Trump blames ‘foolish’ Republican candidate Mazi Pilip for NY special election loss

Donald Trump has hit out at New York Republican candidate Mazi Pilip, branding her a “very foolish woman” for not appealing to his MAGA brand – after she lost the race for George Santos’s former seat to Democrat Tom Suozzi.

Mr Suozzi won the special election in the Big Apple’s 3rd congressional district on Tuesday night, which comprises eastern Queens and the Long Island suburbs of Nassau County.

The Democrat picked up 53.9 per cent of the vote to Ms Pilip’s 46.1 per cent.

He will now take the seat previously occupied by the scandal-mired Mr Santos after he was pushed out of Congress over a series of scandals including criminal charges and his penchant for lying about his personal life.

Clearly angered by New Yorkers braving a blizzard to vote for Mr Suozzi in their droves, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination fired out an angry denunciation of Ms Pilip on his Truth Social platform – in which he disowned her candidacy over her failure to embrace him and his MAGA message more explicitly.

“Republicans just don’t learn, but maybe she was still a Democrat?”, Mr Trump fumed in a post.

“I have an almost 99 per cent Endorsement Success Rate in Primaries, and a very good number in the General Elections, as well, but just watched this very foolish woman, Mazi Melesa Pilip, running in a race where she didn’t endorse me and tried to ‘straddle the fence,’ when she would have easily WON if she understood anything about MODERN DAY politics in America.

“MAGA, WHICH IS MOST OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, STAYED HOME – AND IT ALWAYS WILL, UNLESS IT IS TREATED WITH THE RESPECT THAT IT DESERVES.”

Ms Pilip was born in Ethiopia but raised in Israel where she served with the Israeli Defence Forces before marrying and moving to the US. She had sought to make American support for Israel and tackling illegal immigration the central planks of her campaign.

She did campaign with New York Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a stalwart of Mr Trump’s MAGA movement who is rumoured to be in the running to be his vice presidential candidate, but otherwise attempted to run on the issues alone.

Veteran legislator Mr Suozzi sought to walk a more moderate path and acknowledged in his victory speech: “This race was fought amidst a closely divided electorate.”

The winner also called out Mr Trump directly, declaring: “Let’s send a message to our friends running the Congress these days: stop running around for Trump and start running the country.

“It’s time to find common ground and start delivering for the people of the United States of America.

“The people are watching. They want us to start working together. So our message is very clear: either get on board or get out of the way.”

The result appeared to serve as a stark warning to Republicans in Congress that being associated with a failure to address the immigration crisis at America’s southern border with Mexico, by sabotaging negotiation on spending bills and wasting time with the fruitless impeachment of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, could cost them dearly at November’s election.

Covering the election on CNN, pundit Dana Bash commented that she had interviewed local voters and heard as much from them directly.

“Several of them said to me that they don’t want to vote for the Republicans because it’s clearly impossible to get a solution on the issue of immigration,” she said.

“The border… was the top issue for them and the fact that Republicans killed that bipartisan deal put them over the edge to vote for Tom Suozzi.”

Mr Trump appeared to sense that, hence his fiery rejection of the defeated candidate, whose loss further narrows the Republican majority in the House of Representatives to just six, a fact Mr Santos acknowledged in his own response to the result on X, a post that read simply: “-1.”