'Monsoon of irate constituents': Trump layoffs are putting red state Republicans 'in a bind'

25 February

According to veteran Democratic strategist James Carville, Virginia's 2025 gubernatorial race will be an important referendum on President Donald Trump's policies. A Democratic victory in the race, Carville argues, would be bad news for Trump.

It remains to be seen who the nominees will be. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin is eligible to run for a second term, but not in 2025. Under Virginia law, governors can serve two terms but not consecutively.

Carville believes that the mass layoffs of federal government workers being pushed by the Trump Administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will be a big issue in the race, as many Virginia residents work in the federal government. And according to The Bulwark's Andrew Egger, Youngkin's recent "tone-deaf" comments about those layoffs are not helpful to Republicans in his state.

"DOGE's haphazard blitzkrieg of federal firings is falling harder on some places than others," Egger explains in a column published on February 25. "Virginia, with its 144,000 federal employees, has been among the most deeply disrupted. But fear not, DOGE'd-off workers of the Commonwealth! Gov. Glenn Youngkin has a message for you: Your days of leeching off the public may have come to an end, but with a little elbow grease and pluck, you just might successfully transition to actual productive work in the private sector.'

Egger continues, "That was the gist of Youngkin's strikingly tone-deaf press conference yesterday, focused on the cheerful theme 'Virginia has jobs.'"

At the February 24 presser, the Virginia governor told attendees, "Listen, we have a federal government that is inefficient, and we have an administration that is taking on that challenge of rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse and driving efficiency in our federal government. It needed to happen."

Egger comments, "It's hard to imagine many fired workers finding this particularly helpful or, for that matter, empathetic….

Online attempts yesterday to soothe Virginia's laid-off federal workers weren’t going much better. Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, who is running to replace the term-limited Youngkin, released a direct-to-camera video acknowledging 'concern about the federal government workforce transition,' and sharing five links to 'additional resources to assist.' All five links led to broken '404 Page Not Found' website errors."

According to Egger, Youngkin and Sears are "in a bind."

"On the one hand," Egger writes, "they've got a monsoon of irate constituents to manage, justifiably upset that their life's work, livelihoods and, in some cases, dream jobs have been obliterated by some 22-year-old former SpaceX intern wielding a Grok account and a spreadsheet. But they're constrained in their response by the central rule of today's GOP politics: Anyone who suggests that the emperor has no clothes is met with an instant monsoon of rage and bile from the president's most fervent supporters calling for their instant ejection from the party."

Egger adds, "So they’ve seemingly decided the best way to proceed is by trying to convince federal workers that getting laid off is the best thing that could have happened to them."

The Bulwark's full column is available at this link.

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