MAGA Rep. Troy Nehls brushed off a question about “affordability” by bragging about his expensive July 4 feast.
“How do House Republicans make the case that you’re fighting for affordability when you go back to your districts?” reporter Pablo Manríquez of Migrant Insider asked Nehls on Tuesday.
“Affordability? What’re you talking about?” the 58-year-old Texas congressman replied.
“I’m gonna go there tomorrow, well over the Fourth. I’m gonna get me a couple of big lobster tails, I’m gonna get me some nice ribeyes. I’m gonna sit in my backyard with my family, my neighbors, and we’re going to be enjoying the Fourth, celebrating 250 years,” he boasted.
Manríquez then pressed Nehls further, asking, “You think 60 percent of Americans who are living paycheck to paycheck can afford lobster tails and ribeyes and all that?”
“Maybe not,” Nehls said. “Maybe the 60 percent of Americans don’t work as hard as I do either. I mean, I don’t know.”
Nehls, who earns $174,000 per year as a House member, will not return to Washington for work until July 13, as they break for the July 4th holiday. Congress is also off for nearly the entire month of August for its annual summer recess. The House is also out of session for nearly the entire month of October.
Nehls, who was sworn in to Congress in 2021, is not seeking re-election in the 2026 midterm elections.
Since arriving on Capitol Hill, he quickly emerged as one of President Donald Trump’s most unwavering supporters.
He has echoed the president’s false narrative that the 2020 election was rigged, and has advocated for renaming Washington, D.C.’s Dulles International Airport after Trump. In 2023, he even said he would support naming Trump Speaker of the House, at a time when the House GOP was in a speaker stalemate due to party infighting.
“Donald Trump is the best thing to happen in this country in a hundred years. He was born a very special baby. I bet you the doctors said, ‘I can tell this is a very special baby,’” he proclaimed earlier this month, and was promptly mocked for it.
In April, just one week after Easter, Nehls likened Trump to Jesus Christ, declaring that the current president was “almost the second coming.”
