‘Ultra-MAGA’ Republican Elise Stefanik Described Trump as a ‘Whack Job’ in Private

As House GOP conference chair, Rep. Elise Stefanik has been the third-ranking member of the House Republicans since the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney from the spot. She is also a top Donald Trump Republican, who is even reportedly on his short list for 2024 running mates. But, the New York Times revealed on Saturday, things were not always so.

In an extensive feature article headlined “The Invention of Elise Stefanik,” NYT reporter Nicholas Confessore writes about the GOP leader’s migration from the Paul Ryan moderates to the “ultra-MAGA” hard right.

“I am Ultra-Maga, I’m proud of it,” Stefanik said in May of this year. Confessore describes it as “one of the most brazen political transformations of the Trump era.”

The NYT article goes back to Stefanik’s earlier days, pinpointing the 2018 midterms as the corner turn for the New York Republican.

“(A)s 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,” writes Confessore. “The party was now firmly controlled by Donald J. Trump, a populist president she didn’t like or respect…”

As it turns out, more than not respecting him, she had some very negative comments about him, which the Times reveals included calling him a “whack job” in a message “obtained” by the paper.

That was then, though…

Fox hosts attacked her for not supporting Mr. 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. Mr. Ryan was gone, driven into early retirement. She told friends she was thinking of joining him.

Instead she embarked on one of the most brazen political transformations of the Trump era. With breathtaking speed and alacrity, Ms. 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.

Ms. 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.

Stefanik and her colleagues in leadership are promising big action against the Biden administration and agenda next year.

She did not give a comment to Confessore for the article. However, Trump world is rife with converts who previously held and espoused a dim view of the ex-president, including Trump-endorsed candidates like J.D. Vance, just as the anti-Trump world is littered with former supporters and cohorts, like Alyssa Farah Griffin or Michael Cohen, to name just a few.

So it’s not really all that unfamiliar a tale.

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