Elise Stefanik's Glass Eyes

Once heralded as “the future of hopeful, aspirational politics in America,” Elise Stefanik is now little more than a self-serving and soulless political hack.

Former House speaker Paul Ryan once called Elise Stefanik “the future of hopeful, aspirational politics in America.” Ryan, a mentor, has since confided to friends that he now considers her the biggest disappointment of his political career.

Why?

She once referred to Donald Trump as a “whack job” who was “insulting to women,” and thereby would fail to gain their support. She reportedly drafted a statement demanding that he drop out of the race when the “Access Hollywood” tape came out. And in the 2016 presidential primary, she revealed that she had cast her vote for moderate Ohio Republican John Kasich. During her first two terms in Congress, Stefanik was a moderate Republican who voted for women’s rights, climate change programs and other centrist positions – hence Ryan’s description of her as the epitome of “hopeful, aspirational politics.”

But faster than you can say, “April Fools!” the GOP’s rising star has done a 180.

Stefanik now describes herself as “ultra-Maga” and “proud of it.” Last spring, she attacked “the White House, House Dems, & usual pedo grifters,” clearly a reference to QAnon conspiracists’ insane assertions that Democrats are pedophiles. Stefanik deleted tweets praising Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, including, “America ❤’s Dr. Fauci!” – replacing them in 2021, after Fauci became a target of the far-right, with “Fire Fauci!” And she endorsed politicians like Sandy Smith, a defeated House candidate in North Carolina, who called for the arrest and execution of those behind the “fraud” of Trump’s electoral defeat. In May, she hosted a fund-raiser for the Olympian GOP fraudster and Pinocchio Prize winner George Santos.

A leading bullhorn for Trump’s Big Lie, Stefanik endorsed the twice-impeached ex-president last November even before he announced his bid for re-election, as if to inch up her status on the cloying sycophant scale. “Republican voters determine who is the leader of the Republican Party, and it’s very clear President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party,” she announced, further unctuously ingratiating herself with the coup plotter-in-chief. The conservative policy advocacy organization Heritage Action gives Stefanik a voting score of 87 percent, up from a measly 24 percent at the end of 2018.

Stefanik’s head-spinning volte-face occurred at the time of Trump’s first impeachment in 2019. Rather than having undergone an evolution in her thinking, “she basically abandoned her own core values for a man who had no core values,” a former principal at Stefanik’s high school told the Washington Post. The congresswoman belligerently defended Trump in the proceedings in the spirit of a Stalinist toady and repeatedly disrupted them with shameless theatrical grandstanding.

Stefanik did what many opportunistic politicians with no core principles do. She stuck a wet finger in the air to ascertain the direction of the political winds and changed directions to go with the flow. There’s no set of policies or ideology to grab onto, for the philosophical body of Trumpism comprises nothing more than grunts, sneers, lies and brain farts. But her toe-sucking sycophancy has served her well – for now. She became the third-ranking leader in the GOP House caucus after the party purged Lynn Cheney last year for her anti-Trump stance, and, with Nancy Pelosi’s leaving the Speaker’s job, Stefanik is now the most powerful woman in Congress.

My place of residence at one time lay in Stefanik’s Upstate New York district, a largely wilderness and rural region that is geographically larger than Vermont and New Hampshire combined and sprawls from the Canadian border to the Mohawk Valley. Traditionally solidly Republican, NY21 residents hitched themselves to the Trump populist bandwagon, voting for him in 2016 by 14 points, and in 2020 by over 10 points. So, Elise made the courageous decision to let her constituents lead her.

But true leaders don’t do this, as the New York Times’s Peter Wehner points out:

But even if you believe that the job of an elected representative is to vote according to the will of the voters rather than to owe voters one’s “judgment and conscience,” as the British parliamentarian and conservative political theorist Edmund Burke famously put it, at some point carrying out the will of the voters can become indefensible. That is certainly true if it requires a member of Congress to support a seditious president.

Ms. Stefanik’s story is important in part because it mirrors that of so many other Republicans. They, like Ms. Stefanik, are opportunists, living completely in the moment, shifting their personas to advance their immediate political self-interests. A commitment to ethical conduct, a devotion to the common good and fidelity to truth appear to have no intrinsic worth to them. These qualities are mere instrumentalities, used when helpful but discarded when inconvenient.

As I commented in a previous essay, there are plenty of other Ivy-educated Sedition Caucus Republicans with high intellect and zero ethics (Cruz, Hawley, et al). So, their actions beg the question: Do they truly believe the 2020 election was stolen, that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president? Of course not. They know better.

Hitler acolyte Albert Speer said his failing was weakness of character combined with overweening ambition. He said he wallowed in the reflected glory of Hitler’s power, hoping “to gather some of his popularity, his glory, his greatness, around myself.” But a historian said of Speer, “He knew exactly what he was doing, and he wasn’t duped or anything else. He was a sinner by omission and commission, and he went wading right in. His problem wasn’t blindness. It was blind ambition.” This captures Trump’s highly intelligent lapdogs, Stefanik included – but add: fear. They, like the rest of the GOP congressional castrati, shiver in Trump's presence, scared to death of being humiliated by tweet and by defeat at the polls.

To me, the best word that defines Elise Stefanik and her ilk is “meretricious.”

And as she goes about selling parts of what is left of her soul for near-term ambition, she would be wise to revisit Shakespeare:

“Get thee glass eyes, and like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not.”