Some of us "real" Kansans have always seen through Sen. Roger Marshall
Backstory on the Man Who Scampered Away from Oakley, Kansas
I’m mildly pleased that national Republicans are channeling Brave, Brave Sir Robin from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when it comes to town halls with their constituents.
It allows me to finally do something with the near-decade of clips I’ve compiled on a fellow named Roger Wayne Marshall, formerly my Congressman, now my US Senator. Marshall kinda-sorta kicked off the GOP panic when he boot-scooted out of an event he tried to keep on the down-low out in Oakley, KS, where my wife of three-plus decades grew up, and which I don’t need to find on a map because it’s literally right down the interstate from my house, albeit hours and hours away.
I’ve disliked Roger pretty much ever since I met him. He got into office because his predecessor, Rep. Tim Huelskamp, was such a doesn’t-play-well-with-others dick that he got kicked off both the Budget and Agriculture committees, and being on Ag is pretty much the whole reason the Big First District in Kansas sends anyone to Congress at all.
Marshall was a doctor, positioned himself as housetrained, and campaigned like a garden-variety Republican. These were the days when it was remotely possible to believe that sane, moderate, and patriotic Republicans might still exist or be possible in Kansas. Even Jason Probst, liberal and later state representative from Hutchinson, wrote that city paper’s editorial board endorsement of Marshall over Huelskamp, calling him “a pragmatic conservative who relies on his beliefs and principles as a point of reference to influence others in an effort to accomplish the important work that must be done in Congress.”
Of course, Probst is now out of the legislature, thanks to GOP bullshit, and it didn’t take long for many of us to realize Marshall was just Tim Huelskamp with table manners.
Well, more of us are catching on.
I met Marshall when he opened an office in my town, Salina, just a few blocks away from me. About 20 or more of us crammed into his lobby to ask him questions at his opening meet-and-greet. We quickly learned that if inauthenticity were bipedal, that’d be Roger.
At that reception, some questions and comments were blunt. One woman’s remarks included some slight either to Marshall’s intelligence or to the intelligence of one of his responses—I think the word “stupid” was in there somewhere.
That’s when we saw the flash of anger in his face, the entitlement, the barely-stifled urge to scream back and rage.
I haven’t polled the then-attendees, but I wager we all clocked it. I’ve heard folks describe him with analogies to doctors with God Complexes, lording it over nurses and all other health care professionals they work with. I often think of him like a eager-to-please pledge making his way up the ranks of the fraternity so he can be the one to enact the hazing and garner the adulation of other, weak-willed boys. The whole vibe would become nauseatingly common in Trump Term 1.0 and now Trump 2.0 among “men” in power.
Town Hall Debacle
Marshall’s face-plant in Oakley went national. I first saw Raw Story, then The Daily Beast, then CNN, then NBC’s Today Show pick it up. By then, other Republican electeds were catching hell from otherwise friendly audiences, thanks to Donald Trump’s enabling of Elon Musk’s grossly illegal destruction of state capacity actually beginning to make concrete sense in regular folks’ minds.
Marshall called the participants “rude” and claimed to be able to confirm Trump’s lie that his constituents were paid troublemakers:
Paid by whom? That’s where the usual far-right narrative kicks in. Speaker of the House, Christian Nationalist, and Jan. 6 enabler Mike Johnson has blamed constituent anger at the takeover and dismantling of the federal government by an unelected billionaire who bought Trump’s way into office this time around on … perpetual rich bogey-Jew George Soros!
As with so many of Roger Marshall’s firm statements, his claim that he could “confirm” Trump’s batshit propaganda melted the moment it was questioned.
What no one in the press accounts has done, as far as I can tell, is page back through Marshall’s town-hall and public-statement history.1 This is not the first time Kansans have gone round and round with Roger Marshall on these themes, with him making these same points.
While he received accolades for holding town halls back in 2017, the credit was quantitative: he held a lot of them. But when you go to Palco to talk to ten people, then Ashland, Syracuse, Lakin, Leoti, Dighton and Russell, well, yeah, even this lifelong Kansan has to get out a state map.
And in 2025, Marshall’s priorities are obvious. He effectively lives in Florida, not Kansas, and while he gave Oakley, KS, about 40 minutes of his time before running away at the “rudeness” of those peasants, just a week or two prior he was holding court for wealthy donors in his preferred state at the “Second Annual (Different Kind of) Retreat with Roger Marshall, M.D.”:
If you got the money, honey, Roger’s got more than enough time.
Qualitatively, Marshall’s tendency has been to carefully stage manage and control his appearances: show up when most folks are working (guaranteeing that his audience will be retired, self-employed or professional-flexible / boss-class … i.e., demographically inclined to be friendly supporters), stay for maybe an hour (which even in Kansas, isn’t enough time to hear more than a fraction of the concerns), book “commitments” to prevent lingering past the allocated time regardless of turnout and demand, disallow follow-up questions on the grounds of time constraints (ensuring that his non-answers, dodges, and pivots go unchallenged), and so on.
Visiting dinky towns is part of the plan: if a US Senator comes to your tiny burg, odds are you’re not going to get uppity with the guy who deigns to drop in. It’s celebrity culture, and completely apart from the huge redness of especially rural areas of Kansas, folks here are both pretty neighborly to special guests and frustratingly subservient suckers for any politician with a significant official title.
So what happened in Oakley, KS, is actually a pretty big deal.
Marshall is the guy who said, “What makes this party great is we give choices. We can disagree, and the disagreement leads to greater decision making process. And this president welcomes that disagreement. [!] He welcomes that banter back and forth.”
He said, “I do try to put on my physician hat every day and listen to the problems through everyone’s set of eyes and not just my set of eyes. I try to figure out how it impacts people….I’m not the person who is going to stand up and argue with anybody or judge you. This is your time to ask questions and make a statement.”
But when citizens pay attention to the stuff coming out of Marshall’s mouth and find it disagreeable or mind-bogglingly … well, whack … and do the work to track him down at one of his town halls to confront him about it, he drops that friendly, country doctor facade.
He did it on Christian Nationalist radio as early as May of 2017, after a Wamego, KS, town hall where he received significant pushback, Marshall dissed the attendees as unAmerican: “We still salute the flag. We still pray when we get the chance. We pray before ball games. And Wamego was the exception.”
This was the first time Marshall accused his detractors of being paid protestors and hailing from outside his district. It was another case of Marshall talking out his ass, arguing that the presence of out-of-state license plates in the parking lot of the venue “proved” his claim, despite Wamego’s proximity to Ft. Riley, home of the US Army’s 1st Infantry Division, which “hosts approximately 15,000 active-duty service members and more than 18,000 family members. The area is also home to nearly 30,000 veterans, retirees and 5, 600 civilian employees who work at the post.”2
Did Marshall retract the claim? Not that I know, probably because the slander didn’t go viral and national, and that’s probably why so many are surprised today as Marshall trots out the same, now-eight-year-old libel to slap on the folks who showed up in Oakley, KS.
What slays me is stuff even more oblique in Roger Marshall’s record: while he craps on the legitimacy of the concerns of folks not born and raised in Wamego or Oakley when they show up to ask him questions, he has bragged about his compassionate medical care as an obstetrics provider who accepted Medicaid to folks whose patients had to travel over a hundred miles to reach him.
I guess they weren’t “real” patients.
Even as early as Roger Marshall’s first national splash / gaffe / scandal, he was being called out for treating some Kansans as not his concern.
The Poor Will Always Be With You
It was March 3, 2017, only a few months after the country doctor (really, a hospital administrator with his own wannabe “boutique” OB practice) became a member of Congress, when STAT News’ Lev Facher published his interview with Roger Marshall, in which Marshall explained why he so hated the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid:
The law’s Medicaid expansion, which Kansas has not adopted despite support from many hospitals, including some of Marshall’s former colleagues, is one of the big sticking points for Republicans. Many GOP-led states adopted it and want to see it preserved in some form.
Marshall doesn’t believe it has helped, an outlook that sheds light on how this new player in Washington understands health policy.
“Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us,’” he said. “There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.”
Pressed on that point, Marshall shrugged.
“Just, like, homeless people. … I think just morally, spiritually, socially, [some people] just don’t want health care,” he said. “The Medicaid population, which is [on] a free credit card, as a group, do probably the least preventive medicine and taking care of themselves and eating healthy and exercising. And I’m not judging, I’m just saying socially that’s where they are. So there’s a group of people that even with unlimited access to health care are only going to use the emergency room when their arm is chopped off or when their pneumonia is so bad they get brought [into] the ER.”
People went nuts over this, and rightly so.
The poor don’t want healthcare. Homeless people don’t want healthcare. They don’t take care of themselves. They don’t eat quinoa. They don’t have gym memberships. They don’t use their Pelotons. Probably don’t regularly use their Philips Sonicare 9900 Prestige Rechargeable Electric Toothbrush with SenseIQ ($399.99 at BestBuy) after every meal in a responsible dental care regimen. Those fucking parasites. I’m not judging. I’m just saying socially that’s where they are.
Rob Freelove, a family physician who does good work in my town for low-income patients, responded:
As family physicians, we care for low-income, underinsured, Medicaid recipients and the uninsured every day. They are our neighbors. They are Rep. Marshall’s constituents. He was elected to represent all residents in his district, not just those in upper-income brackets; not just those with health insurance, and not just those who voted for him.
Even Jonathan Chait busted Marshall’s argument: “the overwhelming weight of studies suggests eligibility for Medicaid makes people physically, mentally, and financially better off.” Moreover, he noted that if Marshall were right about the poor and homeless not seeking medical help when ill, they wouldn’t burden Medicaid systems, apart from the human suffering, there’d be no fiscal or logistical cost to taxpayers under that program for these folks.
But Marshall wasn’t right, as Aaron Rupar noted at ThinkProgress on March 3, 2017:
…a Harvard School of Public Health study published last summer shows that Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion resulted in improved health for low-income adults — and fewer ER visits.
“Two years after Medicaid coverage was expanded under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in their states, low-income adults in Kentucky and Arkansas received more primary and preventive care, made fewer emergency departments visits, and reported higher quality care and improved health compared with low-income adults in Texas, which did not expand Medicaid, according to a new study led by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health,” a summary of the study says. “The findings provide new evidence for states that are debating whether to expand or how to expand coverage to low-income adults.”
Other studies examining the effects of providing Medicaid coverage to more impoverished people have found similar results.
Marshall scrambled to retcon his flub (or Kinsley gaffe):
In defending himself, Marshall said he was trying to explain that creating a national health care policy focused on “one segment of the population” does not work because of various peoples’ needs, according to the Washington Post. “When I said, ‘the poor will always be with us,’ it was actually in the context of supporting the obligation we have to always take care of people, but we cannot completely craft a larger, affordable health-care policy around a comparatively small segment of the population who will get care no matter what,” Marshall said in a statement.
This is absolutely nothing like what he actually said to STAT News, which, again, pressed him further on the initial Bible stuff precisely because it sounded so bananapants crazy for a Congressman to say: The poor don’t want healthcare = We will always have an obligation to take care of people. Orwell would be impressed.
By July of 2017, Marshall was back to not really caring about Medicaid at all. First, he uses a technicality to dodge a constituent’s question and concern:
Jackie Borth of Montezuma asked Marshall if he would vote against other bills that cut Social Security, Medicaid or Medicare, pointing to a campaign promise of President Donald Trump.
“I never heard him (Trump) say he wouldn’t touch Medicaid,” Marshall responded to some protests from Borth. “I heard him say he wouldn’t touch Medicare and Social Security.”
Then he completely shrugs off the impact of Medicaid:
Jeff Borth, an independent voter from Montezuma, said he was concerned about how Medicaid cuts in the Senate Republican health care bill would affect nursing homes and hospitals in towns like Montezuma and Meade.
“That’s going to affect small, rural communities,” he said. “If that goes away, which most likely it would, that means half the people that work there are going to be out of a job.”
Marshall, a physician, said he thought it would have “very minimal impact” because many doctors don’t accept Medicaid.
“It’s such a hassle for so little reimbursement,” Marshall said. “Medicaid is so broken I would love to be able to start over with it.”
Even in 2017, when my old college friend Juno Ogle3 showed him April Gallup numbers indicating the Affordable Care Act was supported by 55 percent of those polled, up thirteen points in the last six months, his attempted pivot was simply brainless:
Forty percent said they would like to see the ACA kept in place with significant changes, while only 30 percent preferred to repeal and replace the measure.
“I think it’s one piece of data, one point,” Marshall said when asked if that would change his view.
If we flash forward to 2025, we have a pretty decent reason for people to be upset with Roger Marshall, completely aside from Elon Musk screwing over veterans, even in deep red communities in Kansas:
A total of 82% of those polled said that Congress should keep spending on Medicaid about the same or increase it. While the support was highest among Democrats and independents, 67% of Republicans polled said they believe government funding for the program should stay about the same or increase.
An overwhelming number of those polled, 96%, said Medicaid is important to their community. Ninety-five percent of Trump supporters responded that Medicaid is either very important or somewhat important.
But being upset with Marshall kinda depends on remembering what he’s said and done in the past. I know, in a way it’s hard to miss the fact that he built his rep on the ceaseless cry of repealing “Obamacare,” but folks have short memories. This guy hates Medicaid. He has bonkers and elitist ideas about poor people.
But after losing a voice on the Agriculture Committee for the first time in 150 years, Kansas needed someone, right? And surely Marshall would be good and faithful there, right? Right?
Crop Insurance
Despite recent inflation, despite today’s ballyhooed “price of eggs” (which the GOP wants everyone to shut up about suddenly), Americans comparatively enjoy cheap food per capita, thanks largely to an established governmental commitment to that end.
In 2017, newly-minted Congress-critter Marshall called crop insurance “integral to delivering food at a reasonable cost.” Without it, farming becomes riskier and more costly to the farmers.
Crop insurance helps shoulder some of the production risk and that is good for consumers. He frames it in the context of thinking of a single mother with several kids and having a stable cost for food is necessary for her to make her budget work.
“That’s the person who will get hit hard,” he said.
Why was this a topic back in 2017? Because Trump “proposed a 36 percent cut over a decade in the federal subsidized crop insurance program and a premium cap of $40,000.”
By February 2018, then-Kansas Senator Pat Roberts called out Trump for breaking a June promise to leave crop insurance alone. Instead, Trump’s budget would have cut the average premium subsidy for crop insurance from 62 percent to 48 percent. This was back when we all still believed Congress, and not Elon Musk, held the power of the purse—“but the proposal does lay out the administration’s priorities in terms of budget cuts and spending.”
Roberts secured that broken promise after he and Sen. Jerry Moran got pissed at Trump’s clueless audacity and pushed back. From May 2017:
Two of farmers’ most powerful Republican advocates in the Senate slammed President Donald Trump’s proposal Tuesday to slash crop insurance, warning those and other budget cuts would badly wound one of the president’s most loyal constituencies….
Kansas Sens. Pat Roberts, who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Jerry Moran, who helps set federal spending levels as a member of the Senate’s Appropriations Committee, vowed to fight the president’s plan to cut crop insurance by $28.5 billion over 10 years. That’s a 36 percent cut, significantly more than former President Barack Obama ever proposed.
A visibly annoyed Roberts called the cuts “not viable” and “very troubling” for Kansas.
“We’ve had a freeze, and we’ve had a historic prairie fire, and then we had another freeze and we've lost about 40 percent of the wheat crop,” he said. “How on earth of those farmers supposed to stay in business without crop insurance?”
While our Senators were fighting for the program, Marshall decided to pivot away from the “integral” crop insurance, probably because Trump had signaled his dislike for it.
Congressman Roger Marshall says he opposes the cuts and will fight to keep them funded at current levels, but it’s not a deal breaker for him.
“No ultimatums,” said Marshall. “I have to look at the whole picture of the whole budget, but what I’m hopeful we can do is talk about just the agriculture budget and vote on it.”
Marshall says he is instead looking at other factors that are hurting farmers.
“I think the biggest problem we have in agriculture is the commodity prices themselves, and all the crop insurance in the world isn’t going to fix the commodity prices.”
Marshall is looking at ways to increase farmers’ revenues rather than cover their losses.
“It’s all about the price of wheat, the price of cattle, and what can I do to improve it.”
He believes at this point, trade deals are more important that the farm bill.
“It’s very important,” he said about the farm bill, “but I’m not worried about it, versus trade is in a state of disarray, and we need to be focused on that.”
Marshall hopes to address the low commodity prices by finding more customers, like in China.
“We’ll start selling beef there in July for the first time in over a decade,” he said. “Obviously it’s a huge market.”
Maybe he was spineless. Maybe he read the writing on the wall before old-timers Moran and Roberts who probably believed in the whole separation of powers stuff. But we certainly can see Roger Marshall shifting with whatever winds Donald Trump emitted. If he couldn’t sell voters on his own strength, character, arguments, sincerity … he could always rely on their devotion to the Donald.
Trade, Trade Wars, Tariffs
Marshall justified his second term in Congress on protecting farmers from "bad trade deals that could hurt the very markets they rely on to make a living." China's decision to start importing US beef was so important to him that he thought it should serve to "balance" out the Mueller investigation coverage, which, of course, Marshall called a "witch hunt." He was "thrilled" with NAFTA 2.0 / USMCA, said "over and over again, our farmers need certainty, and solidifying this deal with Mexico is a crucial piece to the puzzle.” Of course, USMCA was barely a change from NAFTA 1.0, but you'd never know this from Marshall.
Seven years ago, Marshall was so into trade and NAFTA that he was kissing Mexican trade delegations full on the mouth and saying things like, "…we must make changes that INCREASE market access for American businesses. That means reducing tariffs and other trade barriers, as well as agreements that provide certainty for businesses."
But Trump had other ideas, starting a trade war imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico, European countries, and China, which Marshall called a "mess." For once, you could almost believe what Roger was saying:
That’s the reason they’ve announced the $12 billion program to make farmers whole. It’s been quite a roller-coaster ride. People don’t realize how hard agriculture has worked over the last years to open new markets. It’s easier to keep a good customer than to get a new one. Going forward, we may have lost customers forever. The $12 billion is just scratching the surface.
The $12 billion, of course, was a”special government welfare package specifically for farmers” to shield them from the impact of Trump's trade war. Another $16 billion followed in 2019.
When the government (Trump) has a tantrum and starts a trade war, then hands out $28 billion in welfare stay-loyal money to the farmers he screwed, Marshall calls this "making farmers whole," as if this were a kind of reparation after a natural disaster, just another form of crop insurance, except this disaster was a man-made twister, a freely chosen act to just fuck up trade relations with Mexico (2016: bought 30% of Kansas ag exports, per Marshall ) and Canada (2017 exports from Kansas were over $2.5 billion).
What did Marshall say to and about the affected farmers? That
they're such great patriots … they're willing to accept this short-term pain in hopes of long-term gain…They realize we cannot keep doing what we’ve been doing, so on the one hand, they certainly say, 'My gosh, please get these agreements done as soon as possible,' but yet, they support the president."
Jump to today. Now that Trump is instituting, revoking, threatening, then delaying, who-knows? tariffs with a mania in his second administration, Marshall is playing his old hits, recycling the same lines he trotted out from his days in the House. Here he is on March 4:
Even though Canada and Mexico were the number one trade partners for Kansas agriculture, I think that my farmers are willing to be patriots and stand beside President Trump to make their families safer.
Last time around, the tariffs were supposed to ensure new markets and better terms. This time, the tariffs are supposed to keep Kansas families safe from “bad hombres” out of Mexico and “bad hommes” down from Canada. (More on that later.)
But this isn’t what town hall participants in the state he pretends to call home are saying. And it’s no wonder: farmers were not made whole after the last trade war, despite the billions paid out, thanks to what Roger was actually correct about: customers don’t like radical uncertainty from petulant heads of state mucking about in supply chains, so they take their business elsewhere.
But even with those payments, farmers still absorbed heavy losses.
“Iowa farmers are in for tough times, we've seen this before,” said Anne Villamil, an economics professor at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business. “Under the first Trump administration, there were tariffs in 2018 and then, even after government aid, it reduced revenue to $1.1 to $1.7 billion.”
Trump’s latest tariffs, set to take effect April 2, impose duties on foreign agricultural imports, including crops coming into the U.S. from China, Mexico, and Canada. In response, China has placed new tariffs on U.S. corn, soybeans, pork, beef, wheat, and other goods.
…Villamil, however, cautioned that trade wars create uncertainty, which hurts businesses beyond farming.
“The U.S. imposed tariffs on other countries unilaterally, and other countries, understandably, are retaliating,” Villamil said. “It seems to be the nature of the current Trump policies to involve sudden stops, and that is very disruptive to business.”
She pointed to the soybean market in 2018, when China cut purchases from U.S. farmers and increased imports from Brazil and Argentina instead. That shift, she said, may now be permanent, and it's possible U.S. farmers may never those markets back.
“China was the largest buyer of U.S. soybeans at the time, a third of the crop,” Villamil said. “China cut back. And this is a key point. It’s substituted to Brazil and Argentina.
Back in 2018, Marshall said of the tariffs, “I have to believe that the long-term gain is worth it.”
Marshall had to believe this, you see. Because it was a requirement of his particular religion, his faith, his bargain: he was positioning himself as a complete Yes-Man to whatever Donald Trump said, did, or signaled, Kansas constituents be damned. The irony here stems from something Marshall wrote—or had written for him—the same month for Fox News.
Ranting against Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the topic of Medicare For All, Marshall claims MFA would make the country’s health care system look like the “last 25 years of the Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals”—and we know from Roger’s recent town hall running-away that he is very sincere in his deep care for the fate of the country’s veterans.
But he concludes his piece with these words:
At its core, socialism is a pseudo-religious belief that big-government central planning can take what it wants and give what it wants.
Sort of like taking away the stability of international commodity deals and giving out chaos and ultimately inadequate farm welfare to paper over your betrayal.
And pseudo-religion? That’s the Trump-worship Roger Marshall has decided to practice instead of faithful representation of his constituents and their interests.
Immigration
In April 2017, Marshall met with a group of high school students in Garden City, KS, a high-immigrant community.
Marshall asked the students what their concerns are with immigration.
One concerns raised was the prospect of children being separated from their families if their parents are deported. Senior Amanda Serafin said that could have a snowball effect because then those children would have to go to an orphanage.
No response from Marshall recorded to that. Sure would be relevant to know in 2025, after the RNC was plastered with MASS DEPORTATION NOW placards.
Asked why citizenship takes so long to get, Marshall blamed bureaucrats.
“Leaders make the complicated simple,” he said. “We have professional politicians who have developed this policy. They make it so hard that no one understands it. They just make it next to impossible to get it done.”
Such a pat answer, fitting for a guy running on deregulation, not so much so for a Trump supporter back then (“They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”), and really hard to square with Trump 2.0 where birthright citizenship is deemed to be a mistake.
By June, Marshall was said to have “broken ranks” with Trump on immigration. How? By timidly doubting the feasibility of “the Wall” and expressing compassion for DACA recipients.
Young kids that were brought here, my heart pours out to them,” he said. “My own son Cal texted me at 2 in the morning to ask me if the girl he took to the prom last year was going to get shipped back home, through no fault of her own. It certainly hit close to home for me. So I do think we have to have compassion.
A year later, with kids literally in cages, Marshall claimed said children were, well, you have to read it to believe it:
A very large number of these children in captivity are not the children of parents, but they are imposters.
Not the children of parents. Maybe very diminutive clones. Whatever they were, they weren’t real.
That said, the night before this story ran, Marshall was on “All In with Chris Hayes” claiming that Trump deeply cares about separated children … even if they’re fake.
HAYES: I asked a simple – I ask a simple question and the question was this which I’d like you to answer if possible. If the President was upset about separating children, why did he put a policy in place and separated children, not tell the truth about that being his policy, and then stick to it for six weeks while 2,600 children were separated and not change until an outcry happened?
MARSHALL: I think he was trying to keep his priorities straight which is exactly what he did and he’s continuing to do that. He’s – if you would just know the President’s heart the way I know it, he loves children. You saw what happened in Syria when the children were bombed with chemical weapons and how his heart response to this. The President’s intention was never to hurt families, his intention was always national security and border security. And now we had the situation arise and he’s addressing it now.
Or, as Marshall told one constituent:
I absolutely think that he's a brilliant person, and he's a great leader. He's taken the country in the right direction, and his heart is just golden. Nobody is more upset than the president is about children being separated from their parents. You think back to Syria and those bombings and how his heart was moved to see those children being attacked by chemotherapy.
Yes, attacked by chemotherapy. He really said that. Beyond this, however, we have the fake kids who cannot be separated from their parents because they’re imposters, but they also break Trump’s golden heart. And because nobody is allowed to follow-up when it’s Roger Marshall “answering” questions, he was still trying to square these circles a month later:
We can have both border security and compassion. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive. We can do both,” he said. “I think we can achieve border security, have compassion for people and take care of the biggest economic challenge facing Kansas, which is a lack of skilled…
[he meant unskilled]
…labor.
I agree 110 percent with President Trump that we need border security, for a lot of reasons, whether it’s drug trafficking, human trafficking, gangs, terrorists, all those reasons, we need border security.
So, have compassion, but also be terrified of drug smugglers, human traffickers, gangs, and terrorists.
By December 2018, Marshall was lying out his ass to scare people about Mexican terrorists, with no sign of the compassionate doctor to be seen. As Christopher Reeves wrote:
When it comes to defending popular vote loser President Donald J. Trump, I’ve heard a lot of outlandish claims. But few rise to the level of complete delusion like Congressman Roger Marshall, who appeared on MSNBC Thursday morning proclaiming that we stop “over ten terrorists” every day at the border with Mexico. That’s more than 3,650 terrorists per year, and easily more than 7,000 for the duration Trump presidency, even giving these terrorist-catching Border Patrol employees a few holidays and weekends off.
Mike Barnicle, obviously wondering where the heck these stats are coming from, poses the question at 2:54: “Where are these terrorists being held?” After all, a sudden influx of 7,000+ new inmates into the jail or prison systems, who are terrorists, would certainly be a major budget item.
Marshall responds: “I’m not saying they all made it across the border, but they would be in our jails.”
It gets worse. At 3:40 into the interview, Congressman Marshall notes that “Unfortunately we’ve had terrorist activity in Kansas.” What kind of terrorist activity? Was it people crossing the border to do harm? NOPE. The terrorism was homegrown, as written up by The Huffington Post:
Three right-wing militiamen from rural Kansas were found guilty on Wednesday in a plot to slaughter Muslim refugees living in an apartment complex in Garden City.
Patrick Stein, Gavin Wright and Curtis Allen were found guilty on charges of weapons of mass destruction and conspiracy against civil rights. Wright was also found guilty on a charge of lying to the FBI. The defendants will face a potential life sentence.
To recap: we have to just cut the red tape to allow folks to become citizens more easily, and DACA kids elicit his heartfelt sympathy … but there are no “real” kids in cages at the border because they’re all imposters … but Trump loves them all anyway because he has a golden heart—just look at those attacked with chemotherapy … and we need compassion as well as skilled—er, unskilled—workers in our fields, but we have to keep out the nefarious hordes of evil-doers who threaten our very lives … like terrorists who are coming in droves, only that’s just something Marshall heard and can’t prove, and the numbers defy all reason, and the example he cites is right-wing white-boy terror.
And today? Well, the justification for tariffs is the evil-doers from Mexico and Canada. Because fentanyl.
Or because human trafficking endangering our womenfolk and young girls? The Trump team arranged the release from Romania of Andrew Tate and his brother to … the US.
No word on this from Roger Marshall.
What Else?
Oh, there’s so much, really.4
Trump has a huge heart and is basically our national Daddy:
I think President Trump has a huge heart and his primary job as president is to protect this country. When you are a father and your children are threatened, you take it up a notch to protect your children, and your mothers are the same way.
He doesn’t believe in climate change.
He endorsed Kris Kobach for governor of Kansas. Besides being an incompetent attorney, Kobach wants to “compassionately” hold undocumented jaywalkers for ICE to deport. He’s also a scam artist, vote supressor, and supremacist.
Naturally, after noting he’s a father of a daughter and has “cared for tens of thousands of women” as an OB/GYN, he responded to the infamous “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape by saying he would “reluctantly continue to support” Trump. No sign of “reluctance” in any of his gushing remarks or policy flip-flops at any point after the 2016 election, of course. He just had to go on record to disingenuously create the illusion of distance from that scandal when reporters called.
Of course, he also claims things like this:
I have never heard of a girl being disrespected in her locker room when she said no,” Marshall said. “For boys, show self-respect and show restraint and girls, just say no. Get involved in groups that will make a difference within the Pro-Life movement.
Lying? Sheltered? Well, he did say her locker room, not the boys’ locker room, so maybe he was being crafty.
Despite his hatred of the Affordable Care Act, he cut his Senate campaign costs by leaving his campaign team to rely on the ACA and Uberfied them all: classifying them as independent contractors rather than employees, thus freeing the campaign from having to provide them health benefits or pay payroll taxes.
He was a fan of hydroxychloroquine during COVID, taking it himself and boosting the drug by example and in public statements.
While he praised the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act and claimed it as the reason for “Record unemployment, Record wages. Record economic growth. Record stock market” I found no such praise for Biden’s economic numbers, which outstripped all of the first Trump administration’s on these metrics. I guess he just like the transfer of wealth to billionaires.
His sycophancy seems conditional, of course, based as it is on Goldenheart’s erratic whims. Here he is simply gushing over Trump’s decision to name Mike Pompeo Secretary of State.
Pompeo (who is trash) became a target of an Iranian assassination scheme in 2022, and in retribution for less-than slavering subservience, Trump revoked Pompeo’s security detail two days after being sworn in for his second term. After such praise for Pompeo, not a peep of protest could I find from now-Senator Marshall on behalf of his old Wheat-State comrade.
Back in 2018, Marshall beamed with pride “that national security has improved during his time in Congress,” bragging that “I don’t think NATO has ever been as strong as it is right now.” In 2025, he serves at the feet of Trump and/or Elon Musk, who have effectively rejected NATO in every way short of formal withdrawal, siding with Russia over the European allies and anyone else who might previously have depended on at least stable self-interest on the part of a sane United States.
Little remembered now, but it was 2017 when Trump first floated the idea of privatizing air traffic control, a concept lethally relevant in 2025 with the horrifically unqualified Sean Duffy as our transportation secretary, planes crashing for the first time in a decade, Elon Musk’s companies ousting FAA contractors for that sweet slurp at the tax-dollar trough, and Musk’s rockets blowing up and disrupting hundreds of flights with falling debris.
Back when the notion was first proposed, Sen. Jerry Moran noted correctly that “Airports across Kansas without exception would be damaged by the privatization of aircraft control.” Rep. Marshall basically shrugged off the issue as “a place to start.”
And if you want to go way back, maybe to do some time-travel fantasizing, here’s the only press story I could find on how Roger Marshall managed to bury his battery and reckless driving charges, something rumored about for a long while, and something that, had the good ol’ boy network not intervened to spare him consequences, might have kept Doc Marshall out of office altogether.
The man has skated on cluelessness, image, non-answers, and pique for two terms as a Congressman and now a term in the Senate. The evidence has been there, but resources to look and dig largely haven’t. What’s really been lacking is a motive to question the dorkily-dressing Doc, since he coasted in on the early Trumpist enthusiasm.
But now that Trump has decided to move fast and break things, like state capacity, the Constitutional separation of powers with its checks and balances, and countless people’s lives and health and safety … maybe even Trump country will wake up and take out its ire on his lickspittles, assuming we get to have remotely legitimate elections going forward.
I get it. This stuff is tedious, the country’s afire. I stopped bothering to keep tabs on Roger about the time he got into the Senate, and even this much poring through the archives has been a sad and time-consuming exercise in crap other Kansans should have seen in real time and spared us from having to deal with by de-electing this doofus. But no.
An observation made by Sage TeBeest, a Facebook friend of mine and now former Kansan. I think we’ve met in person once, maybe twice. Just full disclosure. Far as I know, neither of us has ever been paid by George Soros.
Juno wrote for our college paper and then became a longtime reporter for the Hays Daily News. She since decamped to report in the southwest, some place I do need a map to find, because I’m not from there, and I already did too much looking up to write this piece as it is.
I really stopped bothering with Marshall after he won his Senate seat. Senators are too entrenched to bring down in Kansas, usually. I figured the best chance to influence him to be normal and decent—or to derail his future ambitions—was while he was just a Representative. Plus COVID hit, and we all tread that water while time became unstable. Sometimes sanity requires picking battles. I’m just glad to be able to give this context now, so future researchers (maybe aliens) might recover some more complete record of one of the more obscure bastards who helped ruin the country.
As a former patient of Marshall, I can tell you this is exactly who he is. I dreaded going to him because his reputation expediently proceeded him. I was one of those Medicaid patients that he “didn’t judge” which is absolutely horse sh*t. He was rude, dismissive, arrogant, snarky, and at times, just straight mean. He told me to go to the hospital when I was in full blown labor “And that means straight to the hospital. Don’t go to McDonalds and get 3 cheeseburgers first”
That there are people who vote for people like this guy is depressing. I worry that my anti-depressant meds aren’t strong enough any more