Trump All But Admits He Withdrew Elise Stefanik Nomination Because GOP Could Lose the House: ‘We Don’t Want to Take Any Chances’

President Donald Trump all but admitted that he withdrew Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R-NY) nomination to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations over concerns the GOP might lose its majority in the House of Representatives while taking questions in the Oval Office Friday.

Trump’s admission came after one reporter asked, “Mr. President, yesterday you asked Representative Stefanik to stay in her seat. Can you explain your reason for that? Did it have anything to do with the tight polling in the Florida district that former Representative [Mike] Waltz held?”

“Well, I think we’re doing — yeah, I think we have — as you know, we have a few elections going on. And she is phenomenal, number one. She is a friend of mine, and she was going to go to the United Nations, and I said, look, there’s a lot of room for doing that or something else. But she’s very popular in her district, and I didn’t want to take a chance. I don’t even know who else is running. I assume somebody else would have been running. But if she runs, she can’t be — you never want to say can’t be beaten, but I think can’t be-beaten,” answered Trump.

He continued:

She’s very, very well-liked, and very smart. And I said, “Elise, would you do me a favor?”

We cannot take a chance. We have a slim margin. We don’t want to take any chances. We don’t want to experiment. And she polls like I do; I won her district, as you know, by a lot of points. And she also does very well there. When it comes to Florida, you have two races, and they seem to be good. It’s a Trump plus 32 area. The one thing is they’re spending like $12 million, and our candidate doesn’t have that kind of money, spending much less than that, like maybe one twelfth, about a million dollars, a little bit more than a million dollars. So the airwaves are blanketed. And you never know what happens in a case like that.

I won it by 32 points, and it’s very, very strong. It used to be Democrat, but when I came along, they liked me for whatever reason, you’ll have to explain that, but they liked me and we’re way up. But you don’t know what happens. Second district, who seems to be in pretty good shape, but likewise, he’s being outspent about five to one.

So we don’t want to take any chances. So I went to Elise and I said, “Elise, do you mind?” A very highly rated person, you know, she was a real leader. And she will be, again. I spoke with Mike Johnson, they’re going to put her in a high leadership position. “But will you mind staying in Congress, because we don’t want to take any chances.” And it’s as simple as that. It’s basic politics. It’s politics 101. She’s very popular. She’s going to win. And somebody else will probably win, too, because, we did very well there, I did very well there. But the word probably is no good. So, I really appreciate her doing it. She’s doing me a big favor when she does it because she was all set to go to the United Nations and she would have dealt with Putin and Zelensky and everybody else, and she would have been very effective. But we really want to-, we don’t want to take any chances because it is tight.

Republicans currently boast a razor-thin 218-213 majority in the House, and there are special elections being held to replace both Waltz and former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz. If Democrats won both of those contests — as well as a hypothetical special election in Stefanik’s district — they would take the majority and speaker’s gavel.