Supposed pro-Trump Republican New York Mayoral candidate Fernando Mateo in February bashed him as “arrogant” and praising mass amnesty, newly surfaced clips reveal.
Mateo, a community activist and business owner, is currently running in the New York Mayoral race, and is touting himself as the pro-Trump candidate. This week, he met with President Trump, and was endorsed by his former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who claimed that Mateo “supports and embraces President Trump’s America First agenda.” Mateo even suggested that President Trump may be soon to endorse him in the race too.
However, an appearance on Hot 97’s “Ebro in the Morning” from February this year has recently resurfaced that contradicts his apparent America First credentials. One clip, initially posted on Twitter by Gavin Wax, the current President of the New York Young Republican Club, shows Mateo bashing President Trump, saying that he “had issues” and was “arrogant” with no “humility:
“You know what? I knew that Donald Trump had issues… He had bad issues and he had good issues,” said Mateo. “The good issues were the economy, he kept us out of a war, you know he basically helped the brown and black people probably more than any other president that I know of, but you know what? He was arrogant. He didn’t have humility. He was not a president for all the people. But you know what, that’s that. New York City is my life man…”
https://twitter.com/GavinWax/status/1401316146876456960
Earlier on in the segment, Mateo also claimed that if he won the New York Mayoral race, then he would turn the city into a “gold rush,” and would reach out to “every country, to every city, and I will invite them to come to New York because we will turn the page,” seemingly advocating an open door for a mass wave of immigrants from all around the world to come to America, something President Trump was strongly against. He also praised Ronald Reagan’s mass amnesty program, claiming that by doing so, Reagan “saved so many lives.”
Despite running as a Republican, and wanting the endorsement from President Trump, he kept distancing himself from both the Republican Party as a whole and President Trump. “Don’t brand me, don’t label me, because I’m not that kind of guy,” Mateo said, arguing that the only reason that he wasn’t an independent candidate is because an independent could not win in New York. “Trump is Trump, Fernando Matteo is Fernando Matteo,” he added.
https://twitter.com/JackHadders/status/1401337822649409544
“Fernando Mateo is a fraud,” Wax told National File. “He bundled money for DeBlasio, surrounds himself with never-Trumpers, and now is trying to lie to New York primary voters claiming he is the pro-Trump candidate. We won’t be fooled. Curtis Sliwa is the only real choice for Republican New Yorkers who want to see this city return to greatness.”
Sliwa, who Wax endorsed, is the founder of New York’s famous “Guardian Angels,” a volunteer-run group designed to protect citizens from crime, created by him in 1979 in response to the city’s then atrocious high crime rat. The Angels were made famous by their uniforms with red berets, and became a symbol of the fight against violent crime on the streets – a message that Sliwa’s campaign echoes today, with his promise to refund the NYPD and continue to crack down on the once-again rising crime in New York. General Flynn had slammed Sliwa as being a “Never Trumper,” despite Mateo’s own distancing from the President.
