Trump nomination of Stefanik to UN resurfaces 'ultra MAGA' transformation

11 November 2024

U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) has accepted Donald Trump’s nomination to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, drawing criticism from opponents who challenge the president-elect’s decision to cite her prior controversial and shifting statements, including her apparent hostility toward the international organization.

“Stefanik has repeatedly attacked the United Nations over accusations that the world body is antisemitic. Last month she called for a ‘complete reassessment of U.S. funding of the United Nations’ in response to efforts by the Palestinian Authority to expel Israel from the United Nations as war rages in the Middle East,” Politico reports. “Stefanik this year drew praise from Republicans and Jewish leaders after she grilled college presidents in a House hearing on their handling of campus demonstrations over the Israel-Gaza war.”

But before Donald Trump won the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, Congresswoman Stefanik had opposed the real estate mogul and later attributed responsibility for the January 6, 2021, insurrection to the now-former president, who sought to overturn his election defeat.

Stefanik, 40, currently also serves as the Chair of the House Republican Conference, a role she won after MAGA Republicans ousted U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) from that leadership position. Cheney, who opposed Donald Trump, served as one of two Republicans on the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack.

In 2021, Mother Jones reported that Stefanik had said Trump was soft on Russian President Vladimir Putin, and noted that her replacing Cheney “marks the triumph of Trump-uber-alles fealty within GOP circles. A heretic is being excommunicated and replaced by a loyalist. It’s been noted that Stefanik entered the House as a moderate and now is being anointed as a top Trumper who has fully supported Trump’s Big Lie that the election was rigged against him.”

“But Stefanik’s Trumpification stands out because only a few years ago—well into Trump’s presidency—she was speaking critically about him on key fronts. In fact, at times Stefanik sounded practically like a Never Trumper, as she called on Trump to recognize that Russia had attacked the 2016 election to help him, urged him to release his tax returns, and assailed him for his comments about women.”

The following year, Stefanik proudly declared, “I am ultra-MAGA.”

Before that, Stefanik had made decisively anti-Trump statements, like, “Russia meddled in our electoral process,” and, “We’ve seen evidence that Russia tried to hurt the Hillary Clinton campaign,” and, “I am concerned about some of the contacts between Russians and surrogates within the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign.”

In December of 2022, The New York Times published a lengthy profile on Congresswoman Stefanik, detailing how she had “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.”

“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.”

Critics now note that she deleted her original statement condemning the January 6, 2021 violence at the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection.

And point to an interview she did that highlighted that New York Times report:

Her “reinvention” would also come to include her full-throated support for George Santos, the now-expelled Republican former U.S. congressman and convicted felon, an endorsement that remains on her social media page.

In January, Stefanik declared she had “concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages.”

Former Republican Capitol Hill communications director Tara Setmayer blasted Stefanik for, among other things, calling those convicted of crimes surrounding the January 6 insurrection “hostages.”

Stefanik faced condemnation after that declaration, but escaped a resolution that would have censured her.

NPR’s Brian Mann, who had reported on Stefanik in 2018, wrote Monday that the New York Republican lawmaker’s “foreign policy values during her early career (neocon, antiRussia, internationalist, proNATO) have proven entirely flexible. They have been adjusted or abandoned to reflect Trump’s agenda.”

“Underestimating Stefanik,” he warned, “has ended so many careers.”

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