Karmic Comeuppance: The Rise And Fall Of Elise Stefanik
Annie Karni, with a quick and decent summation of Elise Stefanik's meteoric rise and just as sudden fall after her stunning announcement that she was leaving politics when her term ends, and abandoning her quixotic New York Gubernatorial run.
Source: New York Times
To detractors, Ms. Stefanik’s shoddy treatment by the president amounted to karmic comeuppance for a Republican lawmaker who came to Congress as a Harvard-educated moderate but tacked unapologetically to the MAGA right when it suited her political purposes. They said she personified the opportunistic shape-shifting that gripped her party.
“My greatest disappointment is Elise Stefanik, who should know better,” Representative Don Beyer, Democrat of Virginia, said in an interview last year, describing her as a one-time friend. “She went off the deep end.”
Her tumble from grace crystallized the limits of MAGA loyalty and the risks of building a political identity around Mr. Trump, who can turbocharge or torpedo a career — sometimes both. Once one of the president’s most stalwart defenders, Ms. Stefanik, who referred to herself as “ultra MAGA” and styled herself after Mr. Trump, ultimately found herself undermined by him and politically adrift.
Nowhere was that undermining more evident than when Trump invited the New York mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, to the White House.