WSJ (“U.N. Ambassador Pick Elise Stefanik Has Been Top Trump Defender in Congress“):
In picking Rep. Elise Stefanik for the role of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, President-elect Donald Trump is rewarding one of his most loyal defenders in Congress, who also made headlines with her fierce questioning of college presidents over pro-Palestinian protests.
Stefanik, 40 years old, is the chair of the House Republican Conference, a position that makes her the only woman in House Republican leadership. She was once considered a long-shot pick to join Trump on the ticket as vice president.
“Elise is an incredibly strong, tough and smart America First fighter,” Trump said in a statement Monday.
The post is subject to Senate confirmation. Trump chose another prominent Republican, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, for the U.N. role in his first term. Their relationship later soured, and she ran unsuccessfully against Trump in this year’s GOP primaries. Despite some efforts to patch things up, Trump said over the weekend that she wouldn’t serve in his second administration.
A Harvard graduate, Stefanik was elected in 2014 as Congress’s youngest woman at the time. She moved away from moderate policy positions to embrace Trump’s, following the will of voters in her district, she has said. In 2016, Stefanik pointedly refused to say Trump’s name after he won the GOP nominating contest; she said she would support “my party’s nominee.”
But in recent years, she has gained prominence for her fierce loyalty to the president-elect. She reaped record campaign donations in 2020 after she vigorously defended Trump during his 2019 impeachment. In 2022, she endorsed him in the presidential race before he had announced publicly that he would run. That made her the first member of Congress to do so.
Stefanik again garnered national attention after her aggressive questioning of Ivy League college presidents at a House hearing on antisemitism on college campuses in December. She publicly pressured them to quit over their handling of pro-Palestinian protests. Two of them—University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill and Harvard University’s Claudine Gay—later resigned.
Stefanik, who sits on the armed services and intelligence committees, said in a statement that “catastrophically weak U.S. leadership” during the Biden administration “significantly weakened our national security.” She said she is ready to advance Trump’s “restoration of America First peace-through-strength leadership on the world stage.”
NYT (“What to Know About Elise Stefanik, Trump’s Pick for U.N. Ambassador“) adds:
Ms. Stefanik, 40, would bring relatively little diplomatic or foreign policy experience to the role, beyond having served as a member of House national security committees.
[…]
Her foreign policy views track with Mr. Trump’s. A staunch supporter of Israel, she has repeatedly accused the U.N. of being plagued by “antisemitic rot” and proposed blocking funding for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees.
[…]
Few figures have better embodied the rapid evolution of the Republican Party under Mr. Trump than Ms. Stefanik.
After graduating from Harvard, she joined the George W. Bush administration as a domestic policy aide, helped write the Republicans’ 2012 party platform and prepared Representative Paul D. Ryan for that year’s vice-presidential debate.
In 2014, Ms. Stefanik won her House seat at age 30, flipping a Democratic-held district by running as a millennial moderate. Once in Congress, she eventually secured seats on the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, and was a protégée of Mr. Ryan, who became speaker before falling out with Mr. Trump.
Ms. Stefanik, too, initially kept the disruptive president at an arm’s length. But beginning in 2019, as Democrats prepared to impeach Mr. Trump for the first time, she undertook a dramatic transformation that brought her ever closer to the center of his orbit.
She embraced many of the conspiracy theories undergirding Mr. Trump’s claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. In 2021, when House Republicans ousted Liz Cheney as their conference chairwoman for repudiating Mr. Trump’s election lies, Ms. Stefanik stepped in as her successor.
She also adopted Mr. Trump’s pugilistic style. Speaking at his rally at Madison Square Garden last month in the presidential campaign’s closing days, she warned of “illegals swarming our streets,” blamed Democrats for kneecapping the police and accused them of undertaking a never-ending “witch hunt” against Mr. Trump.
Others have used the post — which comes with a taxpayer-funded penthouse apartment in Manhattan — as a step toward higher office.
Stefanik was certainly not on my radar for the post, but she’s reasonably qualified for it. Service on the Armed Services and Intelligence committees means she’s well briefed on national security matters. I would expect easy confirmation. (Oddly, the job is only in the Cabinet when the President wants it to be. It was with Haley but not with her successor under Trump; whether Trump has changed his mind or whether Stefanik insisted on it as a condition for acceptance I don’t know.)
She has significantly less foreign affairs experience than the incumbent, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, but more than Nikki Haley and, arguably, Samantha Power. Offhand, I worry that she lacks a diplomatic temperament but, then again, John Bolton also held the job.
In terms of domestic politics, the WSJ report notes that,
Under New York law, the governor is required to call a special election within roughly 90 days of the office becoming vacant, which is expected in early January. Party leaders would pick the candidates in that contest.
The district lines would have been redrawn ahead of the 2022 elections. Considering it has twice re-elected Stefanik, one presumes it’s safely Republican now.
