WESTFIELD, Indiana — A week after the now-infamous group chat among top Trump administration officials turned Washington upside down, it’s clear Signalgate has captured the attention of middle America, too.
At a boisterous town hall here Friday night, third-term Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) admitted to angry constituents that Signalgate is “actually very bad.”
In Hamilton County — home of the wealthy and well-educated Republican suburbs of Indianapolis, which Trump won by 6 percentage points — the anger gripping both the Democratic base and independents across the country was on full display.
And much of it was fueled by the texting scandal.
“I promise I’ll behave,” said Spartz, the mercurial Capitol Hill character who rejected National Republican Congressional Committee guidance against holding in-person town halls, to the crowd.
Throughout the evening, her constituents gave her the business, chanting “do your job,” and yelling at her throughout. Spartz held her ground and yelled right back.
Spartz is in a reliably safe Republican district, and it would take a cataclysmic political event for her to lose her seat in 2026. But the energy from the Democratic base — of the nearly dozen attendees POLITICO spoke to, not one was a Republican — many months ahead of the midterms even in a red district was palpable.
Early on, a moderator acknowledged that attendees had submitted a number of questions about the explosive group chat, before introducing “Stephanie from Carmel,” the tony suburb that former Vice President Mike Pence calls home.
Even before the woman completed her question about whether Spartz would demand the officials in the group chats’ immediate resignation, the crowd roared, stood and clapped — perhaps their most animated moment of a very animated evening.
“Resignations go to the Senate anyway,” Spartz told steaming constituents. “So you should talk to the senators. Hopefully they have town halls.” (Last week, one of those senators, Jim Banks, sent donuts as a half-sacrificial offering, half-prank to constituents at a town hall hosted by the liberal group Indivisible.)
Spartz said she would not back resignations for the officials involved, though she conceded that “[i]t’s not a good situation” and there was classified information included in the Signal chat. The Trump administration has maintained the sensitive attack plans were not classified.
Spartz also launched a defense of Elon Musk — the leader of the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, whose hack-and-slash approach to government spending has triggered widespread backlash at similar town halls across the country.
“Actually, that’s what Elon is trying to do,” Spartz said. “He’s trying to bring technology into the government.”
Stephanie Rutter, 37, a hospitality industry worker who asked Spartz about the texting scandal, said in an interview that she found out about Signalgate through an Instagram account called “SHIT YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT,” not The Atlantic, which broke the story.
“It’s everything from Harry Styles to Signalgate,” said Rutter, a Democrat.
Rutter was not impressed with Spartz’s response, and said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and national security adviser Mike Waltz needed to resign. “I think this was really incompetent of them,” she said.
Even before the event began, the gathered constituents were talking about Signalgate.
Brian Jonasen, a retired Air Force veteran who spent 10 years as a consultant to the Department of Defense, said he had recently written Spartz a four-page letter about a number of issues, including her position on Ukraine. (She voted against a $61 billion spending package for her native Ukraine last year.)
But Signalgate had brought him here.
“Because I served as long as I did, I have a top secret clearance,” he said. “I know what is classified. I know that when you take operational data and you put it out ahead of an attack on another country, that is classified top secret. The fact that they’re lying about it — the fact that they are actually perjuring themselves in front of congressional committees — drives me to want to ask the question … what are you doing as a congresswoman about an investigation?”
About 500 people packed into a conference center, and 100 more protesters were gathered outside the building and could at times be heard inside. Near the end, dozens walked out, saying Spartz wasn’t answering their questions sufficiently.
During the event, Tim Edson, a longtime Spartz adviser who was watching from afar, downplayed the demonstration. He texted to say that “room is full of the 5 percent of liberal maniacs who would lead the Democrat Party to lose a national election 55-45.”
Despite the fury that was evident throughout the town hall, Spartz did not cut the event short. She even lingered after to answer more questions from constituents. And perhaps most remarkable: She’s scheduled to do it all over again Saturday in Muncie, a college town home to Ball State University.
And she even earned some applause from an otherwise angry crowd near the end of Friday’s event for being there.
“President Trump was elected to be president by the majority of Americans, but I know you are frustrated with Elon Musk,” she said. “I know you are very frustrated. I want to stay engaged.”
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