A congressman representing the East End touted President Donald Trump’s help in sending more than 1 million pieces of personal protective equipment to Long Island while making the case for Trump’s re-election.
U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-Shirley), who was among the president’s chief defenders on national television during Trump’s impeachment hearings, made his comments Wednesday on the third night of the Republican National Convention in North Carolina as his speech was streamed from a VFW hall on LI.
“When my hometown Suffolk County Executive told me late one Saturday night in April that the county’s stockpile of PPE was depleted because of COVID-19, I immediately thought of our doctors and nurses,” Zeldin recalled. “Jared Kushner was on the phone with me right away and late into that night, wanting to help however possible. The very next day, President Trump announced he was immediately sending 200,000 n-95 masks to Suffolk.”
Trump is expected to accept the GOP nomination Thursday as he seeks a second term against Democratic challenger and former Vice President Joe Biden in the November elections.
Zeldin is seeking a fourth term on Election Day. A spokesman for his Democratic rival, Nancy Goroff, a professor of chemistry at Stony Brook University, called Zeldin’s speech out of touch.
“As our community struggles, Rep. Zeldin is off playing sycophant to a president who ignored the experts and the science to try to bolster his own reelection campaign,” said campaign spokeswoman Hannah Jeffrey.
In addition to the PPE, Zeldin noted that Trump sent ventilators, the USS Comfort, and had federal agencies erect temporary hospitals in New York during the peak of the pandemic.
“For our nation to be even stronger, more prosperous, safer, freer and more secure than ever before, to make our country greater than ever, we must re-elect President Trump,” the congressman said.
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