America First Rep. Matt Gaetz Decisively Fends Off Primary Opponent

America First politician Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Tuesday night successfully fended off a primary challenge from Mark Lombardo, according to projections.

Dave Wasserman, the House editor for the Cook Political Report, said late Tuesday night that Gaetz defeated his primary opponent Lombardo in Florida’s first congressional district.

In response to the projected victory, Gaetz said, “Thank you Northwest Florida!”

Gaetz has been a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump’s America First vision, especially in regards to his advocacy for a noninterventionist foreign policy.

In fact, it was support for the America First vision that led him and other House conservatives to spar with then-House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY).

Gaetz said that he felt moved to call to remove Cheney as the House GOP Conference chair after she supported Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) primary opponent.

The Florida conservative even traveled to Wyoming to support the ouster of Cheney from Congress. During a rally in late January, Gaetz said that Cheney has only done two things in Congress: “frustrate the agenda of President Trump and sell out to the forever war machine.”

Conservatives, including Gaetz, have criticized Cheney for pushing an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would make it harder for Trump to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.

“A nation that sends its best to go fight in the worst places in the world should not send its worst to be representatives in the United States Congress,” the congressman said in Wyoming.

The Florida conservative has also advocated for changes to legal immigration. He elaborated in an interview with Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle:

It’s the legal immigration where you now have a system where we tell these young people go get your STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] degree, go learn how to code [software], and then they do that — they accrue massive amounts of college debt — and then we bring in somebody from India who is able to do the job for $50,000 or $60,000 bucks a year on some work visa.

Big tech scoops all those up and it deprives a lot of Americans of jobs.

So we have to think about immigration, not just at the broken border. I think that’s almost like a very Boomer approach to the broader immigration challenge we have that informs on both legal and illegal immigration.

He contended that ignoring the costs of legal immigration is a “boomer approach.”