Representative Nick LaLota of New York's First Congressional District announced on Saturday that he is endorsing former president Donald Trump's campaign for president.
"As a Navy Veteran and member of both the Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, I understand America needs a Commander-in-Chief who will keep us safe," Mr. LaLota, a Republican, wrote on X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter. "Under President Biden's failed leadership, our border is wide open, [Vladimir] Putin, Xi [Jinping], and Iran have been emboldened, and families are struggling to put food on the table."
The former president's policies, Mr. LaLota wrote, "made our nation stronger and had us on track to prosperity." The congressman wrote that he looks forward "to him cleaning up the mess President Biden created."
In an interview last month, Mr. LaLota, a freshman congressman who is seeking re-election this year, would neither endorse a candidate for president nor discuss Mr. Trump. "I have not waded into presidential politics, and I don't intend to do so anytime soon," he told The Star.
He is the first "Biden-district Republican" — a House Republican elected in a district won by President Biden in 2020 — to endorse the former president, who appears poised to be the Republican Party's nominee for president for the third consecutive election, this time while under indictment and facing multiple trials for attempting to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat, taking classified national defense documents and resisting government efforts to retrieve them, and falsifying business records to conceal a hush-money payment to an adult film actress.
In recent weeks the former president has also attended two civil trials, one regarding business fraud for which he has already been found liable, the other to determine damages he owes to the journalist and author E. Jean Carroll for defamatory statements he made after she claimed that he had raped her in the 1990s.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee issued a statement on Sunday in which a spokeswoman said that with his endorsement Mr. LaLota was "closing the loop on his dutiful and inevitable alignment with the most far-right members of the Republican Party."
In Congress, Mr. LaLota "has prioritized extremism over Suffolk families by backtracking on campaign promises, voting to restrict abortion, and cutting funding for public safety and aid to Israel," said Ellie Dougherty of the D.C.C.C. "LaLota has also failed to advance any meaningful policies — including bringing back the SALT caps that Trump removed — to lower costs for families or to make Suffolk County safer." The state and local tax deduction, or SALT, was capped at $10,000 per year in the Republican-led tax overhaul of 2017.
Mr. LaLota's endorsement, Ms. Dougherty said, "not only cements his standing with MAGA extremists; it sets off a ticking clock until his fellow vulnerable New York Republicans inevitably join him."
