Elise Stefanik: New GOP Moderate GOP Stooge-For-Trump
Looks like The Donald has sourced a new apprentice and so far her on-air auditions at the Congressional Impeachment Hearings are getting good reviews from at least one side of those other GOP cast members in the Trump Circus.
(She's even mastered one finger-and-hand action already!)
"New York Rep. Elise Stefanik has opposed President Trump on Vladimir Putin, women, tariffs, the travel ban and the border wall — and then impeachment made her a star Trump defender and unlikely fundraising juggernaut.
Why it matters: Stefanik has become the youngest, most moderate example of voter-driven Trumpification of the GOP.
The big picture: Trump is highly popular in New York's 21st district. He won it by 14 points in 2016, though Barack Obama carried it in 2008 and 2012.
Stefanik won her first term in 2014, then the youngest woman to be elected to Congress, and built a reputation as a moderate.
But her fierce defense of Trump during the impeachment hearings — along with her attacks on House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff — has made her a champion among the pro-Trump community.
"She needs to be better aligned with [Trump] and the admin to stay on track," said one Republican aide working on impeachment. "She did a good job of framing centrist for 2018 during a Democrat year — and now the goal changes."
Stefanik pushed back against the notion that this is strategic. In an interview Tuesday night, she told Axios that "impeachment is a constitutional matter, and this is an important precedent for future Congresses."
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Want to watch-and-hear Elise Stefanik in action? It's received over 73,000+ views
She's got all the talking-points
Published on Nov 15, 2019
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., read several news articles that quote Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chair, talking about how lawmakers would hear from the whistleblower at the center of the impeachment inquiry. Stefanik read the news headlines on Nov. 15, the second day of a public hearing as part of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Stefanik referred to the "abuse of power" in the proceedings by Schiff and the Democrats, citing the news articles to support her assertion. Stefanik then yielded the rest of her time to Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who continued the criticism of Schiff. The impeachment probe centers around a July phone call in which Trump asked the president of Ukraine to investigate former vice president and 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Yovanovitch has testified that she was forced out of her position after Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, engineered a smear campaign against her.
