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Welcome back to E-PAC's weekly newsletter.


Despite being a liberal rag – Vanity Fair wrote a piece which included multiple interviews with Members of Congress such as Rep. James Comer, Rep. Jim Jordan, and Rep. Wesley Hunt. They highlighted Elise’s strong leadership as the House GOP Conference Chair and her work to expose the Far Left Democrats. You can read the article in full below.
Can Elise Stefanik Become MAGA’s Messenger in Chief?
With help from Brakkton Booker, Jesse Naranjo and Teresa WiltzOnce a Paul Ryan protege, New York Republican Elise Stefanik has morphed into one of Donald Trump’s biggest cheerleaders. She’s now being charged with keeping the House GOP on message for a critical election cycle—and as Trump indictments mount.

By
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ABIGAIL TRACY


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Elise Stefanik began girding herself—and her caucus—for the debt ceiling melee in January. She held a series of policy meetings with greener lawmakers to, according to a senior House Republican leadership staffer, identify “hinge points” and advise members not to “box themselves in too early with statements” during a messy legislative process. When some Republican colleagues tried to bring their pet priorities, like health care, into the debate, Stefanik stressed focus. Stefanik and GOP leadership fine-tuned the message: “How do we define Joe Biden? How do we define House Democrats?”


She declared her party was holding “Washington accountable despite being consistently and constantly underestimated by the mainstream media week after week since the start of this Republican Congress,” shortly after the debt ceiling bill passed the House in a vote of 314 to 117 last week. Ultimately, it was Democrats who pulled the bill—an
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eleventh hour deal made between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the White House— over the finish line in the House. Hard-line Republicans have been furious about the end result, lashing out at Republican leadership, with some even calling for stripping McCarthy of his gavel. The tensions have seemingly even
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spilled out between McCarthy and his top deputy, Steve Scalise. But Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House, has largely escaped the party’s ire. As conference chair, she cut a quieter silhouette in the fight compared to the Speaker and his chief negotiators.


She's been charged with crafting the Republicans’ message; her job was to win the messaging battle. And even Democrats conceded that Biden got played on the optics—despite not ceding nearly as much policy ground as members of his party feared he would. Democrat Jamaal Bowman
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lamented how McCarthy and his ilk had “been successful at painting the Republican Party as a party that is more responsible when it comes to fiscal spending and governing.” Elissa Slotkin
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echoed the sentiment : “I think that the Republicans are always very disciplined in their messaging, and they continue to be, and that’s something that Democrats aren’t always as disciplined about.” Then, a week later, Donald Trump was indicted for the second time, now by the Department of Justice.


It’s a critical moment for Stefanik, who won the House conference chairmanship in 2021, amid the ouster of Liz Cheney, and is now enjoying her first term with Republicans in the majority. She has so far proved her mettle as a loyal messenger, and succeeded in pinning the debt fight as much on Biden as on Republicans. Now, as the party careens toward yet another presidential election cycle with Trump in the lead, she must also navigate his mounting legal woes (Trump is also staring down two more investigations, one in Georgia and another by the DOJ, for attempts to overturn the election results). Stefanik has been undeterred; after the second indictment news dropped, she declared she was “committed” to “holding government officials accountable for their endless
witch hunt against President Trump. In 2024, we will vote like this country has never seen before and we will elect President Trump back to the White House to Save America,” she wrote in a
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statement . It's an allegiance that those in the former president’s circle have noticed— so much so that they question whether Stefanik could next leap from Capitol Hill to the White House.


“I really believe that she should be considered for vice president under the eventual nominee, who I believe would be Donald Trump,” Michael Caputo, who worked for Trump’s 2016 campaign and subsequently served in his administration, tells me of Stefanik. Another Trump adviser echoes the sentiment. “I would definitely have Elise on the short list,” he says. (This person notes that they haven’t been involved in any formal discussions.) Trump ally Matt Gaetz says the same: “There are a number of people who you can already see are gonna get a look, and she’s one of ’em.”


Trump takes Stefanik’s calls. They talk on a weekly basis, sometimes more, she tells me back in late March. We’re sitting in the JW Marriott in Orlando, Florida, on the last day of the annual House Republican retreat. “It’s a close working relationship,” Stefanik says. “I mean, I call him directly and he almost always answers. If not, he calls me right back.”


Just days before, Trump had posted that he was about to get arrested— for the first time. Most Republicans had spent that weekend attempting to avoid the albatross that the former president had become; Trump had once again crashed an opportunity for Republicans to share their economic and social agenda. Stefanik wasn't evasive. The reality that her beloved ex-president could end up in jail only seemed to embolden her resolve that he would be the Republican nominee in 2024. Whatever comes for Trump is politically motivated, and Trump isn’t vulnerable; rather, he’s solidifying the base, she essentially told reporters. In a
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discussion with Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman, ahead of which she had spoken to Trump, she added that it was actually Ron DeSantis who was in trouble politically.


Stefanik
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endorsed Trump’s 2024 bid in November of 2022, before the former president had even formally announced his intention of running again. She
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voted against certifying Biden’s election win,
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amplified conspiracies about Dominion Voting Systems, and doesn’t appear to have acknowledged that Biden won legitimately. Stefanik
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called the New York District Attorney's case against Trump an all-caps “WITCH HUNT” on Twitter, directing people to donate to the ex-president’s campaign. A little over a month later, when another of Trump’s many legal woes—the defamation and rape case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll— saw its resolution in court, Stefanik declined to comment. When communications unveiled through the Dominion lawsuit against Fox
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revealed Trump confidants’ acknowledgments that their stolen-election claims were toothless, Stefanik was mum. With news of the second indictment against Trump in the classified documents case, she posted a photo of herself with the president: “STAND WITH TRUMP!” she wrote. If she talks, she’s always on message. If she doesn’t, I get the sense it’s because she’s realized silence is most expedient.


When I ask her about the vice presidency, she answers. “I would be honored to serve in a Trump administration,” she says. “But I am very conscious there’s a long time between now and then, and there’s a lot of work that House Republicans have to do.” After all, she’s still in office. He—despite the best election-subversion efforts of his team and allies (Stefanik included)—was voted out. She has hitched her wagon to his train, but, at least in this moment in time, her political future could be much brighter than his.


Stefanik was 14 years old when she was excused from class—at the Albany Academy for Girls, a private institution in upstate New York—to attend a 1998 campaign event for former US senator Alfonse D’Amato, who was facing off against now Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer. “I support the Republican view, especially his,” a braces-donning Stefanik
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told the Times Union’s James M. Odato. She added of D’Amato: “He supports all of New York State, not just downstate.” The resume Stefanik built up in the following decades suggests running for office was likely always part of the plan, even though she says it wasn’t. She went to Harvard, worked on the Domestic Policy Council in the George W. Bush White House, and then went to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, where she helped craft platforms and prepped Paul Ryan, Romney’s running mate, for his vice presidential debate against Biden.


After Romney lost, then RNC chair Reince Priebus appointed Stefanik to the task force developing the infamous 2012 “autopsy.” Tim Miller, a Republican political operative who worked on the report alongside her, says Stefanik was like “the point person on a group project in college.” The autopsy concluded that the Republican Party needed to be inclusive of communities of color, women, and young voters. When Stefanik ran for New York’s 21st district to replace incumbent Democrat Bill Owens, who did not seek reelection, she largely embraced the findings of the report she had helped craft. “I don’t remember any point in which [Stefanik] pushed back on the substance of the content,” Miller, who served as Jeb Bush’s communications director
in 2016, reflects. Stefanik, after all, was the “human embodiment of the autopsy.”


At 30 years old, she became the youngest woman elected to Congress; a Glamour
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profile heralded her as “the youngest woman to ever break into the old boys’ club of Congress.” She was seen as something of a Ryan protege; he had been a prominent
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supporter of her campaign. Then, Trump arrived on the scene.


In 2016, Stefanik voted for former Ohio governor John Kasich in the Republican presidential primary. (“Going into 2016, that was my first reelection and the first presidential [election] while I was a sitting member of Congress,” she tells me. “I was very comfortable, leading up, saying, ‘I’m going to support the Republican nominee, and voters will decide who the primary winner is.’ I was proud to vote for President Trump in 2016.”)


These days, her public and social media presence is almost indistinguishable from those of the Gaetzes, Marjorie Taylor Greenes, or Lauren Boeberts of the House. Her campaign repeated “great replacement theory” rhetoric, posting that “radical Democrats”
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were planning a “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” by granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants; she proudly voted to ban trans athletes from women’s or girls sports at federally supported schools, part of what she called a
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fight against “Democrats’ radical and Far Left attempt to erase women”; and she has
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fearmongered over “critical race theory.” But still, there is a Washington, DC, polish to Stefanik, like she’s spent her life being shaped by the political establishment.


Stefanik’s MAGA conversion has befuddled both the punditry class and her past acquaintances. One person who knew her in college describes the transition as “baffling, but at the same time, not. It just looks like the story of somebody who sacrificed ideals that she had for the sake of political expediency.” Another individual who describes themselves as having been close with Stefanik at Harvard reflects: “I think she just wants to be powerful and near power, or try to exercise it herself.” Miller, a vocal Never Trumper, says, “She is probably—next to [Senator] Lindsey Graham—the best example of somebody who just nakedly changed all of their principles for political expediency.”


Stefanik and her team are very matter-of-fact about this transformation. She’s not two-faced; she changed with her district. “When we’re pumping gas, people want their MAGA hat signed by Elise,” her aide Alex DeGrasse says. “I would never describe myself as moderate,” Stefanik adds. After Stefanik arrived on Capitol Hill, she joined the Republican Governance Group—a caucus erstwhile known as the Tuesday Group—which literally bills itself as a landing spot for lawmakers interested in penning “commonsense legislation” across a variety of issues. Over several years in Congress, Stefanik voted against the party’s sweeping 2017 tax bill, supported a bill protecting LGBTQ Americans from discrimination, and
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backed an effort that would help young undocumented immigrants work toward legal status.


“I don’t think Elise changed at all. I think that in a Bush world, in a sane Republican Party, she needed to appear a certain way, so she was okay with that. But I think she’s more comfortable being a Trump person. I think this is who she really wanted to be,” says a Republican strategist who previously worked with Stefanik. “I don’t think she thought much about being a Bush person. It was just what you needed to be. In both cases, she’s gone with the establishment. Trump is the establishment.”


Speaking with me that March morning, Stefanik fashions herself and Trump as almost kindred spirits. Stefanik tells me she’s “been consistently underestimated.” She later makes a point of noting that Trump “is another person who’s been underestimated.” She laments that the media has never given Republican women the same “glossy” coverage granted to, say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (perhaps missing some of the context—ousting an entrenched Democratic leader—that made AOC a star). “The chattering class,” she says, has completely missed Trump’s appeal again this cycle. “They have it dead wrong,” she says. “Trump is more popular than ever.”


Trump, after all, is why Stefanik’s star is where it is. She first gained enough credibility among conservative Republicans to run for leadership because of her performance challenging Trump’s (first) impeachment. “Obviously, there are no bigger hearings, bigger proceedings, than an impeachment hearing on Capitol Hill, in Congress,” says Republican Jim Jordan, a Trump ally and founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, which is made up of the chamber’s most right-wing lawmakers. “There were times where we had her up front because you knew she was gonna be so good.” Gaetz recalls how Stefanik walked off the dais and into the member room with “eyes as big as saucers,” asking him, “Was that good?” “It was
exquisite,” Gaetz says he told her. “She kind of had her moment in the Intelligence Committee, arguing with Adam Schiff. Every Republican despises Adam Schiff, so that was a good place to start,” Republican James Comer tells me. (Stefanik has
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reportedly told people in private that she was “radicalized by” Schiff. Schiff declined to comment for this article.) “But I think she showed that, from a messaging standpoint, she was up for prime time, and she’s just taken the ball and run with it ever since.”


Stefanik has sway among members of her caucus. The more than half a dozen House Republicans who chose to speak with me paint a picture of a member whom they hear from frequently. A number name-check her as one of the first—if not the first—people who called them upon their victories. She is also a source of advice. How do I message my way out of this? What would you do? But there is also an apparent personal touch to Stefanik’s outreach. “It’s little things that she does. She’d read an article about me, she immediately would call me or send me a text message,” Texas congressman Wesley Hunt tells me. Hunt, who has had two children over the past four years, adds, “She’s the one that sends the most amazing gifts, by the way. Like, amazing
personalized baby gifts. And while that might seem like it’s not that big of a deal, it’s actually indicative of exactly who she is.” South Carolina congressman Russell Fry remarks that “she immediately pledged support and guidance…and she lived up to that in every sense of the word.” Congressman Andrew Garbarino, her fellow New Yorker, tells me, “I have a much more moderate district than she does, and she’s never pulled rank or support based on my votes.”


Stefanik isn’t just a lone Trump supporter in Washington, she is one with political capital. As her profile ballooned, Stefanik began pulling bigger fundraising numbers. Stefanik’s Elevate PAC, which she founded to increase the number of Republican women in Congress and support female GOP candidates,
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raised $301,627 during the 2017-to-2018 cycle. Fast-forward to the post-impeachment era: The PAC
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raised $1,051,719 during the 2019-to-2020 cycle.


Before Stefanik, there was Cheney. Stefanik minces no words about her predecessor, now persona non grata in the Republican Party for failing to go along with Trump’s election lies. “[Cheney] was leaving so many issues on the table with her singular pursuit of January 6 and her political vendetta against Trump,” Stefanik tells me of the Wyoming Republican’s willingness to say publicly what others said privately—that there was no basis for Trump’s stolen-election claims and that the January 6 attack was a deadly and terrifying day in American history. Rather, Stefanik’s reflection on the previous conference chair is simply that she “inherited an office with the lights out, literally, with no infrastructure,” and built an actual messaging
operation. “What became very clear is that Elise Stefanik is replacing Cheney, and all of the Cheneys in the Republican Party, as the face of Republican women,” Caputo says.


Cheney’s spokesperson told Vanity Fair that the Wyoming Republican did not want to talk about Stefanik or her time in leadership. But we know where she stands. “My fellow Republicans wanted me to lie,” she said in late May, delivering a commencement address at Colorado College, her alma mater. “I had to choose between lying and losing my position in House leadership.”


When Cheney failed to win in last year’s primary, it felt like a national warning shot: Only the most subservient Trump loyalists could survive this Republican Party. But in the history of House conference chairs, Cheney’s tenure feels like an even more pointed lesson for Stefanik—because before Cheney, there was Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who herself fell prey to an agitated, and increasingly powerful, hard-line right flank. In 2018, when Cheney made her bid to take charge of the Republican message, her pitch heeded the calls of an increasingly Trumpy Republican conference that wanted more aggressive messaging against Democrats. “Although the 115th Congress has been one of the most productive in history, our message isn’t breaking through,” Cheney
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wrote in a letter to colleagues, challenging McMorris Rodgers. Cheney was hailed as a rising star and
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power player . McMorris Rodgers, who served in leadership under Ryan’s Speakership, ended up stepping down, but she has remained in Congress.


Stefanik says McMorris Rodgers motivated her to run for the position, especially when she was pregnant. “I would not have had the confidence to pursue this role had I not seen Cathy have three young kids as a conference chair,” she says. She had a challenger when she stepped up to take Cheney’s spot in 2021; Texas hard-liner Chip Roy
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essentially called her a RINO . “We must avoid putting in charge Republicans who campaign as Republicans but then vote for and advance the Democrats’ agenda once sworn in,” he said. Trump
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endorsed Stefanik. Roy
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congratulated her on her victory.


Stefanik knows the center of power within the Republican Party. It’s not in the halls of Congress. Today, it is often holed up at Mar-a-Lago. So far, she’s avoided the biggest political pitfalls of this new era, so much so that it wouldn’t surprise those in Trump’s orbit if she were catapulted to the national stage. But a looming question for Stefanik now is: What happens if the Republican Party molts again, out of Trumpism? For now, there might be some comfort in knowing that “she’s not different from a lot of other figures currently, who have grappled with how to sort of evolve with the way politics have changed,” as a political strategist who has worked with both Republican and Democratic candidates said.


“She’s not alone.”


Read the article in full
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here at Vanityfair.com .

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