Pistone applauds Trump on tax cut, trade, nuclear negotiatons

By Scott Benjamin

DANBURY – Congressional hopeful John Pistone briefly met Donald Trump decades ago when he was a New York City real estate mogul, and says the president is now a role model since he is a political outsider who is willing to challenge conventional wisdom.

But the Brookfield plumber, who first ran for the congressional seat in the Fifth District as a petitioning candidate in 2010, said he is offended that many Republican candidates in Connecticut are keeping their distance from the 45^th president.

He said 75 percent of the Republicans he spoke with while collecting petition signatures in the Fifth District this year “think that their party has deserted them.”

“The Connecticut Republican Party has made their agenda clear and that is to keep moving further and further to the left,” Pistone stated in a recent CT Mirror column .

During an interview he brought a clipboard with the 3,750 signatures he had collected to qualify for the August 14 Republican primary in the Fifth District, which covers 41 municipalities – including part of the metro Danbury area and most of Litchfield County.

Pistone said the nomination should be determined in a direct primary held in May or early June.

Instead of largely interacting with delegates, as candidates often do prior to the conventions, he said a direct primary would force the contenders to “go to the grass roots.”

Pistone, who also ran as a write-in candidate in the district in 2016, stated in his column that since he is “too conservative” for the Connecticut Republican leaders, and he will instead run as a petitioning candidate in the November 6 election. He said by the end of last week he had already collected 450 of the 3,100 petition signatures that he would need to be on the ballot. They are due by August 8.

He said his ambition has reached the point where he collected signatures for 12 consecutive hours one Saturday at a supermarket.

Pistone said in the interview that he is annoyed that so many Connecticut Republican office-holders and candidates “won’t come out and say that they support Trump.”

However, The News-Times of Danbury recently reported that former Meriden Mayor Manny Santos, who captured the Republican convention nomination in the Fifth District, “Is very clear he is team Trump.”

Matt Corey of Manchester, the Republican convention endorsed candidate for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Democrat Chris Murphy of Cheshire, has voiced strong support for the president, and Dominic Rapini of Branford, who is challenging Corey in the primary, has said that he entered the campaign last year partly because of Trump’s 2016 victory.

Pistone, who has lived in Brookfield for 14 years and coaches youth baseball, said he entered politics because he “is tired of career politicians.”

His platform calls for term limits.

“They get too entrenched,” said Pistone regarding members of Congress.

Perhaps that could be a larger concern, for example, in the Third Congressional District where Democrat Rosa DeLauro of New Haven has served for 28 years, a record for a U.S. House member in Connecticut, or in the First District where Democrat John Larson of East Hartford was initially elected in 1998.

However, no congressman has represented the Fifth District more than six years since Democrat John Monaghan of Waterbury, who was defeated in 1972 after being in office 14 years.

Former U.S. Rep. Nancy Johnson of New Britain was in Washington 24 years, but in the first 20 years she was representing the now-defunct Sixth District.

Of the eight congressmen elected in the Fifth District since 1972, four have lost their re-election bids and four have opted not to run for re-election in the district. In three of those instances it was to run for a higher office.

The seat is open this year after U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D-5) of Cheshire announced in early April that she would not seek another term after she was criticized for mishandling a sexual harassment complaint in her Washington office involving a former chief of staff.

Santos faces Ruby O’Neill, a former psychology professor from Southbury, and businessman Richard DuPont of Watertown in the GOP primary.

Former longtime Simsbury First Selectman Mary Glassman narrowly captured last month’s Democratic convention endorsement over former national Teacher of the Year Jahana Hayes of Wolcott. Former U.S. Senate chief of Staff aide Shannon Kula of Farmington has petitioned her way to the primary.

Pistone said his strongest areas are Woodbury, Southbury, Brookfield, Watertown, Burlington, Plymouth and Torrington. Also, he said “surprisingly” he is becoming better known in Waterbury.

Pistone said he tells voters that he will not accept contributions for his campaign, and instead encourages them to donate that money to their church or use it pay for their children’s college tuition.

He is self-funding his campaign but declined to say how much money he will spend.

Pistone said he supports the Stop Act, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Rick Nolan (D-Minn.), in which federal legislators could not make phone solicitations for campaign contributions, although their campaign staffs could perform that function.

Nolan told CBS’ 60 Minutes in 2016 that the amount of time congressmen devoted to calling contributors had increased dramatically since his first tenure in Congress from 1975 to 1981. He returned to Capitol Hill following the 2012 election.

The Stop Act has meager support in the U.S. House.

On economic issues, Pistone said he supports Trump’s imposition of steel and aluminum tariffs, since they will likely be short term and not lead to a trade war.

“He’s trying to balance trade,” he explained. “He’s a great negotiator. At the end of the day, the United States wins.”

Pistone said supports the president’s $1.5 trillion tax cut although he would have rather than a Flat Tax package.

“Nevertheless, it is better than what we had,” he said.

The Congressional Budget Office has reported that there will be $12.5 trillion in annual budget deficits over the next 10 years combined.

Pistone said he supports a federal balanced budget amendment but indicated he is unsure about whether to support the Pay As You Go budget controls. Under Pay As You Go, additional spending would be offset by reductions in other budget line items or new tax revenues.

He said that he would want to know where the spending reductions would be made.

Pistone said to reduce spending, Congress should tackle entitlement reform.

The trustees for Social Security and Medicare recently reported that those two programs combined comprised 42 percent of federal spending in 2017 and it would be more than 50 percent if Medicaid was included. Seven percent of spending was devoted to debt service in 2017.

Pistone said existing recipients should get all promised benefits but for future recipients there will have to be a higher retirement age and a means test for the wealthy.

Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson has been critical of congressmen, particularly Democrats, for acting in “cowardice” over the looming debt from the federal entitlements.

Pistone said he opposes the 2010 Chris Dodd-Barney Frank federal banking regulations, which were co-sponsored by former U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-East Haddam).

He said it has hurt the nation’s investment industry of the legislation which came in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Pistone said he does support the recent revisions approved in the U.S House, which rewrite the regulations on the small, community banks, but believes similar rules should be written for the larger banks, who have had to vastly increase their compliance departments under Dodd-Frank.

Within the Fifth District, he said he doesn’t think that the largely suburban geography is a deterrent to attracting large companies, even though reports indicate that many of the college-educated millennials want to live in the innovation hubs, such as the Route 128 corridor near Boston.

Pistone said he agrees with Santos that elected officials need to be more diligent about finding tenants for the abandoned buildings in the Fifth District’s cities. The district has a sharp contrast between, for example, Waterbury, which has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state, and Danbury, which ranks first in Connecticut in sales tax revenue and has received praise from Donald Klepper-Smith of DataCore Partners in New Haven, who was chief economist for former Gov. M. Jodi Rell (R-Brookfield).

Regarding foreign policy, he said he disagrees with Murphy’s characterization that Trump’s recent denuclearization negotiations in North Korea were a “photo op.”

Said Pistone, “At the end of the day, Trump is going to succeed.”