Gavin Wax: From Trump's MAGA-phone to FCC official

Daily Point

New York GOP firebrand hired to take on broadcast companies

Gavin Mario Wax, 31, best known as a strident Republican activist — and a recurrent irritant to state and regional party leaders — is headed to the Federal Communications Commission as chief of staff and adviser to Nathan Simington, one of the commissioners.

Wax, who has lived in Merrick, Bellmore and Lynbrook, and more recently the Upper East Side, has been a front-and-center supporter of Donald Trump for years. As head of the New York Young Republican Club, a post he relinquished recently, Wax drew attention in 2022 by hosting far-right figures.

At a time when George Santos was under fire from Long Island Republicans for faking his background and finances to win a congressional seat in 2022, Santos remained associated with the NYYRC, and his congressional chief of staff was Vish Burra, a close Wax ally. But there was more to Wax’s unapologetic boat-rocking within the state GOP.

Last year, the club denounced state Republican chairman Ed Cox’s support for Mike Sapraicone for his unsuccessful run against incumbent Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. This "shameful selection of ... Sapraicone underscores the disdain in which the New York State GOP leadership holds New Yorkers and America First patriots," the club stated. But candidates Trump and Sapraicone expressed mutual support.

In 2023, Wax balked so much at supporting Cox for a new term as state Republican chairman that he let it be known he’s tried to convince Trump to oppose him. Wax clashed with Manhattan GOP chairwoman Andrea Catsimatidis over the club’s efforts to put its allies on the party’s county committee. "They really went nuclear on a paltry number of Young Republicans who wanted to get involved," Wax said after a dozen them were kicked off the ballot by a judge, according to the New York Daily News.

But in a more successful gambit, Wax’s NYYRC, through its attorney Aaron Foldenauer, got a redistricting deal struck down — to which even the state Assembly’s minority GOP leadership had already agreed in Albany.

Also in 2023, Wax was fired from his job at the Babylon Bee, an Onion-like conservative Christian satire website based in Florida, apparently over tweeting profanely at a person then associated with the DeSantis for President campaign.

Wax has displayed unbending fealty to Trump — and even to such foreign MAGA allies as Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Then-ex-president Trump graced the club with his presence at its annual black-tie dinner at Cipriani in December 2023. There and then, Wax said: "Once President Trump is back in office, we won’t be playing nice anymore. It will be a time for retribution. All those responsible for destroying our once-great country will be held to account after baseless years of investigations and government lies and media lies against this man."

"Retribution" and supposed "media lies" could signal the role Wax is expected to play at the FCC. His boss-to-be Simington is one of five commissioners. He was selected by Trump and confirmed by the Senate the month after Joe Biden won the 2020 election. The chairman is Brendan Carr, who wrote the chapter on the FCC for the controversial preelection Project 2025.

Under Trump, some degree of business deregulation is expected to be on the agenda. At the same time, the FCC could well use its rulemaking power politically — to crack down on broadcast organizations that have vexed or criticized the president or MAGA.

— Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com

Pencil Point

False alarm

For more cartoons, visit www.newsday.com/aprilnationalcartoons

Quick Points

Money talks

• Attendance at New York Islanders games was down this year. It’s one of the oldest stories in sports: Fans won’t pay a lot of money to watch mediocre teams.
• New York City Mayor Eric Adams issued more temporary exemptions for mandatory composting, this time giving a break to most of the city’s residential buildings, at least until the end of the year. Give him a little more time and there won’t be anyone who has to compost.
• First Lt. Gabrielle White became the first female Army Ranger to compete in the grueling three-day Best Ranger Competition, where she and partner Capt. Seth Deltenre finished 14th out of 52 teams. Kind of inconvenient for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has said women can’t meet the same physical standards as men.
• California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the legal fight over the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador is "the distraction of the day." It’s the latest political calculation made by an apparent future presidential candidate aware that deportation of immigrants is popular, but it seems like tortured math to call due process and the rule of law a distraction.

— Michael Dobie michael.dobie@newsday.com

Subscribe to The Point here and browse past editions of The Point here.