The personal cost of Elise Stefanik's support for Trump

It's not about "election denial"

When I was at Power Line, I helped pick the congressional candidates we recommended to readers and tried to raise money for. In 2014, based on information from one of my daughters, I identified Elise Stefanik as someone we should recommend. She became one of our picks.

I understood that Stefanik wasn’t as conservative as the four of us, or as most of our readers. But I viewed her as reliably conservative on key matters and about as conservative as one could be if electable in a New York district whose current representative was a Democrat. I also viewed her as very capable and bright— a possible candidate for leadership positions down the road.

Stefanik won her race pretty comfortably. She became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.

During her first few years in Congress, Stefanik was a center-right representative of little notoriety. Then came Donald Trump. Now, she’s a center-right representative — still ranked by the Lugar Center as among the top 25 percent most bipartisan members of Congress — who’s notorious.

Notorious enough that the Washington Post recently published this lengthy article. The subtitle, an accurate reflection of the content, is “Her climb through the ranks of GOP leadership in the House and embrace of Donald Trump has come at a personal cost.”

Of course it has. Just as black conservatives must pay a price, including personal insults, for deviating from left-liberalism, so must a young, Harvard-education woman pay a price, including insults, for being an ardent Trump supporter. As Kellyanne Conway puts it, “If you’re a pro-life Republican female who works with President Donald Trump, you’ve got a target on your front and your back and your forehead.”

Thus, the Post’s story can be viewed as “dog bites ]wo]man.” Nonetheless, it’s worth reading for the details and timing of the bites. As a bonus, the article is more fair-minded than I expected.

Here are some of the abuses and indignities to which Stefanik has been subjected for supporting Trump:

Item: Capitol Police have identified an uptick in threats against her.

Item: Stephen Brown, a member of the history department at Albany Academy [where Stefanik was a star student], said that while his politics never aligned with Stefanik’s — “and the gulf has certainly widened over the last several years, I always personally liked Elise.” “Several of my colleagues all but disowned her,” Brown added.

Item: In January 2021, the Albany Times Union published a community blog post mocking Stefanik for being “childless.” The item was a satirical piece that imagined her reading to a group of first-graders and saying, “I myself am childless because I am a rising star in the Republican Party.” Stefanik and her husband, Matthew Manda, thought it was vile. [They became parents later that year.]

Item: In January 2020, Stefanik was boarding a plane to Vermont to travel home across the border in Upstate New York. At Reagan National Airport, as he waited to board the same flight, a Democratic strategist named Sam Donnelly saw the congresswoman from across the gate. At the time, Donnelly was the chair of the Burlington Democratic Party. He had once viewed Stefanik as a moderate, he said, but her role in the impeachment hearings [i.e., the first impeachment; the second was still in the future] had made him change his mind. Sitting in the gate, scrolling on his phone, he opened a new tweet and attached a GIF of the actor Ryan Gosling, wearing sunglasses and doing a double-take. “I’m sitting next to Eliese Stefanik and I just want to get away,” he wrote, misspelling her name.

I emphasized the part about the first impeachment hearings because it’s important to understand that the nasty backlash against Stefanik didn’t originate with her support for Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen or with her unfortunate endorsement of Trump’s 2024 candidacy. Rather, as the Post says, it began with her “turn to Trump in 2016” and gained full steam three years later from her role in opposing the first impeachment — the one based on his conversation with Ukraine’s president Zelensky regarding military aid and Hunter Biden.

Stefanik played an important role in the first impeachment, and the Post’s article acknowledges her good faith in this proceeding. “She believed Democrats were abusing the committee’s institutional powers,” the Post reporter says.

But neither Stefanik’s good faith nor her comparatively moderate voting record insulated her from insulting attacks. Democrats claimed she had only been given a role in the proceedings because Republicans needed the presence of a woman on their side. Stefanik fired back, “They’re putting me forward because I ask the best questions.”

She did, and that’s when her friends turned sharply against her.

The first impeachment gave rise to serious disagreement — about whether Trump’s conversation with Zelensky was an improper use of presidential power (I thought it was) and about whether his behavior provided grounds for impeachment (I thought it didn’t). But it’s sad that disagreement over these matters caused lifelong friends to turn against Stefanik and some in the media to make her a target.

I can’t say it’s surprising, though. This is how many Democrats roll.

We hear plenty of talk from the left about a Trump “cult of personality” (and I believe one exists). But it seems to me that certain strands of anti-Trumpism are also cult like.

It’s the cult-like nature of these strands that explains the “personal cost” Elise Stefanik has paid since she helped lead the opposition to the first impeachment of Donald Trump.