Lee Zeldin: Trump Over-Delivered Resources to Fight Pandemic

President Donald Trump led a “phenomenal” emergency response to help New York address the coronavirus outbreak, said Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) on Wednesday night during his speech to the Republican National Convention.

Zeldin highlighted the federal government’s provision of masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE) for medical workers, ventilators, and the the deployment of the USNS Comfort to New York City as a temporary hospital.

Partial transcript below.

I’m Congressman Lee Zeldin. Tonight as we celebrate America as a Land of Heroes, I’m here at a VFW post of heroes in Westhampton Beach, New York. I’ve seen amazing Americans in action — raised in a law enforcement family, deployed to Iraq as an 82nd Airborne paratrooper, and serving today in the Army Reserve. My generation of post-9/11 veterans has huge shoes to fill, following our greatest generation that fought tyranny and saved the world.

All over our country, everyday heroes serve and sacrifice for the greater good. Farmers, truckers, craftsmen — these heroes keep America running, and President Trump fights for them every day. This year, we’ve especially relied on one particular group of heroes — frontline medical workers.

My twin daughters, Mikayla and Arianna, were born over 14 weeks early. They weighed a pound and a half. At two weeks, Mikayla went into septic shock, had a stroke and underwent brain surgery, leaving a third of the left side of her brain a hole. Her doctors didn’t believe Mikayla would survive, fearing dire, permanent consequences even if she did.

Through the miracles of modern medicine, power of prayer, and her will to live, my daughters are now starting high school and doing great, with no long-term effects from those frightful months in the NICU.

So when I learned my county’s PPE stockpile was depleted, I immediately thought of those healthcare workers who saved my baby girls. Jared Kushner and I were on the phone late into that Saturday night. 

The very next day, President Trump announced he was sending us 200,000 N-95 masks. He actually delivered almost 400,000. That number quickly grew to 1.2 million masks, gowns, and more. The President sent thousands of ventilators to New York. He deployed the USNS Comfort and converted the Javitz Center to a field hospital. His administration authorized our lab testing requests at blinding speed.

During a once-in-a-century pandemic — an unforeseeable crisis sent to us from a faraway land — the president’s effort for New York was phenomenal.

For our nation to emerge even stronger, more prosperous, freer and more secure than ever, to make our country greater than ever before, we must re-elect President Trump.

We are the land of the free, because of the brave. We are the land of opportunity because we have a President who wants to empower the best of who we are to be the best of what we can be. 

Zeldin concluded, “There’s never been a nation greater than ours, never a people more resilient than ours, and never a future for America more promising than ours, right now. Keeping America Great is up to us, and losing isn’t an option.”

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