Lee Zeldin Is the Most Lethally Boring Man in the Trump Administration

The EPA administrator’s bland personality has provided cover for the most destructive reign since the agency’s creation.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin, reportedly being considered to replace Pam Bondi as attorney general, is not the most polarizing member of the Trump administration, not by a long shot. Yet he’s one of the most dangerous.

In contrast to the mutant plastic visage of Kristi Noem, you probably can’t call up a visual mental image of Zeldin’s eminently forgettable face. It’s also hard to call to mind any memorable utterances by Zeldin. That’s an achievement in a crowd that normally will not shut up. Consider, for example, the luridly reactionary and genocidal statements of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who last month called wartime rules of engagement “stupid” and “politically correct,” and recently reposted a video of the founding pastor of his church calling for the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment. Or consider Steven Miller, who baselessly accused ICE murder victim Alex Pretti of being a terrorist, a charge he lobs against left-leaning protesters all the time. Or take Trump himself, who gleefully bragged that he was going to destroy Iranian civilization this week and that it wouldn’t be a war crime because Iranians are “animals.”

At one point in 2022, when then-Congressman Zeldin ran for governor of New York and a violent attacker interrupted one of his campaign events, commentators noted that the unfortunate incident could help him by increasing his name recognition; a Siena poll that year found that 57 percent of New Yorkers either did know who he was or had no opinion of him.  

By last summer, as EPA chief, of course his profile had risen, but nearly a third of New Yorkers were still not sure what to think of him until the pollster explained what he was doing at EPA, at which point in the conversation his negatives tended to rise. (He’s so boring that national pollsters rarely even ask about him.) By contrast, 48 percent in a February poll had a negative view of RFK Jr, and only 5 percent of respondents said they had never heard of him.

Inasmuch as he has been perceived at all, Lee Zeldin hasn’t been perceived as an extremist, even in his blue state of origin. Although he lost his 2022 bid for governor, he came close, garnering over 47 percent of the vote. (The last Republican to win........

© New Republic