Contemporary Republican politics is filled with the names of prominent officials and candidates who showed Donald Trump unflinching loyalty, expecting the president to respond in kind, only to discover his willingness to hang them out to dry when it really mattered.
Indeed, Mike Pence, Kevin McCarthy, Reince Priebus, Mo Brooks and Ronna McDaniel all learned the same lesson: Loyalty is something Trump expects to receive, not to bestow.
It’s the same lesson that Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, who unexpectedly announced her retirement late last week, learned in painful fashion over the course of 2025. The New York Times summarized:
Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, was willing to be the team player with the stiff upper lip.
But everyone has their limits. After a series of public humiliations delivered to her by President Trump … Ms. Stefanik on Friday afternoon announced she’d had enough.
It might seem like ancient history, but Stefanik used to go out of her way to be seen as a relative moderate in GOP circles. As recently as the 2016 election cycle, the congresswoman was reluctant even to say Trump’s name out loud for fear that voters might see her as an ally of her party’s nominee.
It was around this time when the congresswoman encouraged voters to see her as one of Congress’ “most bipartisan” members. A year later, when nearly everyone in Republican politics voted for Trump’s tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations, Stefanik voted with Democrats against the package.
The New Yorker eventually concluded, however, that to get ahead in GOP politics, she would need to put aside her principles and start moving sharply to the right. By 2020, the congresswoman had adopted an entirely new persona as a partisan hardliner and Trump loyalist.
For a while, the metamorphosis worked to her advantage. After Trump’s defeat in 2020, then-House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney insisted on defending democracy and the legitimacy of election results. At that point, GOP lawmakers ousted Cheney from her leadership position — and handed the job to Stefanik.
In late 2023 and early 2024, there was even some scuttlebutt about the congresswoman being considered as a possible Trump running mate, at which point Stefanik became even more reactionary, abandoning positions she ostensibly had taken seriously in the recent past.
But over the last year or so, the president repaid her genuflecting loyalty with a series of slights. Trump nominated her to serve as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations before abandoning the idea because the party feared the loss of her congressional seat. Months later, during an Oval Office event with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, the president also publicly undercut her. When Stefanik launched a gubernatorial campaign, the conventional wisdom suggested she’d get an endorsement, at a minimum, from the president she’d sacrificed her reputation to support. That didn’t happen: Trump hedged, a GOP primary rival emerged, and the president’s neutrality made her path to success that much more difficult. And that’s about the point when Stefanik seems to have decided to retire from politics altogether, at least for the time being. The Times’ report, which includes details that haven’t been independently confirmed by MS NOW, added that the GOP lawmaker is “privately livid at Mr. Trump and deeply frustrated with her job in Congress,” creating uncertainty as to “whether Ms. Stefanik even has any interest in finishing her term.” Shortly after she announced her retirement plans, the president published a brief item to his social media platform, offering her praise and concluding, “I am with her all the way!” Of course, if that were true, Stefanik wouldn’t have made the decision to walk away.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
Latest Post
Recommended
