Who is Lee Zeldin?
Rep. Lee Zeldin is a Republican congressman from Long Island, N.Y., who has positioned himself as a staunch political supporter of President Donald Trump and the standard bearer for Republican support of Israel.
Zeldin is speaking in a primetime slot on Wednesday evening during the Republican National Convention.
He is currently one of two Jewish Republicans in the House of Representatives, is co-chair of the House Republican Israel Caucus, and one of several Jewish veterans serving in Congress. He served in the Army’s military intelligence unit from 2003 to 2007, and deployed to Iraq in the summer of 2006. Before joining the House he was a member of New York’s State Senate for two terms.
Zeldin joined the House in 2015, and emerged as a hawkish voice on Israel policy. He joined Trump’s fight to repeal then-President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. (Two-thirds of Jewish lawmakers backed the deal in 2015.)
Zeldin publicly supported Trump since May 2016, whom he endorsed after the then-candidate effectively clinched the Republican nomination. He has since supported Trump’s decision to kill DACA; defended Trump after his “both sides” comments on the violence in Charlottesville in 2017 and emerged as one of the most vocal critics in Congress of the impeachment probe.
Zeldin has, like many of his Republican colleagues, seized on talking points used by Trump about his rivals, such as suggesting that Joe Biden’s son was paid money by a corrupt Ukrainian company to influence Biden. According to fact-checkers and experts, Trump has repeatedly twisted the facts about Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine.
A corrupt Ukraine gas co run by a corrupt Ukraine oligarch hired Hunter Biden for $50k+ p/month to curry favor while VP Biden was running point for Ukraine in the Obama admin. VP Biden got the prosecutor investigating Hunter’s new co fired, threatening Ukraine w/the loss of $1B.
— Lee Zeldin (@RepLeeZeldin) August 21, 2020
The relationship goes both ways: After a hotly contested race in 2018, Zeldin beat his Democratic opponent by about four points [after getting an endorsement from Trump.(https://forward.com/fast-forward/411005/lee-zeldin-wins-trump-backing-in-close-long-island-congressional-race/) During the race, Zeldin accused his opponent, also Jewish, of defacing his own campaign sign with a swastika.
Zeldin’s support for Trump, and of Trump’s allies, is born of political calculation and personal temperament, according to observers and political analysts. Though the district twice voted for Obama, Trump won it by 10 points in 2016. Zeldin’s fate will be tied to how well he and the Republican party can motivate their base in the area to replicate 2016.
And as a former soldier, Zeldin values loyalty, much as Trump does.
“He’s a veteran. He has that code of honor: You don’t desert somebody,” Mike Dawidziak, a longtime pollster and political strategist who has worked on campaigns in the district for forty years, said in 2019.
Yet Zeldin has criticized the president at least once: When Trump said that Jewish Democrats were displaying “disloyalty” to Israel, Zeldin told JTA he did not like the term.
“It’s a word that I wouldn’t use, with a long history of being used by others who have a hatred towards Jews and Israel,” he said.
Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aefeldman
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO