Heard Enough, Mr. Zeldin?

With every new outrage from Donald Trump, his support among Republicans dwindles. At press time, reporters around the country were describing a “civil war” within the G.O.P., as leaders of Mr. Trump’s own party threw up their hands in disgust and responsible members fled in droves. Yet Lee Zeldin, our first-term representative from the First Congressional District, is hanging tough in his support of the rogue nominee.

Mr. Zeldin is a true believer. 

In May, he was among the earliest backers of Mr. Trump in the House of Representatives. This was disappointing, given what was already known about Mr. Trump’s character at that point — his statements about Mexicans and Muslims, for example, his pandering to the worst xenophobic impulses of the American electorate.

In June, Mr. Zeldin took a deep swig of the venomous brew, saying in a CNN interview that President Obama was the racist. Mr. Zeldin stood by Mr. Trump after he insulted veterans in general and Senator John McCain in particular, then went on to denigrate the parents of Humayun Khan, an American serviceman killed in Iraq (where, from July to September 2006, Mr. Zeldin served as a military legal officer). 

It is now October, and Mr. Trump has said that, if elected, he would “instruct” his attorney general to “get a special prosecutor” to investigate his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and throw her in jail — boasts worthy of a banana-republic dictator that also betray an abject ignorance of the way the justice system works. Mr. Zeldin is an attorney. We wonder how he can ignore Mr. Trump’s reckless and ignorant disdain for the law. 

In the meantime, Mr. Zeldin has failed to repudiate Mr. Trump’s views about women. (We wonder what he expects his twin daughters to make of the disclosure that Mr. Trump has bragged about sexual assault.) Mr. Zeldin has failed to repudiate his candidate’s praise for the Russian president, Valdimir Putin. He has failed to contradict Mr. Trump when he said that veterans who return from combat with post-traumatic stress disorder are weaklings.

So what would it take for our representative to say enough? So far, it looks as though nothing would do the trick other than Mr. Trump’s becoming a clear threat to Mr. Zeldin’s own chances of re-election.

Perhaps this is because Mr. Zeldin is rather full of hot air himself: He is a tough-talking frequent commentator on cable news shows, but missed scores of House Foreign Affairs Committee meetings and more than two-thirds of subcommittee discussions of ISIS and Syria. 

We are all entitled to our opinions, certainly, and should all vote accordingly: Those are central American values. But our political leaders should not get a free pass if they continue to support a candidate who is narcissistic, ill informed, predatory, and a threat to both the security of our nation and the rule of law. 

As with Mr. Zeldin, they should be held accountable.