YUCCA VALLEY, Calif. — By the time U.S. Rep. Jay Obernolte, a Big Bear Lake Republican, tried asking for unity at his “community coffee” event, his audience had screamed, cussed and called him a Nazi.
“We’re not on team liberal or conservative; we’re not on team Republican or Democrat. We all play for team United States of America,” Obernolte told the overflow crowd last month at the Yucca Valley Community Center.
Boos drowned him out.
Obernolte told constituents to call his office “when you have problems with your government.” A woman in the audience responded by singing, to the tune of the “Ghostbusters” theme song: “Who ya gonna call? The fasc-ists!”
The crowd was furious that Obernolte had defended the Trump administration’s mass firings of federal workers. They yelled when he said he was glad billionaire Elon Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was “looking at all of the waste” in the federal budget.
And in reference to Trump, they shouted: “No king! No king! No king!”
The scene in the solidly conservative, mostly rural 23rd Congressional District was mirrored in communities across the county over the last two weeks, from California to Texas to Wisconsin and Georgia, as Republican lawmakers returned to their home districts prepared to tout the Trump administration’s first month of accomplishments at town hall meetings.
Instead, many of those gatherings erupted in confrontation and reproof, much of it focused on the power Trump has ceded to Musk as the administration takes a jackhammer to federal employment, eliminating tens of thousands of middle-class jobs, seemingly without regard to salary or what service a given employee provides.
The pushback has been particularly heated around cuts to the National Park Service, which is losing nearly 10% of its workforce to federal buyouts and layoffs. The jobs eliminated include rangers, wildlife researchers and maintenance staff, and last weekend prompted protests at roughly 140 sites across the nation, including Joshua Tree National Park near Yucca Valley.
Republicans have dismissed the testy town halls as having been orchestrated by Democrats: “Paid ‘troublemakers’ are attending Republican Town Hall Meetings,” Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social, adding, “It is all part of the game for the Democrats, but just like our big LANDSLIDE ELECTION, it’s not going to work for them!” In an interview with CNN, House Speaker Mike Johnson blamed the blowback in red districts on “paid protesters” and “Democrats who went to the events early and filled up the seats.”
But at the town halls themselves, while some speakers identified as Democrats, others identified as Republican. And at the Feb. 22 Yucca Valley event, it was clear from interviews that the audience included plenty of local residents; at least one wore a Trump hat and some in attendance were clearly displeased by the outspoken attendees.
In a statement to The Times, Obernolte’s office downplayed the Yucca Valley gathering as “an anomaly,” and said he held six other gatherings in the district that had “more constructive discussions.”
Although there “were some animated voices” in Yucca Valley, the statement read, many in the audience “attended with the intent to disrupt rather than engage in a productive conversation.”
Obernolte, the statement continued, “maintains that our $36 trillion national debt is an existential threat to our nation and he supports efforts to root out waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars.”
Obernolte was reelected in November during a rightward swing in California, which has nine Republican U.S. House members and more than 6 million Trump voters.
California was home last fall to some of the nation’s most competitive congressional races, giving the state an outsize role in determining the balance of power in the House. The GOP has one of the slimmest majorities in history, holding 218 seats while Democrats hold 215.
But because Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House, their honeymoon is already over, said Shaun Bowler, a political scientist at UC Riverside.
“They’ve had the photo ops. They’ve had the press releases. They’ve had their 15 minutes on Fox or talk radio. It’s time to deliver, and there’s no reason not to deliver now,” Bowler said.
Obernolte’s vast district — which stretches across the Mojave Desert and San Bernardino Mountains — includes most of San Bernardino County and portions of Kern and Los Angeles counties.
The high desert towns around Joshua Tree have undergone fundamental shifts in recent years. During the pandemic, city dwellers and remote workers moved to the desert in search of more affordable housing and easy access to nature. Home prices skyrocketed. Properties were converted into vacation rentals. And bumper stickers reading “Go back to L.A.” became a common sight on Highway 62, the main artery through the Morongo Basin.
Voter registration in the district is about evenly split among Democrats and Republicans. But the district, historically, has favored conservatives.
In November, Obernolte won reelection by 20 percentage points. And both San Bernardino and Kern counties, which comprise 92% of the district, voted for Trump.
The district includes both the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms and the Army’s Ft. Irwin National Training Center. It is home to tens of thousands of military veterans.
It is also one of the poorest congressional districts in the state, according to analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.
Many of the region’s better-paying jobs are positions with federal agencies. And its small towns rely upon tourism at Joshua Tree National Park.
Park employees confirmed to The Times that at least six full-time workers in the fees division — tasked with collecting entrance and campground fees and staffing the visitor centers — were fired last month as part of the Trump administration’s cuts.
At his Yucca Valley gathering, Obernolte was peppered with questions about the park service firings, as well as potential cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food assistance for low-income Americans.
Despite his praise for Musk, Obernolte told the audience that he disagreed with the Joshua Tree cuts. “It’s going to create a terrible experience for our visitors,” he said. “It’s going to devastate our communities.”
He lauded the administration’s decision to backtrack on eliminating thousands of temporary seasonal positions at the National Park Service after the cost-cutting move met with loud public outcry. But the administration has forged ahead with firing about 1,000 probationary park service employees — generally people in their first two years of service — as part of a multiagency purge of probationary employees that will eliminate tens of thousands of jobs.
In addition, according to an internal email sent to park supervisors last month, more than 700 year-round National Park Service employees are taking part in the federal buyout program the Trump administration has pushed in its campaign to slash the federal workforce.
Asked about potential cuts to the social safety net, Obernolte said there “has been a lot of angst and consternation about programs that everyone relies on like Social Security, like Medicare, like Medicaid.”
“I want to be crystal clear about this. No one is talking about reducing benefits for people who depend on them,” he said.
The crowd chanted: “Liar! Liar!”
Keith Hamm, a vacation rental host and registered Democrat who lives in Joshua Tree, was among those who attended the event. He said he had expected a sleepy affair, where he would be one of the few people with a dissenting opinion. But then, he said, he started hearing “a lot of build-up,” and expected the meeting could become contentious.
“It honestly was more than I expected,” said Hamm, who described the district as a “deeply impoverished” place where plenty of people rely on food benefits and Medi-Cal.
He said of Obernolte: “It’s just so frustrating to come face to face with guys like Jay. He’s completely out of touch with his constituency.”
Joseph Candelaria, a 38-year-old musician and lifelong Twentynine Palms resident, kicked off public questions by blasting federal job cuts and potential cuts to food benefits in a community he described as “underprivileged, under-resourced.”
“You talk about how the military isn’t paid enough. So let’s take away SNAP benefits? You know who uses SNAP benefits? Military communities, because we don’t pay them enough,” Candelaria said.
Candelaria said in an interview that the outcry at the event was genuine, that the room was filled with locals, and that he was angry about the attempts by Republican leaders to dismiss the blowback in red districts.
“I think that, historically, this community has been taken advantage of because we’re nice people. We’re kind. But we’re not dumb,” he said.
Candelaria said that he is not registered with either major party but that he often attends local political events and has never seen one get so contentious.
He said of his own public comments: “I was told that I cussed too much.”
Not everyone in the crowd expressed outrage at the first weeks under the new Trump administration. Many attendees quietly nodded or clapped as Obernolte spoke.
A few days after the event, Joshua Tree resident Brad Irwin, sporting a well-worn Trump 2024 hat, was vocal in his approval as he left a Harbor Freight in Yucca Valley. Irwin, 75, said he had not attended Obernolte’s event but was glad to see DOGE moving so quickly.
“I wake up every morning and say, ‘Thank you, Lord, for President Trump,’” said Irwin, who worked in the grocery business for 35 years. “We have this once-in-a-lifetime chance to straighten out our country financially, and if we don’t, we’re done.”
Asked about the layoffs at Joshua Tree, Irwin described himself as an “outdoor person” who loves the national parks but believes government agencies need better supervision.
“How many people in the government are on the porn sites when they’re supposed to be on the job?” he said. “How many people are getting transgender changes, when they’re supposed to be actually on the job?”
Branson-Potts reported from Los Angeles; Plevin reported from Yucca Valley.
This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.
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