Greg Landsman, a Democrat representing Ohio’s 1st District in the U.S. House of Representatives, is navigating two rising tides: President Donald Trump’s “hostile takeover” of the federal government, as he described it in a recent town hall, and the loudening voices of constituents telling him to do something about it.
Landsman hosted two town halls last weekend – one in-person in Blue Ash, one virtual – to answer questions that mostly centered on Trump’s first month of executive action in 2025. The frustration towards Trump and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk dominated the discussion, with many speakers asking Landsman why he isn’t doing more in the face of rising fascism.
“You can come up against the party that is with you or you can go up against the people who are against you,” Landsman told town hall participants.
As thousands are losing their federal jobs to DOGE, putting even Republicans in the hot seat during their own town halls, Landsman believes his “pragmatic” approach to bipartisan politics could be more impactful than ever.
“I’ve got to get those members of Congress to get on board with us, or get out of the way,” Landsman told town hall participants.
CityBeat sat down with Landsman for a Q&A on the issues pressing down from the executive branch.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CityBeat: What were the common questions you heard during the town hall?
Greg Landsman: There’s an enormous amount of frustration and anger and and a sense of betrayal that, whether folks voted for these people or not, there is this portrayal as it relates to our democracy and the rule of law, innocent people who now have had their lives upended because of the indiscriminate firing of federal employees. There’s an enormous amount of anger and frustration with specific firings at the VA, firing veterans or individuals who are helping veterans. There’s an enormous amount of anger and frustration as it relates to the FAA firings and the fact that air travel may be less safe, and there’s already questions about air travel with all the crashes and the tragedies. There’s the uncertainty, and again, anger at the indiscriminate and reckless firings of people who are responsible for managing our nuclear arsenal that you have people who are in charge of these major weapon systems that were fired, and the implications to our national security. The parks, the National Parks firings, it has touched a nerve. These are some of the best people in America. The indiscriminate, reckless firings of public service employees has touched a nerve, has angered and frustrated people. People are very mad, and they know what’s going to happen. Three things are going to happen: People’s lives are going to be ruined, critical services are going to be undermined and they’re not going to save any money. They’re going to fill these openings with Trump loyalists, which is undemocratic, that’s not the civil service.
CB: Democrats in Congress don’t have great legislative power right now. You have a work-across-the-aisle approach with Republicans. If building relationships with Republicans to get them to use their power to rein in Elon Musk is your best option right now as a Democrat, what sort of concessions do you think Republicans will look for from Democrats on key issues? They hold the power right now.
Landsman: On the Energy and Commerce [Committee], I’m going to be in the middle of the fight on protecting health care. And so all of the healthcare cuts that they have proposed will go through Energy and Commerce. And so I will be on the front lines of that fight. Every day I get more prepared and more determined to win that fight with my colleagues. I mean, we are ready to take them on on this. And I think that one, the public is not at all with them on slashing health care for tens of millions of people, and number two, I don’t think they have the votes. We’re gonna do everything in our power to make it very difficult for them, even though they are in the majority.
What’s happening on the ground does have a huge impact. It does, like, it’s changing the polling, it’s changing the news, it’s changing what members of Congress, Republican members of Congress, are seeing. It makes them think twice about going into this very dark place with Trump and Musk and these other billionaires who have taken over the federal government.
CB: You are the Democratic whip in the Problem Solvers Caucus. How important is that caucus right now as Democrats try to persuade Republicans to vocalize opposition to DOGE and the cuts to federal jobs?
Landsman: There’s 435 members of Congress. You need 218 to pass legislation. You need a majority of that 435 and right now, we Democrats have 215 members and so Republicans are in the majority by a few votes, and the Problem Solvers Caucus has, I think, about 30 Democrats and 30 Republicans. These are the folks who are sort of considered center-left, center-right, who like to work on the big problems. Most of them are moderate, but it’s not like a moderate thing, it’s not like that’s the ideology. The ideology that sort of brings them together is that they want to be in the room to solve the problem. They don’t like the partisan bickering. That’s the makeup of that group, that if there’s going to be Republicans who say Trump and Musk have gone too far. Odds are one of those [Republicans] are going to say, you know what, let’s put some guard rails around this billionaire tech donor Elon Musk, who’s clearly trying to become the first trillionaire at our expense. He can’t access our data. New law, simple. He has to follow Freedom of Information Act laws and tell us what’s what he’s doing. Easy. Simple. Do it. He has to disclose all of his conflicts of interest, and then he has to stay away from anything that would be a conflict of interest. Simple, do it. That’s my hope with being in that group.
CB: Are you hearing criticism of Trump from Republicans on the Hill? Even on some of the more outlandish proposals, like “Trump Gaza” or making Canada the 51st state?
Landsman: They think it’s a joke, and it’s not funny. I think they’re going to realize that it’s not at all funny, and that whatever they find amusing about Donald Trump is irrelevant when it comes to the responsibility that we have to fix this. Canada is not going to be – I don’t even want to go down that path, because it’s just like, that’s what he wants. He wants us to talk about all of these other things while he’s literally hacked into the federal government with Musk, and they have caused significant damage day in and day out since he was given the chainsaw to destroy the parts of our government they don’t like.
CB: What are the downstream effects you see happening if the U.S. actually takes control of the Gaza Strip as Trump’s promised?
Landsman: Look, the path forward is, one, you got to get these hostages all out. That’s going to be critical to ending the war, not just temporarily, but ultimately. Two, you need a legitimate governing authority that everyone can work with in Gaza that’s led by Palestinians, that’s led by Gazans, that’s going to require a ton of work with Egypt and Jordan and the [United Arab Emirates] and Bahrain and hopefully the Saudis and all of these other Arab nations that have not been involved in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the way that we’ve all needed them to be. To be part of building up credible governing authorities in the West Bank and in Gaza, where you’re building schools and hospitals and roads and bridges and not tunnels, and you’re rooting out terrorism and corruption and getting to a place where that governing authority is able to sit down at a negotiating table. You have to have leaders who are committed to achieving it, and who are all in and working on it, as opposed to somebody who’s saying, ‘Oh, I’m gonna commit American troops to a third location. I might send them to Greenland. I might send American troops to Panama.’ He’s so cavalier about sending American troops to places. ‘Oh, I may send him to Gaza,’ which is in and of itself wrong to be that cavalier about American troops and how that works. It should be one of the last things that a president has to do is send American troops. He seems excited about it, as opposed to, well, this is our only option. I mean that in and of itself is problematic. His rhetoric is not helping. It’s not funny.
CB: Trump has joked about running for a third term, and a poster at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference was captioned “Third Term Project,” showing Trump’s face, albeit styled like Julius Caesar. As your party looks ahead to 2028, whether it’s – in a wild moment of Constitutional crisis – Trump as the candidate, or more likely, someone else in Trump’s vision, what kind of opposing candidate do you think is going to be able to pull off what Kamala Harris couldn’t?
Landsman: I think it’s an important question, and one obviously that, if you’re thoughtful about this and you want to and believe you have to fix this, which I do, you want to spend time thinking about. What is the best possible approach? I believe strongly that the most effective people in the end when it comes to fixing this will be the ones that have the most trust and credibility, and so being very vocal and honest about what’s happening is step one. I have been very, very vocal, doing every interview I can; local, national podcasts, doing the social media stuff that we’ve been doing, where I walk through in a way that does get attention. Because I’m sitting there, instead of yelling and screaming, I’m saying with credibility what is happening and why it is bad, and why it is going to hurt people. A lot of those videos will go viral, and it’s seen by millions of people, because there is a sort of a calmness to my approach. I’m betting on the fact that it’s not about being in the fight, that isn’t a question, it’s about how you show up in this fight. And are you going to be a person in the end that gets the people needed to stop this all on the same page, working together? Or are you alienating the people we need?
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This article appears in Feb 19 – Mar 4, 2025.