Elise Stefanik Truly Is The Worst

Her recent success in taking down two Ivy League presidents highlights her hypocrisy and the doom spiral of the GOP

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N). Photo: Mark Schiefelbein/AP

It was an ambitious, ultra-MAGA politician’s dream. In a televised hearing that went viral, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the fourth most powerful member in the Republican House leadership, outplayed three Ivy League presidents, cornering them on what felt like straightforward questioning about campus antisemitism. The disastrous public performances of the college presidents led to widespread criticism and two resignations, including recently that of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, whose detractors smelled blood and weaponized accusations of plagiarism to help force her ouster.

Stefanik has been crowing ever since. “The resignation of Harvard’s antisemitic plagiarist president is long overdue,” she declared in a statement. Gay’s responses to Stefanik were “devoid” of “moral leadership,” she stated. Stefanik promised to “deliver accountability to the American people.”

So here’s the thing. With these MAGA types, there are two, never-fail rules. First, every accusation is a confession. And second, as political strategist Rick Wilson has emphasized, “Everything Trump touches dies.” 

Today, let’s expose Stefanik for who she really is behind those accusations. We’ll discuss why her claims of wanting to protect Jewish students are cynical and bogus, why she and her allies are shameless hypocrites on the question of plagiarism, and how she has zero standing to speak about moral leadership and accountability.

We’ll also look at how Stefanik now seems to be drunk on her new power and influence. In fact, she’s already wielding it in a very Trumpian way: by promoting her own ambitions, even if she has to help destroy her own party to get her way. And that could have an outsized effect on November’s elections.

Stefanik has promoted antisemites and antisemitic theories

If the spectacle of watching Stefanik suddenly take a stand for Jewish people during her questioning of college presidents was jarring, you’re not alone. It was Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) who said it best in an interview with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.

“Where does Elise Stefanik get off lecturing anybody about antisemitism, when she’s the hugest supporter of Donald Trump, who traffics in antisemitism all the time?” Raskin asked.

“She didn’t utter a peep of protest when he had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over for dinner,” Raskin said. “Nick Fuentes, who doubts whether Oct. 7 even took place because he thinks it was some kind of suspicious propaganda move by the Israelis.”

Raskin added, “The Republican Party is filled with people who are entangled with antisemitism like that,” Raskin added, “and yet somehow she gets on our high horse and lectures a Jewish college president from MIT.”

But it’s more than her silence that is damning. Stefanik also has trafficked in and openly amplified the Great Replacement Theory, which blames Jews for the influx of immigrants as part of a plot to take control of the country. Her echoing of this theory was brought into stark focus in the wake of the deadly mass shootings of ten Black people in a supermarket in Buffalo in May of 2022. Per the New York Times, the killer had espoused beliefs that the “elite class, sometimes manipulated by Jews, wants to ‘replace’ and disempower white Americans.”

Stefanik had played footsie with this theory as a politician. For example, she ran an ad on Facebook in 2021 that accused “radical Democrats” of planning a “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.” And she pressed that false claim hard. “Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington,” her ad falsely claimed.

When questioned about the ad and whether it had helped stoke racist hatred and antisemitism, Stefanik instead attacked her detractors. She condemned the media for even reporting on her Great Replacement Theory claims. But tellingly, she never disavowed the ideology. 

Stefanik and her allies don’t care about plagiarism

It is equally galling to hear Stefanik condemn plagiarism during her victory laps, given both her silence in the face of the far worse practices by others in her party and her shameless lifting of text from her own House colleagues.

Stefanik was in the House of Representatives when allegations of plagiarism arose against Justice Neil Gorsuch’s nomination. As noted by Yale Review consulting editor James Surowiecki, Gorsuch’s book The Future of Assisted Suicide was fairly blatant in its lifting of text and ideas without attribution. But where was Stefanik’s and others’ outrage then?

Stefanik also was silent when Trump’s wife Melania famously lifted entire sections of her speech from (checks notes) Michelle Obama. Hard to miss that one. But far be it for Stefanik to criticize Trump’s wife.

Most hypocritically, Stefanik herself is guilty of appropriating whole passages from a congressional colleague and passing them off as her own. She did so while writing to the very governing boards of the universities whose presidents had given congressional testimony, purporting to express deep concern over campus antisemitism.

As Congresswoman Kathy Manning posted, “Can anyone spot the difference between the first 3 paragraphs of these two letters…? One is my letter, and one is @RepStefanik plagiarizing my letter to try and get her 15 minutes of fame. Don’t take my word for it, see for yourself.”

Let’s also be clear about Claudine Gay’s case. Harvard’s governing body launched an independent review of the claims of plagiarism in Gay’s research and writing. And, while finding some instances of “inadequate citation,” that review found no violation of the university’s standards of research misconduct.

Plagiarism should be condemned, but as they say in the law, an accuser shouldn’t come into the courtroom with unclean hands. Stefanik’s feigned outrage over plagiarism fails this test and is cynical to its very core.

A call for moral leadership and accountability … from Elise Stefanik?!

Hearing Stefanik call for moral leadership and accountability is a bit like hearing Exxon Mobil call for action on climate change. The problem lies with the messenger.

Stefanik was once a moderate Republican, but she sold her soul to Trump for her own ambitions. As I wrote back in 2022 after Stefanik helped oust Liz Cheney from GOP House leadership, the individual who began her career in 2014 as the youngest woman ever to be elected to Congress was very different than the person we know today:

If this were Stefanik of even just a few years ago, we would hear her say of the Muslim ban that it was “not who we are as a country,” of the Border Wall that “I don’t think that’s realistic,” and of Trump’s Access Hollywood tape that these were “inappropriate, offensive comments.” As Mother Jones notes, Stefanik entered Congress as a moderate but “now is being anointed as a top Trumper who has fully supported Trump’s Big Lie that the election was rigged against him.” The woman who in town halls and interviews once called upon Trump to admit that Putin interfered in the election in 2016 to help him, and for Trump to release his tax returns, has done a complete political about-face worthy of Lindsey Graham or Kellyanne Conway (or for that matter, Kyrsten Sinema).

In 2020, Stefanik signed on to an amicus brief pushed by now Speaker Mike Johnson in support of a GOP suit asking the Supreme Court to toss out Biden’s victory. And she voted with House Republicans to object to certifying Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania.

That move got her booted off of Harvard’s Institute of Politics, which issued a letter condemning Stefanik for “public assertions about voter fraud in November’s presidential election that have no basis in evidence” and “public statements about court actions related to the election that are incorrect.” 

Stefanik likely has been itching for revenge ever since that removal, which could explain her obsession with going after Harvard and other elite institutions. Her statement at the time spoke volumes. “The decision by Harvard’s administration to cower and cave to the woke Left will continue to erode diversity of thought,” she wrote in a statement. “The Ivory Tower’s march toward a monoculture of like-minded, intolerant liberal views demonstrates the sneering disdain for everyday Americans and will instill a culture of fear for students.”

More recently, and at every opportunity she can, Stefanik has sought to suck up shamelessly to Trump. She even worked with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in an effort to expunge the two Trump impeachments off his record.

Stefanik now seems drunk on her own power and could do real damage to her own party as a result. On Thursday, she very publicly withdrew support from Craig Riedel, a Republican candidate running for a House seat in a swing district in Ohio. Riedel’s crime? Daring to criticize Trump for his name-calling and arrogance. 

Stefanik’s enforcement of absolute loyalty to Trump, with the threatened loss of party support, could help elevate poor candidates or even extremists while silencing moderates—a formula for potential disaster in November. In Riedel’s Ohio race, for example, the alternative Republican choice in the primary is J.R. Majewski, who lost badly to the Democrat in 2022 after it was reported that he had lied about serving in Afghanistan. But by seeking to maintain absolute loyalty to Trump within the ranks, Stefanik may have kneecapped the more electable Riedel while making it more likely the politically damaged Majewski will prevail in the GOP primary.

That’s the risk the GOP takes in putting opportunists and Trump loyalists like Stefanik into positions of power. They inevitably will abuse their positions to aggrandize themselves and serve their own interests, even at the expense of the party’s success. That’s why, like Rep. Greene, Elise Stefanik represents the worst impulses and traits of the modern GOP, even while carrying and spreading the seeds of its eventual destruction and demise.