Debun-King Trump

Daily Point

King on Trump

Ahead of Donald Trump’s anticipated campaign announcement Tuesday, former Rep. Pete King is warning Republicans against going with the former president for a third round.

In a conversation with The Point on Tuesday, the longtime Long Island congressman said he holds Trump “largely responsible” for the GOP’s poor performance in the midterms, given Trump’s finger on the scale for certain candidates, including ones who parroted the election denial falsehoods that fueled the Capitol riot.

“If there was any year when the out-of-power party should have scored big," King said, “it was this year."

It’s of a piece with King’s recent public statements about his old ally, whom he hasn’t talked to since the funeral for Trump’s brother in the summer of 2020. Monday night, King tweeted the New York Post’s headline, “DENIERS DENIED,” arguing that the newspaper’s formulation, that voters have punished Trump-backed candidates this midterm cycle, “says it all.”

“Republicans lost races in key states such as Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania because of weak candidates forced on the Party by Donald Trump,” King tweeted. The Seaford politician, who left office in 2021, went on to say that Trump was a “one man wrecking crew” this election cycle. “And he lost, bringing the Republican Party down with him! Time for a change!”

King has also suggested that Republicans should tell Trump, “You’re fired,” and criticized the former president for his treatment of former Vice President Mike Pence.

King told The Point that he “mostly supported” Trump as president, but the “real turning point” was Jan. 6. King said Trump had an “absolute obligation” to “denounce it.”

The former congressman said he hadn’t spoken to Long Island’s new four-man Republican congressional delegation about his Trump feelings. But appropriately, given his new partial career as a pundit for Newsmax and The Hill, he offered some prognostication before Trump’s jump into the 2024 GOP race: “He has to win it in a hurry,” King said, pointing to other potential contenders he preferred like Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

King’s livelihood is no longer directly tied to electoral politics, perhaps making it easier for him to criticize Trump — with one professional caveat.

“If he offers me a job, I’ll deny I ever said this,” King joked. Him and Mitt Romney.

— Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano

Talking Point

A 3-decade ‘first’ for LI House seats

Lee Zeldin’s impressive bid marked the first time since 1994 that a Republican showed a real shot at unseating a New York Democratic governor. That time, George Pataki came out on the winning side, of course, capturing the first of what proved to be three successive terms.

For Long Island, this election has an even more meaningful echo of 1994. It’s the first time since that year that Republicans ran the table on four congressional seats encompassing the lion’s share of Nassau and Suffolk counties. The national impact is obvious, with the GOP apparently en route to taking the House, by a relatively modest margin.

In the surprise Pataki tide 28 years ago, two Long Island seats changed representatives.

In the general election in CD1, Michael Forbes, with a long history of switching between parties over the long haul, unseated Democratic incumbent George Hochbrueckner.

CD4 stayed Republican as before — but with Dan Frisa having beaten incumbent David A. Levy in the GOP primary by running to Levy's right. And the Island’s two first-term Republican incumbents, Rick Lazio in CD2 and Peter King in CD3, won reelection that year.

The New York House delegation elected in 1994 included 14 Republicans out of 31 seats; this time the outcome is expected to be 11 Republicans out of 26 seats, nearly the same proportion statewide.

It should interest operatives of both major parties that the results of 1994 — which marked a midterm backlash against Democratic President Bill Clinton — did not entirely hold in the next cycle. In 1996, Democrat Carolyn McCarthy unseated Frisa and stayed in Congress through 2014.

In 2022, Long Island painted its House team all red but with a slightly different brush. No incumbents were turned out last week. While Republican Nick LaLota won CD1 to succeed Zeldin, and first-termer Andrew Garbarino held on in CD2, Anthony D’Esposito flipped CD4 for the Republicans, as did George Santos in CD3. The latter two did so by capturing the seats of departing Democratic Reps. Kathleen Rice and Tom Suozzi, respectively.

So it was destined to be a change year no matter what, with two Democrats jumping ship.

For regional perspective: New York City’s dozen House seats in 2022 came out with the same partisan proportions as in 1994. A sole NYC GOP incumbent was reelected from a mostly Staten Island district — Nicole Malliotakis this time, Susan Molinari back then.

Some galaxies remain unchanged in the bipartisan universe.

— Dan Janison @Danjanison

Pencil Point

Pushing for change

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

Final Point

SBF, FTX, LI, $$

The bankruptcy filing of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the potential legal challenges for its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, make it appear unlikely that the 30-year-old will follow through on his suggestion that $1 billion would be a “soft ceiling” in his political contributions heading into 2024.

But Bankman-Fried, people connected to him, and associated political action committees made their mark on Long Island politics this cycle before the company’s implosion last week. A super PAC called Protect Our Future, largely funded by Bankman-Fried, put hundreds of thousands of dollars behind Josh Lafazan and Laura Gillen in their Democratic primary contests for the 3rd and 4th Congressional districts. Bankman-Fried associate Ryan Salame, a leader of FTX Digital Markets, put hundreds of thousands of dollars into groups including Crypto Innovation PAC and Stand For New York which slammed CD1 Republican Nick LaLota or boosted Lalota’s primary opponent Michelle Bond, who happened to be Salame’s significant other.

Bankman-Fried, a relative newcomer to political spending who sometimes played the video game “League of Legends” during meetings, has said that he wanted to focus on primaries since they were “more important.” He is affiliated with the philosophy called effective altruism, which attempts to find evidence-driven ways to do the most good. The Protect Our Future group that was active on LI was meant to support candidates who would be “champions of pandemic prevention,” a spokesman told The Point earlier this year.

Bankman-Fried’s brother Gabriel, who ran a somewhat-related political group called Guarding Against Pandemics, did make a few personal donations in the general election, however, to Gillen and Robert Zimmerman, who had defeated Lafazan in the CD3 Democratic primary.

And Salame also made contributions to Long Island races in which his romantic partner wasn’t running, sending thousands to Andrew Garbarino, Robert Cornicelli, and George Santos.

As for the big contributions, Bankman-Fried, at least, was even backing away from his broad $1 billion promise long before the exchange’s financial implosion.

“That was a dumb quote on my part,” he said in October. “I think my messaging was sort of sloppy and inconsistent in some cases.”

— Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano