https://www.yahoo.com/news/invention-elise-stefanik-154529580.html
From below: Within days of Stefanik’s endorsement, audio surfaced of
Paladino praising Adolf Hitler as “the kind of leader we need today.”
The New York Times
The Invention of Elise Stefanik
Nicholas Confessore
Sun, January 1, 2023 at 7:45 AM PST
Signs of support for Rep. Elise Stefanik and other Republican lawmakers
in Saranac Lake, N.Y. on Oct. 24, 2022. (Cindy Schultz/The New York Times)
Elise Stefanik had had enough.
In the wake of the 2018 midterms, the young congresswoman was sick of
commuting to Washington from upstate New York and weary of dialing for
campaign dollars. She was demoralized that Republican primary voters had
spurned so many of the women she had helped persuade to run for
Congress. She was annoyed that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic
socialist who had displaced her that fall as the youngest woman ever
elected to the House, had not shown her the respect she felt was her due.
But it was bigger than that. For years, Stefanik had crafted her brand
as a model moderate millennial — “the future of hopeful, aspirational
politics in America,” as her mentor, Paul Ryan, would describe her in
Time magazine. But as her third term unfolded, according to current or
former friends and advisers, it was becoming painfully clear that she
was the future of a Republican Party that no longer existed. The party
was now firmly controlled by Donald Trump, a populist president she
didn’t like or respect — a “whack job,” as she once described him in a
message obtained by The New York Times. Fox News hosts attacked her for
not supporting Trump enough. Her friends criticized her for not opposing
him more forcefully. You don’t understand, she would tell them. You
don’t get how hard this is. Democrats were back in charge in the House.
Ryan was gone, driven into early retirement. She told friends she was
thinking of joining him.
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Instead she embarked on one of the most brazen political transformations
of the Trump era. With breathtaking speed and alacrity, Stefanik remade
herself into a fervent Trump apologist, adopted his over-torqued style
on Twitter and embraced the conspiracy theories that animate his base,
amplifying debunked allegations of dead voters casting ballots in
Atlanta and unspecified “irregularities” involving voting-machine
software in 2020 swing states. The future of hopeful, aspirational
politics in America now assails Democrats as “the party of Socialists,
illegals, criminals, Communist Truth Ministers & media stenographers.”
In the process, she has rocketed from the backbench to the party’s No. 3
House leadership job, presiding over the conference’s overall messaging.
Stefanik’s reinvention has made her a case study in the collapse of the
old Republican establishment and its willing absorption into the new,
Trump-dominated one. But as Republicans prepare to take control of the
House in the coming days, her climb to MAGA stardom may also be a
cautionary tale. Trump’s obsession with litigating his own defeat has
left him at once the party’s most potent force and its greatest
liability, blamed by many Republicans for their failure to win the
Senate in November and for a House majority that, some fear, may be too
narrow to govern effectively. Republican politicians and voters are now
agonizing anew over the price of their alliance with Trump. “It’s
crystal, crystal, crystal clear,” Ryan told SiriusXM. “We lose with
Trump if we stick with Trump. If we dump Trump, we start winning.”
For her part, Stefanik has only doubled down, betting that her alliance
with Trump will carry her further still — to a job in his Cabinet,
perhaps, or even a slot as his running mate in 2024. In November, even
before Trump made his bid for reelection official, she became one of the
few senior Republicans to endorse him. “Republican voters determine who
is the leader of the Republican Party, and it’s very clear President
Trump is the leader of the Republican Party,” she said, putting her
loyalty on display in the way that Trump prizes.
That loyalty has already exacted a steep cost. Within the old-line
Republican circles that spent years grooming Stefanik for a different
kind of stardom, charting her turn toward Trump has become a kind of
morose parlor game. Ryan has told associates he now considers her the
biggest disappointment of his political career. One by one, many of her
oldest and closest friends have stopped speaking to Stefanik, leaving a
trail of embittered final texts and emails. Over dinners and group
chats, they sometimes talk about what happened to the talented woman
they once loved and respected. What really made her abandon her old
political self? What had they missed?
Stefanik insists they missed nothing at all. She declined to be
interviewed by the Times. But in a statement responding to questions for
this article, Alex deGrasse, executive director of her political
operation, denied she had ever considered quitting Congress and
repeatedly rejected criticism of her as sexist. DeGrasse denounced
“anonymous sources who are clearly viciously Anti-Trump, Anti-Elise, and
Anti-Republican,” who “clearly hate the American people who support
Trump.” As criticism of her has mounted from former friends and allies,
Stefanik has argued that in embracing Trump, she is merely serving her
older, predominantly white and rural constituency, as she has since
first being elected. “I’m the same member of Congress that I’ve always
been,” she said after her breakout performance defending Trump during
his first impeachment.
In an important sense, Stefanik is right. Virtually no one who knows her
believes she has any genuine attachment to Trump-style populism — unlike
Trump’s earliest supporters, for example, or media figures like Fox News
host Tucker Carlson. Indeed, over dozens of interviews, former aides,
advisers and friends going back to Stefanik’s Harvard days struggled to
identify any of her deeply held political beliefs at all. Most recalled,
instead, her generic loyalty to the Republican Party, her intense
competitiveness and her unerring ability to absorb what she thought
people around her wanted and to reflect it back at them. Eager to
advance, skilled at impressing more powerful figures with her
intelligence and work ethic, she has spent years embedding herself
wherever the action seems to be at the time. “She knows exactly what
she’s signed up for,” said Kate Yearwood Young, a former friend from
Harvard. “There was no radicalization.”
‘I Am Ultra-MAGA’
One day this past October, Stefanik stood in front of a dozen gigantic
bins of bovine teat cleanser, decrying the war on chocolate milk to a
nodding crowd of farmers. Months earlier, New York City’s quirkily
centrist mayor, Eric Adams, had floated the idea of banning chocolate
milk from city schools, then quickly abandoned the idea amid bipartisan
criticism. Now, in the closing weeks of the campaign, Stefanik had come
to the Mohawk Valley village of Fultonville, seizing a chance to
simultaneously defend local businesses and stoke her constituents’
age-old suspicions of big-city liberals. “We are seeing really bad ideas
from the progressive left,” she warned, adding, “I’ve been proud to be
the leader standing up for chocolate milk.”
Like Trump, Stefanik, who is 38, does not merely advocate policies; she
casts herself as a warrior against the leftist forces scheming to take
away the things that make America great. She speaks MAGA fluently but
with a touch of a foreign accent. “No matter what the Far Left says,
#NY21 will ALWAYS stand for, salute and honor our flag,” she tweeted in
2021, referring to her district. “Check out these beautiful American
flags in the North Country!” Like any convert, she makes up in zeal what
she lacks in pedigree. When a reporter asked her last May about the new
“Ultra-MAGA” label President Joe Biden had begun affixing to her party,
she responded almost too eagerly. “I am Ultra-MAGA,” she said in a tone
of utter seriousness. “I’m proud of it.”
Stefanik writes her own tweets and is effectively her own campaign
manager — the first and often last word on messaging, scheduling and
strategy. “She was always the smartest strategic mind in the room,” said
Anthony Pileggi, who worked on her first two campaigns. Somewhat
unusually for a high-ranking lawmaker, she personally approves every
piece of campaign direct mail, weighing in on the design, photos and
creative content and sometimes writing the copy herself. Routine
statements from her office or campaign often appear first on Breitbart,
the alt-right bible, which hypes them as “exclusives.”
Since throwing in her lot with Trump, Stefanik has endorsed politicians
like Sandy Smith, an unsuccessful House candidate in North Carolina who
called for the arrest and execution of those responsible for the “fraud”
of Trump’s defeat. In May, she hosted a fundraiser for George Santos, a
pro-Trump Republican recently elected to a district in Queens and Long
Island, who fabricated vast swaths of his resume and biography. (A
picture of the two still adorns Santos’ Twitter profile.) The same
month, Stefanik attacked “the White House, House Dems, & usual pedo
grifters” for failing to address the nationwide infant-formula shortage,
a seeming allusion to the QAnon mythos. In 2021, as a surge of Haitian
migrants sought to cross the border into Texas, she ran a series of
Facebook ads warning that Biden would “grant amnesty to 11 MILLION
illegal immigrants” to “overthrow our current electorate and create a
permanent liberal majority in Washington.” The ads echoed a racist
conspiracy theory, heavily promoted by Carlson, about a supposed
Democratic plot to replace the native-born electorate with illegal
immigrants.
In New York, Stefanik has allied herself firmly with the Republican
Party’s clamorous Trump wing. Two weeks after a young white man killed
10 people at a supermarket this past May in a largely Black neighborhood
in Buffalo, accusing his victims of seeking to “ethnically replace my
own people,” Stefanik endorsed Carl Paladino, a developer and Trump
friend running for Congress, who had suggested online that the massacre
might have been a false-flag operation meant to help Democrats “revoke
the 2nd amendment.” (Within days of Stefanik’s endorsement, audio
surfaced of Paladino praising Adolf Hitler as “the kind of leader we
need today.” The congresswoman told HuffPost that his comment had been
taken out of context.)
Last January, she joined the New York Young Republican Club, a longtime
redoubt of Rockefeller Republicanism recently taken over by MAGA
enthusiasts. In May, the club announced a partnership with the youth
wing of Austria’s right-wing Freedom Party, proclaiming a shared
interest in “ending illegal immigration undertaken with the interest of
eradicating the traditional people of a land.” Guests at the club’s
annual holiday banquet in December included Peter Brimelow, founder of
the nativist website VDare, and Jack Posobiec, a far-right commentator
known for promoting the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. The club’s
president, Gavin Wax, views Stefanik’s trajectory as almost inevitable.
“She’s really transformed,” he said in an interview. “There’s no point
in being a moderate Republican in New York anymore.”
From Harvard to the Hill
Like the Ivy League-educated Republican Sen. Josh Hawley or Florida Gov.
Ron DeSantis, Stefanik has succeeded in the Trump era in part by turning
on the kind of people and institutions that made her.
The daughter of a prosperous Albany-area plywood distributor, she
arrived at Harvard a year after the Sept. 11 attacks and immediately got
involved with the university’s Institute of Politics. At the institute’s
glass-and-brick building near the Charles River, a college freshman
might brush elbows with a visiting senator, a Nobel Peace Prize winner,
even a former president. “We all wanted to be around power, and we all
had to decide what we were going to do with that access,” said Naomi
Ages, a Harvard contemporary who went on to a career in environmental law.
The institute tried, with mixed success, to weld the students’ natural
ambition to some notion of the public good. Stefanik fell in easily with
a mostly left-leaning crowd. Four people who knew her at the time said
she identified as a supporter of abortion and gay rights, although
another college friend, Daniel Dunay, said in an email that “she was
pro-life then, just like she is now.” Friends recalled her zipping
around Cambridge in a sporty BMW, an earnest and fun-loving young woman
with an endearingly goofy side. “She was sort of fascinated by the
glamour of politics,” said Clarke Tucker, now a Democratic state
lawmaker in Arkansas. “A lot of people with the IOP, myself included,
are sort of nerds with a reverence for American institutions. I would
have said the same about her, which is the most heartbreaking part of
this.” He added: “She was running for something from the second she got
there.”
A few weeks into her freshman year, she was picked to help run a weekly
study group for a seminar led by Ted Sorensen, a former Kennedy
speechwriter and confidant. “After that, I was hooked,” she later told a
Harvard newsletter. No other institution in the world, she exulted,
could match the institute “in terms of exposure and having a seat at the
table.”
As a rising junior, she set out to run for the institute’s student
presidency. Institute elections were hotly contested — Pete Buttigieg
was famous in their circle for his surprise victory two years earlier —
but not particularly ideological. Stefanik and a friend named David
Kaden, the polished son of a politically connected New York lawyer,
decided to run together. Stefanik believed she should be at the top of
the ticket, but in the end grudgingly agreed to be Kaden’s vice
president, a concession that left her bitter years later. Adopting a
quasi-populist platform — giving all students, not just those in
leadership, keys to the IOP student office — they won overwhelmingly.
Later, a friend and Harvard alumna introduced Stefanik to her boss at
the White House, an official who ran President George W. Bush’s domestic
policy council. The day after graduation, she moved to Washington as his
new assistant.
Stefanik was an adept networker in the way of many successful young
Washingtonians. Older people had a tendency to see in her a younger
version of themselves, and after Bush left office and her law school
plans fizzled — none of the schools she applied to accepted her — she
translated her White House connections into a succession of
opportunities. With vague ideas about a revival of Bush’s “compassionate
conservatism” or an American version of Thatcherism, she persuaded
several prominent Bush alumni to join the board of a new web magazine,
named American Maggie and dedicated to promoting “new ideas, new voices,
and new types of candidates.” American Maggie lasted about six months,
publishing a mix of syndicated columns and lightly polished essays by
young conservative women in Stefanik’s orbit. In 2011, she became policy
director for Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor running for
president as a Tea Party-friendly lunch-pail conservative. When the
party nominated an altogether different candidate, the patrician
ex-financier Mitt Romney, her Bush connections helped land her a job
with his running mate, Ryan, an icon of the party’s libertarianish wing.
After Romney lost, Stefanik was hired by a Republican National Committee
task force charged with figuring out what had gone wrong. The project,
known as the Republican “autopsy,” would call on the party to embrace
comprehensive immigration reform — “amnesty,” as it was disparaged on
the right. Stefanik, who served as an editor for the task force, was “a
strong advocate of including the immigration language,” according to
Sally Bradshaw, a task force member. “I can’t recall any time where
Elise argued against being bold in that document,” Bradshaw said. As she
recalled, Stefanik was most involved in the passages that examined how
the party could attract a more diverse electorate. More inclusive
messaging would not be enough, the final report argued; the party had to
run more women for office. Stefanik, it turned out, had a specific kind
of candidate in mind.
North Country Makeover
Running for Congress would be her first reinvention: from staff member
to principal, insider to outsider, Beltway striver to North Country
native. As Stefanik prepared to run in New York's sprawling, largely
rural 21st Congressional District, she took a job at her family’s
company, Premium Plywood Products, and moved to their vacation home in
the town of Willsboro, on Lake Champlain. She told friends she would
play down her liberal views on abortion rights and gay marriage by
casting them as settled matters. She hired Romney’s media consultant,
who prepared a rosy-toned introductory ad heralding her “return home to
the North Country”; her campaign bio described Stefanik as “a
small-businesswoman who works in North Country sales, marketing and
management.” When one local reporter visited Willsboro for a profile, he
couldn’t find a single person who had either met or heard of her.
The older, overwhelmingly male political class in the district did not
immediately take Stefanik seriously. The candidate and her aides felt
that local news coverage of her was hostile and nitpicky. But she had an
instinctive sense of how to craft a sound bite and repeat it
relentlessly, embracing the slogan “new ideas and a new generation of
leadership.” She logged thousands of miles on the road — she had ditched
the BMW for a Ford F-150 pickup — and boned up on local issues, like
broadband internet access and tick control. When the incumbent Democrat
announced his retirement in early 2014, Stefanik’s main challenge was
defeating his previous opponent, a self-funding businessman, in the
Republican primary.
Whatever resistance she may have faced in New York, the party’s national
establishment, fearful of Democrats’ dominance among young voters,
embraced her eagerly. Billionaires threw her fundraisers and put more
than $1 million into super PACs backing her candidacy. Smaller checks
poured in from former White House colleagues and college friends,
conservatives and liberals alike. “At the time, she was everything I
agreed with,” said Heather Grizzle, a friend and fellow Republican from
her Harvard days. “I was thrilled to help a friend who looked like she
had a shot.”
That fall, at the age of 30, Stefanik became the youngest woman ever
elected to Congress. The Institute of Politics brought her onto its
board, among the ranks of the politicians and leaders she had idolized
as a student. In Congress, she joined a new, more diverse crop of young
Republicans; senior Republicans began to discuss her as a future House
speaker. She was profiled in Glamour magazine and told CBS she had been
influenced to run by reading “Lean In,” the bestselling book by Sheryl
Sandberg of Facebook. But she carefully turned down most national
interview requests. “I wanted to make sure that my first impression to
my colleagues is that I am a workhorse,” she would later explain.
In private, Stefanik already seemed to be thinking ahead. Not long after
the 2014 primary, according to records provided by the online forensics
company DomainTools, StefanikForPresident.com was registered by Alex
Skatell, the co-founder of IMGE, a political consulting firm retained by
Stefanik’s campaign. Within days, the records show, the firm had
registered or acquired two dozen other Stefanik-themed web addresses,
more than half hinting at a future bid for Senate or president.
Ownership of the addresses was later hidden behind a proxy service. In
2017, local papers reported that persons unknown had registered
StefanikForPresident.com and other Stefanik-related domains. At the
time, a spokesperson denied it had been Stefanik or anyone working for
her, chalking up the scrutiny to “desperate candidates and their
partisan allies.”
‘Supporting’ the Nominee
When the congresswoman appeared in May 2021 on “War Room,” Steve
Bannon’s popular talk show, the onetime Trump consigliere prompted her
to tell listeners how she had always stood by Trump’s side. “People in
the audience need to understand this,” Bannon said: After the release of
the “Access Hollywood” tape in 2016, in which the future president
bragged about groping women, “you had every opportunity to run like so
many of the Republican establishment did at the time.”
Stefanik, then mounting her first bid for House leadership, wound up for
the softball. “I will never forget campaigning in 2016 despite the
media’s obsessive Trump derangement syndrome,” she said. She had felt
the energy on the ground, had seen Trump’s win coming, even if others
had not. “The media didn’t get it; the establishment didn’t get it. I
was proud to be a part of it. And I was proud to be on that ticket.”
In truth, she had loathed Trump from the start. In August 2015, she told
a New York radio station that he was “insulting to women,” and that his
candidacy would hurt the party’s efforts to attract female voters. That
December, at a friend’s wedding in Australia, she made Trump the butt of
an elaborate rehearsal dinner toast, according to four people who
attended. Whipping out a red MAGA hat, she glared at the other guests
with mock suspicion, warning them not to post pictures or videos of the
speech online, where they might get back to her constituents. Winding
up, she placed the hat on the groom, a tech entrepreneur known for his
socialist politics and friendly debates with Stefanik. Everyone laughed.
(Her spokesperson denied it was a MAGA hat and said the toast did not
mock Trump.)
Like many establishment Republicans, according to her former friends,
she thought Trump was too awful and ridiculous to be taken seriously,
then watched with alarm as his campaign soared. She refused to endorse
anyone before the New York presidential primary that April, leading
Paladino, her future ally, to denounce her as a “fraud” and “Washington
elitist establishment sellout.” Around that time, she returned to
Cambridge for an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Institute
of Politics. Afterward, she and a dozen of her old crowd gathered at a
restaurant to catch up. Stefanik said she planned to vote for John
Kasich in the primary and could not possibly vote for Trump in the
general election, according to people who were there, and suggested she
might write in someone else’s name if he became the nominee. (Her
spokesperson denied that account of the dinner.)
Stefanik skipped the Republican convention that summer. When the “Access
Hollywood” tape broke, she drafted a statement demanding that he drop
out of the race, according to a person familiar with her decision-making
process, before settling for a Facebook post calling his statements
“inappropriate, offensive” and “just wrong.” (Her spokesperson said that
it was “Never Trump Outside consultants” working on her campaign who had
drafted statements calling on Trump to drop out.) A week later, after a
local debate, she told the assembled news media that she was “supporting
my party’s nominee.” Then she dashed to her vehicle as her campaign
staff blocked an Albany television reporter from following her. In text
messages to friends after Trump won, she expressed shock and worry, not
the exultation she claims today.
Her revisionism still shocks those who have known her the longest and
who remember the disdain she expressed for Trump back then. “I suspect
there are a lot of Republican members of Congress who take positions on
Trump that they don’t hold privately, for their own political security
or gain,” said Tucker, the Arkansas lawmaker. “Elise is the only one I
know for certain who has.”
Woman in the Middle
Over Trump’s first two years in office, Stefanik fought what amounted to
a losing battle against her own ambition. She voted with the president
most of the time but against some of his signature initiatives — his tax
cut, for example, and his attempt to free up funding for a border wall
by declaring a national emergency. She co-sponsored legislation to
provide a path to citizenship for “Dreamers,” young immigrants brought
to America illegally as children, and registered high-toned disapproval
of the president’s attacks on “shithole” countries. (“Wrong and contrary
to our American ideals,” she wrote on Twitter).
Her friends outside Washington would occasionally text her with praise
after a tough vote. “Getting a lot of negative feedback back home,” she
wrote one after the wall showdown. “But also some positive. So mixed.
But I feel strongly it was the right vote.” She began participating in a
book about millennial politicians by a Time magazine journalist,
Charlotte Alter, who cast Stefanik as a rising star determined to drag
her party into the 21st century. “I just think my generation doesn’t
want to see the extreme partisanship,” she told the writer. Mike
Conaway, a former Republican lawmaker from Texas who served with
Stefanik on the House Intelligence Committee, described her as a
diligent and hardworking member who “would ask really good questions and
ask really good follow-up questions.”
But according to current and former friends, she felt increasingly
frustrated and lost in the House, horrified by the behavior of her
harder-right colleagues and unsure of her place. As Trump’s presidency
unfolded, it was becoming more difficult to play the middle. Some of the
high-profile issues on which she had positioned herself as a bipartisan
leader — climate action, immigration — had little traction in the Trump
era. The president’s base wanted revenge, not high-minded ideas; Trump
set policy by tweet, not white paper. As the 2018 midterms approached,
Stefanik’s campaign took on a grim, joyless air. According to friends
and advisers, she seemed brittle and unhappy. No longer a novice
candidate, she dictated a hyperlocal campaign, emphasizing her
bipartisanship and focus on regional issues. Though Democrats took the
House that fall, Stefanik won the largest margin of any Republican in
New York, a seeming validation of her carefully calibrated approach. But
it was bittersweet. She was a promising young lawmaker with a seat at no
particular table, respected by her party’s fractured establishment but
viewed with suspicion by its ascendant Trump wing.
Still, the campaign had given Stefanik a glimpse of an alternate path.
That August, she had appeared with Trump at Fort Drum, a major military
base in her district, to mark the signing of that year’s defense bill.
With a Democratic wave approaching, Stefanik had fretted for weeks over
whether and how she wanted him to appear, but ultimately lobbied hard
for Trump’s visit, according to a former White House official involved
in the planning. At Fort Drum, Trump mispronounced her name — calling
her “STEF-a-nik,” not for the last time — and offered backhanded praise.
“She called me so many times” that he had dodged her calls, Trump told
the audience. Stefanik gave a brief speech from behind the presidential
lectern, lit for television as she cited the bill’s pay increase for
soldiers and provisions she had written providing support for military
spouses.
The day made a powerful impression, according to people who know or have
worked with her. The cheering crowd was “a taste of being Jim Jordan and
Mark Meadows for a day,” said the former White House official, referring
to two of Trump’s staunchest House allies. More important, she had
successfully maneuvered the power of the presidency — even if it was his
presidency — behind a piece of her own agenda. It was a taste of the
influence she had always imagined having.
In the months that followed, many people sensed her impending
transformation only as a kind of withdrawal. Rep. Eric Swalwell,
D-Calif., serving with her on the intelligence committee, recalled that
in their first years on the panel, they texted often about committee
business. “She took the Russia stuff seriously for a long time,”
Swalwell said. “And then she just went dark.”
Always a happy warrior — someone who loved a debate and gave as good as
she got — she now seemed cornered and defensive. She felt she was taking
risks in criticizing Trump, even gently. But amid the polarizing fever
of the Trump presidency, longtime friends were increasingly impatient
with her cautious triangulations.
In the summer of 2019, when Trump attacked the Baltimore district of a
Black lawmaker as a “rat- and rodent-infested mess” and urged four
Democratic lawmakers of color to “go back” to where they came from,
Stefanik called his comments “denigrating and wrong” but balked at going
further. “I don’t believe he’s a racist,” she told a North Country
newspaper. A week later, she received a long email from her old Harvard
friend, Yearwood Young. “I’ve been wanting to write this email for
months, but have been holding out as long as I could, hoping you would
redeem yourself at some point,” she wrote. “You know he is racist. It
honestly disgusts me that for political purposes you will not only
refuse to call it out, but to actually state that he is NOT racist.”
Stefanik wrote back that afternoon. “I am so sorry that I have
disappointed you,” she said. She pointed out that she had among the more
bipartisan records in Congress and asked her friend to respect their
differences. “I know how divided this country is right now. I hear it,
see it, experience it every day. I receive emails like this on a daily
basis from people (including some of our college friends!) who shame me
for not supporting President Trump enough,” Stefanik wrote. She skirted
the question of whether Trump or the things he said were racist,
responding that “supporting President Trump does not make voters or
people racist.”
Their volley of emails took on a progressively bitter tone. Stefanik
said she had been “called out by name on Fox News and radio repeatedly”
after voting for “immigration reform and legal status for undocumented
immigrants.” She had been subject to violent threats; strangers had
followed her while driving. She sounded resigned. “As long as I happen
to be a Republican today,” she wrote, “that is unacceptable and immoral
in your mind.” They never spoke again.
That October, after receiving a list of routine fact-checking queries
from Alter, the Time journalist, Stefanik demanded through an aide to
speak to Alter’s publisher. The aide claimed that the queries reflected
significant factual errors, according to emails Alter provided, but when
pressed, identified only a handful of minor items, easily fixed before
publication. “They were trying to use my good-faith effort to check the
facts as a cudgel to stop a book they didn’t want to be in anymore,”
Alter said. “The book aligned with her earlier image, and she was making
a transformation.” Just weeks later, Stefanik made her move.
‘She Has Become a Star’
Among those who have known her longest, a question about Stefanik’s
ideological journey almost invariably draws a pause, a sigh and a
theory. Even now, many former friends and associates believe that she
did not, at first, intend to travel quite as far as she did. “I don’t
think that the plan was to become a MAGA star,” Tucker said.
Indeed, through most of autumn 2019, as the intelligence committee
examined allegations that Trump had threatened to withhold military aid
unless Ukraine investigated Biden, she remained a minor player,
attending fewer than half of the private depositions and asking
questions at just two. She closely watched the Democratic presidential
debates, sometimes offering, through a friend working on his campaign,
unsolicited advice for Buttigieg. Even weeks later, as she publicly
defended Trump, she was mulling other paths for advancement: She asked
the friend whether Buttigieg might consider her for a Cabinet job if he
won the presidency. The friend, incredulous, told the Times the idea was
never sent up the chain.
Yet as public hearings loomed that November, Stefanik lobbied for a
bigger role. Like other Republicans, she felt that Democrats were
abusing their power, forcing through one-sided rules for the impeachment
battle. Her plan, she told one Republican friend, was to highlight the
unfairness of the process. But she would not carry Trump’s water. “I
will never defend Trump,” she said. (Her spokesperson said that the
notion that Stefanik had raised the idea of a Cabinet job with anyone on
the Buttigieg campaign was “stupid and false,” and that she had never
expressed reluctance about defending Trump.)
On the first day of the hearings, she led off Republican efforts to
derail the hearing, attacking the panel’s chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff of
California, for blocking Republicans from calling some witnesses. But as
the hearing progressed, she did defend Trump: Addressing herself
directly to the television audience, she waved away the president’s
efforts to pressure the Ukrainians. “For the millions of Americans
viewing today, the two most important facts are the following,” she
said. “No. 1, Ukraine received the aid; No. 2, there was, in fact, no
investigation into Biden.” When the committee reconvened two days later,
Stefanik again led the attack. With theatrical interjections,
deliberately breaking the Democrats’ rules, she lured Schiff into
calling his young female colleague out of order. “What is the
interruption for this time?” she demanded.
On the left, Stefanik became an instant target of hatred. Hollywood
celebrities and liberal Twitter influencers attacked her relentlessly,
dubbing her “Trashy Stefanik” and circulating a doctored picture of her
supposedly giving the finger to a photographer during the hearings. In a
clumsily sexist tweet, ABC’s Matthew Dowd suggested she had been elected
only because she was a woman. But Fox News ate up her performance,
featuring clips through prime time. Trump loved it. “I know a lot about
stardom,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends” the following week. “This young
woman from upstate New York — she has become a star.”
Stefanik’s Republican friend, to whom she had pledged not to carry
Trump’s water, was not surprised. He had watched many Republican
politicians grapple with the political incentives of Trumpism. All her
life, Stefanik had streamlined herself for success; finally she had
found the engine of her ascent. The farther she turned the dial, the
more power and influence she would have. “So then the question is, what
do you do with that dial?” said the friend. “You can say, ‘I can embrace
it without going full MAGA.’” Stefanik chose differently. “She just
said, ‘Wow.’ She cranked the dial. I don’t think she arrived at this
issue set totally disingenuously.”
‘I’ve Chosen My Values’
As the positive reviews rolled in, Stefanik seized the opportunity. On
the day of the second impeachment hearing, her team activated a new
account on WinRed, the small-donor platform set up by Trump campaign
veterans. She raised more in grassroots contributions in a week than she
had over the entire rest of her congressional career, according to a
Times analysis of campaign finance records. By the end of the first week
of hearings, her team had prepared to unveil a new impeachment-themed
fundraising site, FightSchiff.com, and set out to have her booked on Fox
News to plug it.
Stefanik marveled to friends at the flood of money. Contributions from
her leadership PAC to other Republicans would quadruple by the end of
2020. With Trump’s blessing, she could tap into a nationwide base of
MAGA fans. Out of roughly $4 million she raised on WinRed this election
cycle through late October 2022, just 4% came from her own district,
according to a Times analysis of campaign finance records.
Ever her own best adviser, Stefanik dictated the tactics and message. As
she milked the MAGA base for money and visibility, she began
articulating a new, almost passive conception of her role as
congresswoman, in which her job was to mirror her constituents, not take
principled votes they might dislike. In 2014, her defenders have argued,
her district wanted a Bush-style Republican; in the Trump era, it wanted
a Trump-style Republican. “There’s no shift,” said Pileggi, the former
campaign aide. Who could say she was wrong if the voters said she was
right? The discredited gatekeepers of the mainstream media? The small
papers back home that fewer and fewer people read? Asked in a recent
interview whether she had chosen her ambition over her values, she
simply avoided the question. “I’ve chosen my values,” she said. “And
I’ve chosen my constituents.”
She moved quickly into Trump’s circle, readily accepting the compromises
it entailed. In spring 2020, she flew with the president on Air Force
One to witness the SpaceX rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Aboard the plane, according to a former White House official who was
there, the president made a derogatory comment about the sex life of one
of his most loyal and senior female aides. Stefanik had once criticized
Trump’s demeaning comments toward women; now she simply plastered a
smile on her face. “No one said anything. Neither did I,” the former
official recalled. “It was a sign that she knew who he was.” Stefanik’s
spokesperson denied the account, saying it “never happened.”
In public, however, Stefanik’s new political self was most obvious on
Trump’s favorite social media platform, where she began to favor his
random capitalizations and conspicuous exclamation points. In the years
since his first impeachment hearing, she has attacked political
opponents or journalists as “sick” or “sickening” more than three dozen
times — language she had never before used on Twitter. She edited away
parts of her old online persona that might grate against the new. As the
2020 elections approached, according to a Times analysis of Twitter data
collected by ProPublica, Stefanik deleted a pair of tweets from that
March praising Dr. Anthony Fauci, the public face of the federal COVID
response. “America [HEART]s Dr. Fauci!” she had written. In 2021, with
Fauci firmly established as a right-wing punching bag, she expressed a
different view. “Fire Fauci,” she tweeted. “Save Christmas!”
After Trump’s election defeat, as he fomented a deluge of lies and
conspiracy theories about cheating and voter fraud, Stefanik quickly
fell in line. Trump had made his election lies a litmus test for fellow
Republicans, and Stefanik was unwilling to fail it, even as election
officials and judges dismissed or refuted almost every claim made by the
president or his legal team. Repeating a string of already debunked
assertions, she claimed that local officials had counted the votes of
dead people, or tossed out procedures intended to prevent fraud, or
illegally counted late-arriving votes. Having lied to her own
constituents, fanning their fears of a rigged election, she then claimed
their suspicions as a casus belli. “Tens of millions of Americans are
rightly concerned that the 2020 election featured unprecedented voting
irregularities,” she said in an open letter to her district on the
morning of Jan 6.
That evening, after the Trump-inspired mob was cleared from the Capitol,
she joined other Republicans to vote against certifying electors from
Pennsylvania. The next day, she got a text from Tucker, the Arkansas
lawmaker and Harvard friend. “I cannot put into words how disappointed I
am in you,” he wrote. She had squandered a “historic opportunity to
fundamentally strengthen our country and democracy,” he told her.
“You’ve done this all for, what exactly?” Disgusted, he joined hundreds
of other Harvard alumni and students on a petition for Stefanik’s
removal from the Institute of Politics board. So did Grizzle, her fellow
Republican, who had lived most of the year in Pennsylvania: One of the
ballots Stefanik had tried to invalidate was her own. “You can’t promote
democracy if you’re throwing out people’s votes,” Grizzle said.
A few days later, the dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, which oversees
the institute, asked Stefanik to step aside. When she refused, he
announced her removal. She had disqualified herself, the dean said in a
statement, through repeated false statements about the election.
Stefanik responded with the kind of bristling performance her former
friends had come to expect. Her alma mater had decided to “cave to the
woke Left,” she said; getting kicked off the board was a “badge of honor.”
A Fall and an Ascent
A few weeks after the insurrection, House Republicans met to consider
removing Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, then the party’s highest-ranking
woman in Congress, from her job as conference chair. In the two previous
leadership contests, it was Stefanik herself who had stood before
colleagues to nominate Cheney, once calling her a “huge asset in the
role.” But Cheney had now voted for Trump’s second impeachment,
infuriating not only Trump allies but a broader range of Republican
lawmakers, who complained that she had made their party look divided.
Days after the vote, Politico reported that Stefanik had “privately
signaled” her interest in replacing her.
That February, Cheney’s colleagues voted to keep her in the job. But as
Cheney continued to speak out against Trump, the woman who had remade
her principles to fit her ambition set out to depose the one risking
career suicide in service of hers. Though Stefanik had a far more
liberal voting record than the woman she wanted to replace, she worked
both sides, making clear she would neither embarrass Republicans who had
cowered before Trump’s election lies nor anger supporters who insisted
on believing them. Her argument, as one Republican member recalled it:
“I’m a woman, I’m young, I’m reasonable. I like Liz, but we need to quit
focusing on Jan. 6.” Trump’s ringing endorsement that May sealed the
deal. Cheney was out, and Stefanik was in.
It became harder, then, for her to reconcile the identity she said she
hadn’t abandoned with the power she had finally grasped. She dropped her
support for the Equality Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at extending
housing and employment anti-discrimination rules to gay, lesbian and
transgender people, and pulled her name from another Republican-backed
gay-rights bill, known as the Fairness for All Act, saying she now had
“serious concerns on how this bill would impact society.” (She recently
voted in favor of a bipartisan bill codifying the Supreme Court’s
decision legalizing same-sex marriage.) Her voting score from the
conservative group Heritage Action was a squishy 24% at the end of 2018;
she currently rates a stalwart 86.
She has repeatedly voted against spending bills championed by Biden and
the Democrats, then taken credit for the money those same bills
delivered back home. Last March, her press office alerted upstate
reporters that Stefanik had secured $205,000 for job training in Warren
County, though a news release from her Washington office, quoting the
congresswoman, proclaimed that she could not support “Speaker Pelosi’s
bill,” which was “drafted in the dead of night.”
The further Stefanik traveled into Trump’s world, the deeper she seemed
to dig in. She hadn’t changed; her former friends had. They were out of
touch, driven mad by hatred of Trump. That spring, Rep. Seth Moulton of
Massachusetts, a fellow Harvard graduate and her Democratic colleague on
the Armed Services Committee, approached her on the House floor. Both
elected in 2014, they often had lunch together at the Capitol, and had
mutual friends outside Washington. Speaking carefully, he told her that
people were worried about the course she had set herself on, Moulton
recalled. Stefanik lashed out, demanding to know which of their friends
had talked to him. She mocked him, saying that some of the same people
had asked her what Moulton thought he was doing when he ran for
president the previous year.
He tried to get up and leave, but she pulled him back down, pressing her
case. Her former friends had no idea what real Americans thought,
Stefanik told him. They didn’t know anything about the district she
represented.
“But these people know you, Elise,” Moulton replied. “And now they feel
like they don’t even recognize you.”
The Price of Loyalty
“What happened to the red wave, congresswoman?”
The day after her party’s midterm underperformance, even the normally
friendly hosts on “Fox & Friends” had questions for Stefanik. In the
weeks leading to Election Day, she had predicted nothing less than a
“red tsunami.” But around the country, Trump’s hand-picked candidates
for the Senate and other offices went down to defeat; those he had
endorsed in close House races ran significantly behind Republicans he
had not, hampered in part by voters’ revulsion at the extreme rhetoric
he had normalized in Republican circles. Fewer than one-third of the
female House candidates Stefanik had endorsed through her leadership PAC
made it through the general election. Republicans will soon take control
of the House with one of the slimmest margins in history; the party’s
House leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, has already been forced to
cut deals with the most extreme members of his caucus to keep his
would-be speakership alive. Like the party more broadly, House
Republicans cannot yet afford to banish those most responsible for their
quandary.
But as other Republicans questioned how to wean their party off Trump,
Stefanik issued her preemptive endorsement of his all-but-announced
reelection campaign. In some respects, she had little choice: Stefanik
is arguably more dependent on Trump’s patronage than any other
Republican leader, and his team soon made clear that he expected such an
endorsement from anyone he was supporting for a leadership job. Two
weeks after her reelection as conference chair, when Trump dined at
Mar-a-Lago with rapper Kanye West and the young MAGA commentator Nick
Fuentes — two guests with a history of antisemitic or racist statements
— Stefanik said nothing. Nor did she have anything to say publicly when
Trump, citing stories about how Twitter had handled moderation decisions
during the 2020 election, suggested “termination” of the Constitution
might be an appropriate remedy.
When Congress reconvenes, many of the younger, more Trump-critical
Republicans who joined the House alongside Stefanik eight years ago will
be gone. So will all but two of the Republicans who voted to impeach
him. Some in Congress believe that if McCarthy cannot corral the votes
to make himself speaker, Stefanik could offer herself up as a compromise
candidate.
Yet her position may be more precarious than it appears. Unwilling to
acknowledge that her politics have changed, she has never offered MAGA
die-hards a persuasive conversion story, leaving behind lingering
suspicion. “One thing I’ve heard consistently from pro-Trump members is
that the 180 that she pulled was just so jarring,” said one veteran
Republican lobbyist who is in touch with a wide array of Republican
lawmakers.
Among her fellow Republicans, according to Republican lawmakers, Hill
staff and lobbyists, Stefanik has a reputation for being both diligent
in advancing the party’s message and unabashedly transactional in
amassing chits of support for her own climb up the ladder. But her
campaign donations and endorsements have given her support that may be
more broad than deep. For much of the spring and summer, while serving
as conference chair, she quietly tested the waters for promotion to the
next highest-ranking House job, that of Republican whip. As the race
grew more crowded, however, Stefanik found herself without a clear
constituency for the position. The party’s remaining moderates no longer
saw her as one of them, and its right wing preferred a more consistent
conservative. Only when another House member announced his interest in
succeeding her as conference chair did Stefanik finally commit to
running for another term in her old job.
News stories about the upcoming presidential campaign still mention
Stefanik as a rising star who might join a Trump ticket in 2024 — a
political pole vault that would carry her, finally, to the very top of
the Republican Party. But within the president’s inner circle, according
to two people close to Trump, stories casting Stefanik as a potential
running mate are regarded as clumsy plants by her own team, and inspire
bemusement and mockery. Trump liked her, they said, and liked watching
her defend him. But even he didn’t trust her.