“Press 3 if you want to get in the queue to ask a question, and press 6 to subscribe to my newsletter,” Representative Nicholas LaLota said, repeatedly, throughout his March 5 tele-town hall, when he answered questions about the Department of Government Efficiency, Ukraine, tariffs, and the border, among other topics.
“What unites the House Republican conference is cutting in three areas,” he said, answering a question about Elon Musk and DOGE. “One: Getting everybody who is not in this country legally off of the Medicaid rolls. Two: Requiring work for able-bodied adults. Three: Rooting out the waste, fraud, and abuse that is rampant in systems like New York. I don’t want to go further than that. If it goes too far, I’ll vote ‘no.’ I’ll vote against my own party.”
His office said there were 5,000 participants at last week’s meeting, which he touted as his 21st. (“We’ve had 16 in-person meetings where neither payment nor party affiliation were required. We’ve had four tele-town halls,” he said.) It lasted under an hour, however, and the congressman took only seven questions.
Critics have said that he has yet to hold a legitimate town hall in the two years he’s been in office. During the February congressional recess, demonstrations, which attracted hundreds, called for him to hold an in-person town hall, in a public venue, that allowed for questions and follow-ups.
Perhaps sensitive to that criticism, he started the tele-town hall with a question about executive branch overreach from the organizations that participated in the protests. And yet, strengthening the critics’ point, the question was submitted ahead of time and read by one of his staffers. No follow-up question was allowed.
“Let’s frame this the right way. Trump, we all know, is a disruptor,” the congressman answered, pivoting. Instead of addressing the criticism of overreach, he focused on one of the examples of overreach, President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship. He then offered a snap poll.
Later in the meeting, when asked again about DOGE, he offered more clarity. “The president is the one with the executive order pen, the Congress is the one who passes things, and Elon Musk makes recommendations,” he said, adding that he sat only 150 feet away from Mr. Musk at President Trump’s joint congressional address. “His group has found many problems in the way that our nation spends money. I welcome that additional oversight.”
“He would follow up each answer with a very loaded and one-sided snap poll clearly designed to provide him with data that he can use to promote Republican talking points and President Trump’s agenda,” said Anna Skrenta, chairwoman of the East Hampton Town Democratic Committee. “He very obviously avoided addressing specific concerns about the real-world implications of the gutting of the federal offices, tariffs and trade wars, and how the Republican-led Congress continues to cede power to Trump and the executive branch.”
Mr. LaLota argued that the federal government doesn’t have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem, which is exacerbating inflation. “We’re in this condition because, for 25 years, regardless of party, Washington screwed it up. They haven’t balanced the budget. The mission is to decrease the deficit to decrease the inflation to help hardworking families. How we do it is by growing the economy and cutting wasteful spending.”
“I come to this DOGE issue with that in mind. We have to find ways in our $7 trillion annual spending, when we have a $2 trillion deficit, we have to find ways to find and create efficiencies.” But he didn’t think taxing the rich, or simply closing loopholes that enabled the rich to avoid paying federal taxes, was the answer.
“Just merely whacking every rich person over the head with a larger tax probably just forces them to move their money offshore and doesn’t actually close the gap in our deficit,” he said.
He supported the tariffs. “When used properly, they will ensure that American workers, manufacturers, and farmers are able to compete on a level playing field.”
“The parties screwed that up for years too,” he said. “You know, we have entered into numerous trade deals internationally, where the concept was that America was going to be able to buy cheap products from overseas and somehow all of our sons and daughters would have a nice white-collar job and would make a lot of money. That hasn’t panned out for many of our families. Too many times, we’re sending our kids to college, racking up a ton of debt, just for them to graduate, and they leave without a viable enough job to pay off all that debt. Then, likewise, we can buy a lot of cheap crap off Amazon and elsewhere that undermines the things that we want to buy in our country.”
If tariffs were an example of President Trump’s using his negotiating tactics and leverage, Mr. LaLota said another example came in his recent meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“The United States has spent $175 billion for a stalemate that’s a human meat grinder,” he said. “I think the president is on the right track to want to stop the dying over there. I don’t trust
Russia, I’ll say it quite clearly. Putin is an evil dictator who illegally invaded. Can’t trust them. But I think we’re at a point where we need to get Zelensky and Putin into a room to agree first to a cease-fire and then to a long-term peace deal. I think that Donald Trump is the only human on the face of the earth who could possibly get that done.”
“I want a commander in chief who our adversaries fear,” he said separately.
While he said he was “motivated to negotiate” on the state and local tax deduction, otherwise known as SALT, according to The New York Times, the one demographic its removal — in the tax overhaul during President Trump’s first term — hurt most is “unmarried folks who make more than a million dollars,” not middle-class families.
“I don’t want to lose the A.M.T. [alternative minimum tax] fix, nor do I want to lose the lower individual rates for middle-class folks,” he said.
When a man called to ask what was going to be done with all the illegal immigrants standing around on street corners, Mr. LaLota blamed former President Biden. “All hell went crazy in the last couple of years.”
“Four years have been open border, dismantling ‘Remain in Mexico,’ weakening the asylum rules, got to a point where our country was flooded with migrants — by the way, most of them awesome people. Most of them just looking for economic opportunity.”
Compounding the problem, he said, were New York City’s sanctuary laws.
“I think that more cooperation is part of our future in Suffolk County. I want my local law enforcement, when the federal government says, ‘Hey, listen, do you have some intel on this one or that one, or can you facilitate this or facilitate that?’ I want there to be cooperation between the feds and the local law enforcement.”
“We continue to request an in-person, public town hall to address the growing concerns around President Trump and Elon Musk’s unconstitutional and dangerous dismantling of our federal government, actions which gravely threaten Long Island’s economy,” read a press release from Progressive East End Reformers South Fork, a group advocating social, racial, environmental, and economic justice.
Mr. LaLota’s office said a town hall in April would be scheduled soon, but wouldn’t yet specify where it would be held, or if it would be in person.
