When Elise Stefanik flipped her Obama district from blue to red in 2014, establishment Republicans saw in her the hope of a future GOP: a smart, reasonable consensus builder with Harvard pedigree.
Instead, the one-time George W. Bush White House staffer engineered a head-spinning transformation over the last several years from Paul Ryan acolyte to "one of my killers," as Donald Trump puts it, in what seems like the blink of an eye.
Ever since, Stefanik has thrown herself into the MAGA world with gusto. Her grassroots fundraising capability among Trumpers is part of what helped fuel her rise within the House Republican caucus. Not content to simply spout Trump's 2020 election fraud lies, she has wholeheartedly embraced his excessively nasty persona. Last month, when Stefanik endorsed a primary opponent of Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, whose GOP leadership post she now holds, Stefanik went above and beyond to turn the knife.
“Liz Cheney abandoned her constituents to become a Far-Left Pelosi puppet. Liz sadly belongs in an MSNBC or CNN news chair, not in Congress representing Wyoming,” Stefanik said in her endorsement statement for Harriet Hageman.
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If selling her soul was the price of power, Stefanik has been all too happy to pay it. According to a New York Times profile, Stefanik sacrificed a circle of her Harvard friends, got ousted from the advisory committee of her alma mater's prestigious Institute of Politics, and turned prickly whenever someone suggested her abrupt shapeshifting might come back to haunt her at a later date.
Republican colleagues defend Stefanik by saying she's just playing the game.
“Congress has gotten tougher and rougher,” Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma told the Times. “She didn’t start that. She’s proven she knows how to mix it up, and that’s one of the qualities we look for in a conference.”
But some of Stefanik's early boosters regret getting played.
“I introduced her to donors and contributed to her campaign in 2014,” said Never Trumper Bill Kristol, adding that at a private meeting in her office in 2018 she agreed Trump was a liability. “She seemed like a responsible elected official. Wrong.”
Now, of course, she's all in.
On morphing from Ryan Republican to Trump killer, Stefanik explains, “I believe that my record and my time in Congress is reflective of my constituents."
On Trump calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a genius, Stefanik offers, “I think that President Trump was saying that Vladimir Putin assessed the weakness of Joe Biden, and unfortunately took advantage of it."
As for the possibility that Trump's star in the GOP might be falling, not so, she says.
“It’s on the rise,” Stefanik counters. “Especially now that voters have regrets about voting for Joe Biden.”
Sounds like the profound hope of someone who's backed themselves into a corner with the least loyal scumbag of all time.
