congress a few weeks ago. Republicans jumped to their feet and roared approvingly while Trump attacked nearly every marginalized American community. 

“I sat in that room – I’m not going to lie – and I looked across at the other side, and it looked like a lynch mob,” said Lee. “And it felt like a lynch mob.”

This is strong language, and it was devastating to hear it used by an elected official describing her reaction to a major presidential address in 2025. Then we got distracted: Our phone buzzed with a news alert that Trump had signed an executive order dismantling the Department of Education. Good lord, in March the rain seems endless.

Dismay, however, wasn’t the night’s overall theme. Lee was there to offer reassurance. Trump may have stunned Democrats with a flurry of executive actions over the past several weeks, but Lee insisted progressives aren’t beaten; they’re not cowed; they’re just beginning to fight back.

This was a welcome message to those frustrated by the lack of spunk displayed by Democratic leadership in the Senate. Last week proved especially frustrating. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and nine of his Democratic colleagues backed down from a government shutdown threat and helped the GOP pass a funding bill. Lots of progressives feel the Dems caved and gave up leverage they could have used to slow down Trump’s carnage.

Lee acknowledged this frustration. Maybe it’s time for a change, she suggested.

“We have to call some people to go home,” she said. “If you are uncomfortable in this moment, then this moment is not for you, and there’s no shame in that. If you served for 40 years, you served your time .…” Now is the time to “stand up, fight back, scream, shout, hold the floor, and if you’re not willing to shut down sessions, then maybe it’s OK to step aside.”

This got the crowd riled up. Clearly she had connected with folks. So after the event was over, we joined a cluster of reporters huddled around Lee and asked about the frustration her Democratic colleagues in the House felt after watching Schumer & Co. whither under pressure.

“People are pissed,” Lee said. “I think people want to see some fight. I always say that when you are in the game, you might not win every single battle, but your jersey needs to get dirty. You cannot leave the battlefield with a white jersey.”

Progressives understand the realities, she said. Republicans hold the White House as well as the House and Senate. Democrats have few legislative tools, but their supporters “want to know that we’re going to put up a fight at every single turn,” Lee said.

“This is a kind of guerrilla warfare, which is, I think, a new area for a lot of Democrats. This means that we’ve got to employ new tactics. We’ve got to tap into energy that comes from places that maybe we are not accustomed to going to in order to get that energy.”

If older establishment Democrats are uncomfortable with that, perhaps it’s time for them to step aside and cede power to a new and more aggressive generation of progressive leaders. Lee is a part of that generation.

“We are actually accustomed to doing that, because we came out of movement spaces. We came out of those organizing spaces. And I think that’s why so many of us ran for Congress, because we knew that the time was going to come that we needed more organizing energy, that we needed people who were activated.”

And now is that time, she said. The energy that has too long been suppressed by the Democratic establishment now needs to be embraced by new leadership that’s not trapped into a binary world divided between moderates and progressives.

“I think the question is, how do we expand the electorate?” Lee said. “How do we hear the concerns of young people who are the future of our party? How do we hear the concerns of an increasingly diverse electorate? How do we hear the concerns about people who did not come out to vote because they thought that this election was the election that should be about change, that should be about understanding that the status quo was harmful – and they wanted that reaction from the Democratic Party, and we didn’t give it to them.”

Those people are still out there, Lee said.

“They’re waiting for us to say that we missed that moment in the election and that we need to catch it now.”

***

There was a lot of talk about money and politics at Thursday night’s event. Here, it seems, Lee says there is a binary choice. The Democrats can’t serve two masters. It can’t protect the interests of billionaires and working-class folks. Pick one.

We live in a system designed to benefit the super wealthy. There’s Elon Musk, buying the now massively toxic online influence machine that was once the only mildly toxic site formerly called Twitter, then purchasing a seat in the White House. All those millions earned him a golden chainsaw (yes, this really happened), which he’s using with reckless abandon to do a lot of damage. If he were a lumberjack his co-workers would be missing a few limbs. But Musk isn’t alone. He’s just the most visible of the billionaires now wielding incredible influence over the country’s direction and thus limiting the choices available to us.

So what do progressives do about this? It’s going to call for more than posting memes on social media and weeping over alarming news reports. Lee reached back into history, and reminded folks how protests have forced change in the past. She focused on students, whose past is a “storied history of activism, of action and organizing.”

“You are part of a long legacy,” Lee said. “From apartheid South Africa, to the civil rights movement, to the women’s suffrage movement, to the anti-Vietnam War movement, to so many more. These movements always come at a cost. It’s never been without a price to pay.”

This caught our attention. We spend a lot of time talking to our fellow newsroom strikers, who’ve lost more than two years of pay while battling against owners willfully breaking the law, and to other workers who are organizing and often risking reprisals for doing so. We’ve talked in the past few weeks with members of the disabled community who have risked arrest, and some who were taken into custody, while successfully protesting health care cuts the GOP proposed as recently as 2017. These folks continue to fight. They’re still standing. They’re not cowed.

At one point last night, a woman in the audience thrust her fist in the air and stated she was ready to do her part. We saw a number of similar gestures, which suggests the restoration of stability in American society will come from places like Ebenezer, not from the halls of Congress. A warning: It may involve a bit of discomfort and pain.

“When the price is steepest,” Lee said, “That’s when we need you the most.”