Sorry, World: The Story of Elise Stefanik

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(Last June, in a TBR Sunday Read for paid subscribers, I took a deep dive into the toxic waters of Rep. Elise Stefanik. Since Trump has decided to foist the nightmarish Stefanik on an unsuspecting world by naming her UN ambassador, today I’m making this story available to everyone for free. As always, thank you for supporting my work. —Andy)

Let me start by saying something nice about Elise Stefanik: She went to Harvard. Then again, so did the Unabomber. You might think it’s unfair to compare Stefanik to the Unabomber, and it is—to the Unabomber. For all his flaws, he was way more ideologically consistent than Stefanik.

There really are two Elise Stefaniks: Original Recipe and Extra Crazy.

Original Recipe Stefanik was first elected to Congress in 2014, when she was often referred to as a moderate Republican. Nowadays, “moderate Republican” means anyone to the left of Heinrich Himmler. But back then, before the extinction-level event known as Donald Trump, there were still some House Republicans who could pass as rational beings. Stefanik belonged to her party’s centrist Tuesday Group and was ranked by Georgetown’s Lugar Center as one of the House’s most bipartisan members. (At the time, she touted both distinctions; today, each has been deleted from her congressional website like an embarrassing ex cropped out of a profile pic.)

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Stefanik continued to exhibit signs of sanity. She supported the candidacy of someone with government experience—Ohio Governor John Kasich—and criticized the foreign policy “knowledge” of the former reality show host running against him. In October 2016, she said of Trump, “His statements regarding NATO, his statements regarding Putin, regarding some of the positions in regards to Iraq that he made, regarding the oil fields—I absolutely oppose those.” But one month later, Trump won—including in her upstate New York district, which had gone for Obama twice. And so began the congresswoman’s rapid devolution into a Donald Trump tribute act.

TV viewers got their first taste of Extra Crazy Stefanik during the 2019 impeachment inquiry. She ran roughshod over committee rules, then lambasted Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, for having the nerve to enforce them. Her obnoxious performance must’ve made the people at the Lugar Center wonder if the formerly bipartisan lawmaker was now snorting meth. “A new Republican Star is born,” Trump tweeted, underscoring his enthusiasm with random capitalization. But she was just getting started.

In December of 2020, a month after Trump lost to Joe Biden by over seven million votes, Stefanik signed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate the results in four battleground states. As if this weren’t enough to establish her cred as an election-denier, on January 6 she voted to decertify Biden’s win in Pennsylvania.

Embracing the Big Lie might’ve sucked for democracy, but it was amazing for Stefanik’s career. When the House GOP ousted Liz Cheney as conference chair for voting to impeach Trump, Stefanik jumped to succeed her—and earned an even more erratically capitalized shoutout from the Big Liar: “Liz Cheney is a warmongering fool who has no business in Republican Party Leadership… Elise Stefanik is a far superior choice, and she has my COMPLETE and TOTAL Endorsement for GOP Conference Chair. Elise is a tough and smart communicator!” Despite those amazing communication skills, in her victory speech she neglected to mention that, in two previous conference chair elections, she’d nominated Liz. This blend of opportunism and treachery earned her an enemy-for-life in Cheney, who came to love trolling Stefanik as much as her dad digs waterboarding.

Their feud came to a boil after Stefanik appeared on “Meet the Press” on January 7, 2024, and said of those imprisoned for the Capitol riot, “I have concerns about the treatment of January 6th hostages.” This bold attempt to equate the QAnon Shaman with Nelson Mandela was apparently too much for Cheney, who called Stefanik a “total crackpot.” Cheney tweeted out a copy of a statement Stefanik had issued at the time of the insurrection, in which Original Recipe Stefanik seemed to briefly reappear: She decried the “violence and destruction” at the Capitol and called for the rioters to be brought to justice. Confronted with evidence of her hypocrisy, Stefanik met the moment: She quickly deleted the statement from her website.

Lest you think Stefanik’s disdain for elections and fondness for insurrectionists mean she’s anti-democracy, she has called out autocracy when she’s seen it—namely, in the form of Dr. Anthony Fauci. In the early days of the pandemic, she showed respect for the celebrated epidemiologist, tweeting that her followers should  “tune in to Dr. Anthony Fauci during federal press briefings” and praising him for his “incredible job educating the public.” But once she realized that these pro-science tweets weren’t finding favor with GOP voters who thought COVID could be cured by taking horse medicine and ingesting bleach, Stefanik again hit “delete,” by now the most beloved button on her keyboard.

In October of 2021, when Fauci urged caution about Christmas gatherings, she shivved him like he was Liz Cheney in a lab coat. “Fauci has lost all credibility with the American people,” she posted on Facebook. “We aren’t waiting on his permission to celebrate Christmas together.” In the ultimate homage to her demented mentor, she sent out a fundraising email with a subject line in all caps: “FIRE FAUCI.”

Fearing, perhaps, that her debasement wasn’t complete, she pandered to one of the most important constituencies in today’s Republican Party: white nationalists. She voted against holding alt-right parade float Steve Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress and became a regular guest on his podcast, often railing against “The Biden Crime Family.” Hoping to reach Nazis who don’t listen to Bannon’s show, she ran a Facebook ad sharing her highly derivative version of “The Great Replacement” theory. This paranoid fever dream, an obsession of the “very fine people” who marched with tiki torches through Charlottesville in 2017, envisions Jewish conspirators plotting to replace white voters with non-whites. On Facebook, Stefanik claimed that Democrats were fomenting “permanent election insurrection by granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.” Apparently, Stefanik only likes insurrections when they’re led by white people.

With such a stellar record of election denying, rioter loving, and hate spewing, Elise Stefanik has burnished an almost flawless MAGA CV. Why do I say “almost”? Well, Stefanik was so busy checking all those fascistic boxes that when it came time to support a congressional candidate in the most recent midterms, she didn’t do her homework.

On August 11, 2021, she tweeted, “MAJOR ENDORSEMENT ALERT: Excited to endorse my friend and fellow America First conservative George Santos for Congress in #NY03. @Santos4Congress will take on NYC liberal elites and bring a new generation of GOP leadership to NY and America. He has my full support!”

How full? According to a GOP strategist who spoke to CNN, “Stefanik’s team was laser focused on electing Santos to Congress—more than just about any other race in the country.” On May 23, 2022, she tweeted, “WOW! Great lunch event for @Santos4Congress! We raised over $100,000 to help George FLIP #NY03 George has my complete and total endorsement and come November Yorkers will send George to Congress! #SaveNewYork #SaveAmerica”

After Santos’s septic tank of lies overflowed and fellow Republicans called for his resignation, Stefanik’s loyalty to him remained unshakeable. Alas, she never got a chance to raise additional dough for her bestie. After Santos was charged with nearly two dozen felonies, the House voted to expel him. Standing by her man to the bitter end, Stefanik voted no. I give her credit for impostor solidarity, but Stefanik’s steadfast allegiance to a man who falsely claimed that his mother died on 9/11 isn’t exactly a resume booster. Looks like she’s got more deleting to do.