ICYMI: New York Times Highlights Lee Zeldin’s Long Standing Relationship with Donald Trump

Highlights from the story below:

New York Times: Zeldin Built His Profile Defending Trump. Will New Yorkers Mind?
By Nicholas Fandos, 10/19/22

On the day the U.S. Capitol was ransacked, as police officers were still counting the injured and stunned lawmakers emerged from hiding, Representative Lee Zeldin of New York walked into the Rotunda, held up a shaky camera and went live on Fox News.

Other Republican leaders had already begun distancing the party from President Donald J. Trump, whose monthslong campaign to overturn his election loss helped incite the violence. But that evening, Mr. Zeldin sounded all but ready to exonerate him. 

“This isn’t just about the president of the United States,” he said, referring to what prompted the riot that he condemned. “This is about people on the left and their double standards.”

The comments — blaming Democrats and “rogue state actors,” not Mr. Trump, for undermining confidence in the election — drew little attention at the time. Soon after, Mr. Zeldin would join 146 other Republicans in seeking to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in key states. 

Two years later, though, as Mr. Zeldin seeks to become governor of New York, the episode has come to illustrate what may be his greatest political liability: a well-documented, yearslong alliance with a former president many New Yorkers consider a pariah. […]

But there is perhaps no other major candidate as deeply associated with Mr. Trump and his campaign of election lies who is seriously contesting a state that has so thoroughly rejected the former president.

Mr. Zeldin, 42, was among the first congressmen to treat Mr. Trump’s bid for president with credibility, praising his foreign policy 14 months before the 2016 election. He defended Mr. Trump when fellow Republicans accused him of racism. He volunteered to help lead the president’s impeachment defense. And after the president left office, he voted to block the creation of an independent commission to investigate Jan. 6.

The relationship came with clear payoffs that helped build Mr. Zeldin’s profile ahead of a run against Gov. Kathy Hochul, the Democratic incumbent. Records assembled by The New York Times show a sharp uptick in Mr. Zeldin’s appearances on Fox News, where conservative stars are made and grass-roots donations are seeded. Mr. Trump gave him a prime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention. And a coterie of former presidential aides and relatives helped woo big donors. […]

The governor has made the Trump-Zeldin relationship a centerpiece of her campaign, spending millions of dollars on ads trying to tie her opponent to Mr. Trump’s “extreme and dangerous” agenda.

That strategy has made some Republicans anxious that it could undercut their best shot at the governor’s mansion in two decades.

“Embracing Trump. Not a winning strategy,” George E. Pataki, the state’s last Republican governor, told The New York Post after Mr. Zeldin turned to Mr. Trump for help raising money and floated a possible campaign appearance earlier this fall. […]

But Mr. Zeldin’s pivot has only gone so far. He has pointedly declined to directly criticize or denounce Mr. Trump.

Political analysts said the awkward middle ground reflected Mr. Zeldin’s challenges in assembling a winning coalition. Doing more would risk attracting Mr. Trump’s ire and potentially depress Republican turnout. […]

But there may be another, simpler impediment: Almost a decade of history, recorded in media interviews, social media posts and votes, makes it hard to obscure the political bond.

The alliance stretches back to Mr. Zeldin’s first successful campaign for Congress in 2014, when the New York real estate developer cut him two $1,000 checks and promoted him in a robocall. “Nobody better,” Mr. Trump said on the call. “Very conservative.”

When Mr. Trump’s entrance into the political arena began roiling Republican politics, Mr. Zeldin quickly grasped his potential: “Americans want candid, brutally honest, sometimes politically incorrect leadership,” he told ABC News in September 2015.

He also showed early on that he was willing to overlook Mr. Trump’s flaws, and echo his tactics. The following June, Mr. Trump accused a Mexican American judge of bias because of his heritage. Paul D. Ryan, the Republican House speaker then, called it “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

Mr. Zeldin, who by then had endorsed Mr. Trump, tried to turn the accusation onto Democrats.

“You can easily argue that the president of the United States is a racist with his policies and his rhetoric,” he said on CNN, referring to then-President Barack Obama.

But it was not until late 2019, after House Democrats began impeaching the president for a political pressure campaign on Ukraine, that Mr. Zeldin actively moved toward Mr. Trump’s inner circle.

He began meeting with a small cohort of right-wing bomb throwers, like Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mark Meadows of North Carolina, to plot a presidential defense strategy. He spent 12-hour days cross-examining diplomats who testified, and raced to television cameras to flay Democrats, with Trumpian flair, as “a joke.” […]

His decision-making around Mr. Trump’s drive to overturn the 2020 election may prove more consequential.

At nearly every turn, Mr. Zeldin sided with Republicans who were amplifying doubts about its legitimacy. A month after the election, he signed onto a Texas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to throw out results in key swing states, previewing his Jan. 6 votes.

Recently disclosed records show that shortly after the election, Mr. Zeldin worked behind the scenes to pass along ideas to Mr. Meadows, who had become White House chief of staff, about how Mr. Trump could better make his case. […]