Donald Trump announced this morning that he will nominate New York Representative Elise Stefanik as United States ambassador to the United Nations. In a statement, the president-elect called the Republican congresswoman an “incredibly strong, tough, and smart America First fighter.”
Stefanik has been a staunch supporter of Israel since the attacks on October 7th last year. She grilled university presidents over claims of antisemitic rhetoric on their campuses in hearings after protests broke out across the country against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Her aggressive questioning brought about the resignations of Harvard and University of Pennsylvania’s leaders. Stefanik has also called for the defunding of UNRWA, the only humanitarian agency with the resources and know-how to alleviate the already-hellish conditions brought about by Israel’s genocidal campaign.
Stefanik is conference chair for the GOP in the House of representatives, making her the party’s 3rd ranking member in that chamber of Congress. Her House colleagues voted her into the leadership position in May of 2021, after ousting Liz Cheney (whom Stefanik had previously supported) from the role for repeatedly refuting Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him. Stefanik began backing Trump overtly in 2019 during the impeachment proceedings against the former president. At the time, he tweeted about her performance in the hearings, declaring that “a new Republican star is born.” Stefanik’s profile rose significantly, as her campaign contributions more than quadrupled, from $2.8 million in 2018 to $13.3 million 2020, according to Open Secrets.
The Republican from New York’s North Country would remain in the Trumpist lane from then on, declaring herself “ultra MAGA,” and engaging with right-wing rhetoric that brushed against extremism and conspiratorial thinking. In September 2021, she put out ads on social media claiming that Democrats were seeking to naturalize millions of undocumented immigrants in order establish a “permanent election insurrection,” echoing great replacement theory rhetoric proffered by extremist pundits like Tucker Carlson, which posits that Democrats are seeking to replace White voters with non-Whites for electoral advantage. In May of the following year, she dabbled in QAnon talking points when she said on Twitter that Democrats and “pedo grifters” were offering aid to migrants at the southern border at the expense of Americans.
Stefanik had been a moderate after she was elected in 2014 (then the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, until AOC’s election in 2018), prior to her strong defense of Trump and propagation of extremist rhetoric. She voted against Trump’s tax cuts in 2017, and voted to reopen the government after a shutdown in 2019, in both cases being one of only a handful of Republicans to do so.
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Stefanik’s alma mater, cut ties with her after she spread falsehoods about election fraud and supported the attempted coup on January 6th 2021. Stefanik responded at the time by accusing the university, from which she graduated in 2006, of “bowing to the woke Far-Left.”
