Rep. Fitzgerald Faces Protest In West Bend

Scott Fitzgerald. (Public Domain).

West Bend briefly became a hotspot in the growing revolt against the wide-ranging and deep-cutting executive actions taken by President Donald Trump in his first four weeks in office.

What seemed like a routine listening session held by Republican Rep. Scott Fitzgerald at West Bend City Hall on Friday turned into a loud and energetic disagreement. The citizens questioned congressional oversight on the blizzard of Trump’s early executive orders. They also challenged his enabling of Elon Musk to slash tens of thousands of jobs across federal agencies.

Normally, only a few people show up for routine visits to their district by members of Congress. This time about 100 people, largely organized by an organization called Indivisible, mostly members of the Washington/Ozaukee County Democratic Party, showed up brandishing hand-crafted signs in opposition to Trump’s heavy-handed actions.

The West Bend protest was carried as a page one story in the Washington County Daily News, but was also covered by WTMJ-4 TV. The local coverage morphed into national coverage when NBC used the local protest as an example of similar, small protests across the country. The West Bend resistance was also mentioned in a Wall Street Journal report.

Republican Rep. Glenn Grothman ran into similar challenges on Friday at a meeting in Oshkosh. He was even booed for Congress’ inaction on the Trump/Musk attacks on government agencies. Grothman represents the district to the north of Washington County and formerly represented Washington County. That meeting was packed and some 50 people could not get in.

Fitzgerald was caught flat-footed. He had few concrete answers for questions about Musk’s unofficial Department of Government Efficiency  or DOGE, that has turned loose a pack of junior employees from his companies to find alleged waste and fraud in government agencies.

With Trump’s backing, Musk and his kiddie corps have orchestrated the termination or retirement of a large swath of federal employees across several handfuls of federal agencies. It’s hard to keep count.

Federal employees on probation were summarily dismissed, even those who had been recently transferred to new assignments. Other longer-term employees were also fired, often under the pretense of “poor performance.” Many reportedly had stellar records prior to their termination in two-line emails. That amounts to defamation.

Unlike most private companies that treasure their workers, Trump and Musk seem to get their kicks from firing, even abusing, people.

Fitzgerald did come clean on several points of contention. He conceded that Ukraine had not started the war with Russia, though Trump and his mate Vladimir Putin have claimed otherwise.

The congressman, a retired Army Reserve officer, agreed with a questioner that the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, should be at the bargaining table for negotiations to end the three-year war with Russia. Trump has excluded the Ukrainian president from his two-way conversations with Putin and other high-level Russian-American exchanges.

As a result, Trump and Zelenskyy have waged a counter-productive war of words over Trump’s pending betrayal of Ukraine, a democratic ally of the United States ever since Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in 1994.

Given Trump’s growing reversal of U.S. foreign policy on its relationship with Europe over 80 years, it turns out that Ukraine made a big mistake in trusting the United States for its long-term security. Ukraine should have kept its nuclear warheads.

The flash of revolt in West Bend should not be surprising. Trump’s approval ratings have dropped significantly over his first four weeks in office. Many polls agree he has dropped about four points to an average of 47%.

Inflation may sink his presidency. The anticipation of Trump’s tariffs on imported goods from Canada, Mexico and China has triggered an anticipatory increase in inflation to about 3%. Grocery prices in particular continue an upward trajectory.

One West Bend restaurant owner couldn’t believe the higher prices he was paying for food. He said he would have to charge $14 for a hamburger to make money, but is holding off for now.

Trump’s pain from the devastating national polls showed up in a frantic Trump post on Truth Social. “I won the Presidential Election in a landslide, won ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, THE POPULAR VOTE, AND ALL FIFTY STATES SHIFTED REPUBLICAN, a record, and now I have the best polling numbers I’ve ever had,” he wrote. He won by 1.5 points last November.

My guess is that Trump and Musk can expect more of the same in the coming weeks and months, that Republican office-holders at the state and national levels, like Fitzgerald, will face increasing protests in communities, small and large, across the country.

I also guess there will be boycotts against Tesla that Musk leads. Its sales have already dropped sharply in Germany, accelerated by the JD Vance snub last week in blowing off a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Will the boycotts extend to other billionaires who have bent their knees to Trump, such as Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Jeff Bezos at Amazon? They thought they were making a winning play by lining up with the power in the White House, but the marketplace can be far more powerful.

Boycotts and protests, like the one in West Bend, and other forms of resistance will shape the landscape for the mid-term elections in 2026.

John Torinus is the chairman of Serigraph Inc. and a former Milwaukee Sentinel business editor who blogs regularly at johntorinus.com.