American Führerin: The (Potential) Tyranny of Elise Stefanik, VP

Trump needs a Putin to his Yeltsin. Stefanik is Putin. Beware.

There are 435 members of the House of Representatives. How many do you think you could name? Only a few dozen, if that, are well known: Pelosi, Schiff, AOC; Jordan, Greene, Gaetz. Most of them toil in thankless anonymity, content to perform their civic duties as the Founders intended.

In the fall of 2019, Elise Stefanik was one of those. When she was first elected in 2014 at age 30, this wide-eyed Millennial was the youngest woman to ever win a House seat. Despite this accomplishment, and the fact that she served on the prestigious House Intelligence Committee—she’s one of the few brainy Republicans—Stefanik was hardly famous. I had never heard of her—and I live in New York, where her district is located. That all changed in November of 2019, when Stefanik made a cold, calculated decision to boost her Q rating in MAGA circles, coming out of the shadows to become one of Trump’s most vocal public supporters.

I know this because I wrote about the phenomenon in one of my first (and still one of the most read) PREVAIL pieces. I remember thinking that Stefanik was like one of those boobs in an old cartoon who, observing her colleagues sinking in quicksand, hollers, “I’ll save you!” and proceeds to jump into the quicksand, dooming herself, too. I was convinced that she’d torched her political career:

It took a single afternoon for House Intelligence member Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York’s 21st district, to mortally wound her political career. All the Harvard graduate had to do was join the fray of analphabetic asses braying their lies about the Ukraine scandal in front of the TV cameras. Stefanik calculated that by aping Donald Trump, she would gain notoriety (Nunes, it should be pointed out, made a similar calculation in 2016).

[“#NY21 voters will soundly defeat gun-grabbing, Taxin’ Tedra who is now the #1 pro-IMPEACHMENT candidate across the country,” she tweeted. “Her campaign is led by this NEVER TRUMPER impeachment-obsessed ‘abusive creep,’” with an arrow to a Daily Wire article about her antagonist, George Conway.]

She’s gained notoriety, alright, but not the good kind. Frau Fascism went Full Devin Nunes—to whom she bears an uncanny physical resemblance—and America was outraged. Her opponent in NY21, Tedra Cobb, raised more than half a million bananas in 24 hours, and gained over 200,000 Twitter followers since Friday.

Suddenly, Stefanik found herself mentioned in newspaper articles and talked about on cable news shows. It was like when the music industry decides to cram some new, focus-group-approved pop star down our throats.

I figured her 15 minutes were up. As I advised in the subtitle, “Never go full Devin Nunes.” I wrote:

Elise Stefanik is now an object lesson for any other GOP who might get the bright idea to pipe up and start flinging feces in the hallowed House chamber. There is a reason they moved Jim Jordan to the Intelligence Committee, and it has nothing to do with intelligence. They need another loudmouthed baboon to disrupt the proceedings. House Republicans may be wary of coming out against Trump, but that doesn’t mean the President will enjoy their full-throated allegiance. After what happened to Stefanik, GOP members will be much less likely to offer more than tepid, perfunctory statements of support. Once we consider the Devin Nunes, Jim Jordans, Matt Gaetzes, and the handful of other well-known deplorables from presumably safe red districts, Trump will find few takers eager to walk the plank like Stefanik just did.

Needless to say, this did not come to pass. Stefanik did not sink in the Trump quicksand. On the contrary: she went full Devin Nunes and kept right on going, even as the actual Devin Nunes cashed out to take over Truth Social, Trump’s social media outfit. Here is her trajectory:

• Carpetbags her way to a House seat

• Sidles up to Nunes (her doppelgänger) and to Jim Jordan (which makes that hateful troll look tall)

• Comes out against impeachment

• Usurps Liz Cheney in the GOP House leadership structure

• Supports conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen

• Joins Ken Paxton’s treasonous lawsuit attempting to overturn the election results

• Blames Nancy Pelosi for January 6

• Declares herself “ultra-MAGA and proud of it”

• Boosts the campaign of George Santos; endorses Carl Paladino, the reactionary weirdo who said that Hitler was “the kind of leader we need today”

• Attempts to expunge Trump’s first impeachment from Congressional record

• Echoes same “great replacement theory” rhetoric that inspired Buffalo mass shooter

• Initiates political hit job to oust the presidents of Penn and Harvard, her alma mater (both of them are women; one of them is Black)

• Despite photos of her cowering in fear on January 6, repeatedly refers to the incarcerated insurrectionists as “hostages”

• Says she believes that Trump did not rape E. Jean Carroll, insinuating that Carroll is a liar and blaming the media

Does she really believe all this stuff? Highly doubtful, especially when she reportedly badmouths Trump behind his back like she’s one of the Mean Girls. Taken together, we must conclude that Elise Stefanik is a formidable opportunist, nothing less than Machiavelli’s wet dream made flesh.

Nine and a half months until Election Day, the entire GOP is now under the control of Donald Trump. Republican politicians can’t even wipe their asses without his say-so. (Cut to Ron DeSantis, on his knees in his tighty-whities like Kevin Bacon in Animal House, squealing, “Thank you, sir. May I have another?” and preparing for another paddle blow.) By boarding the Trump Train when she did, Stefanik finds herself riding first class.

In hindsight, I wildly underestimated Elise Stefanik. I didn’t realize that she was playing the long game. That she knew exactly what she was doing. That she probably has a copy of The 48 Laws of Power on her nightstand. That by this time next year, she may have won the ultimate prize. That when the Adderall dust settles and the ketchup clears, Frau Fascism may wind up on top.

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Boris Yeltsin was the first president of the Russian Federation after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1991, he was a national hero. But by the end of 1999, he was a bloated, besotted, unhealthy mess, in no condition to lead his country into the new century. His primary concern was not staying in power, but rather ensuring that his family could keep all of the loot he’d pillaged from the state coffers.

Yeltsin’s Number Two was his polar opposite in almost every way: young, short, slight, sober, dour, quiet, obscure, capable, ruthless. But above all, this second banana was loyal. In exchange for the keys to the kingdom, the former KGB functionary was happy to look the other way at the Yeltsin family’s grotesque corruption. When he became acting president on December 31, 1999, he was widely viewed as a nebbish—a nobody. Few would have predicted, when the ball dropped at midnight that day, that Vladimir Putin would remain in power longer than Yeltsin; longer than Gorbachev, Khrushchev, or Brezhnev; longer than Tsar Nicholas II; longer than any Russian leader since Stalin—and still, somehow, going strong, thanks in part to Republicans in Congress.

There is an analog here.

Much has been written, on these pages and elsewhere, about how, if re-elected, Donald Trump would seek out, and probably acquire, dictatorial powers. He’s said that he wants to be a dictator, and when given the opportunity to walk back that statement, he doubled down. He’s deliberately channeling Hitler. He has his pro-dictatorship supporters at the Heritage Foundation working on a plan to bring this all to fruition. And it’s not just NRx crazies wishing for autocracy; a sizable chunk of the voting public, perhaps tired of the chore of having to go to the polls once a year, wants a dictator. There’s a reason every fascism scholar in the country is freaking out right now.

While Trump would surely enjoy the perquisites of dictatorship—How did Mel Brooks put it? “It’s good to be the king!”—especially the part where he gets to indulge his inner sadist by having his enemies arrested, indicted, sued, imprisoned, bankrupted, roughed up, and possibly killed, I don’t know that he’s dictator material these days. Have you seen the guy? Trump is a homebody. Aside from his rallies and his court appearances, he likes to stay at Mar-a-Lago, where he can enjoy the omelet station, ruin wedding receptions, boss around Waltine, have his picture taken with well-Botoxed female admirers, and cheat at golf. Alexander the Great he is not. At this stage of the game—77 years old and pounds overweight, reportedly incontinent, with inexplicable blisters on his right hand, cognitive skills in marked decline, and undisclosed health issues we can only guess at—Trump is more 1999 Yeltsin than Hitler 2.0.

I have long believed that the real reason Trump didn’t want to leave the White House, and the primary reason he seeks to reclaim he presidency, is not to crown himself king, but to avoid accountability for his crimes. Like the bloated Boris, he’d like to keep all the shit he stole. He wants to be pardoned. He wants immunity. Which is why he keeps yammering on about immunity—or, rather, IMMUNITY—on Truth Social. Trump won’t shut up about IMMUNITY the way a kid who wants a puppy for Christmas won’t stop talking about dogs.

The thing is, to be granted immunity, Trump doesn’t have to be president. Not in any meaningful way. All he has to do is pick a running mate who will do the dirty work a dictatorship demands, who will oversee the day-to-day operations of the autocracy, who will stay loyal, who will look the other way at his corruption, and who will grant him a blanket pardon if and when he steps down. This way, he can spend his second term on the golf course.

In short, Trump needs a Putin to his Yeltsin. Elise Stefanik is Putin.

Consider the other options: Kari Lake doesn’t fit the profile—too crazy. Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t fit the profile—too stupid. Kristi Noem is closer to the ideal, but she’s too distractingly pretty for Trump. Sarah Huckabee Sanders would work. So would J.D. Vance or Vivek Ramaswamy. But all three are polarizing figures. Stefanik is the perfect Number Two: smart, shameless, capable, ruthless, cutthroat, Machiavellian, and, compared to the rest of the clowns on this short list from hell, relatively normal. She was a Paul Ryan Republican, once upon a time! This makes her exceedingly dangerous.

Even if we’re all exaggerating the threat to democracy of a second Trump term, even if Donald behaves in the same half-ass way he did the first time around, the guy is still old, morbidly obese, and behaving like a dementia patient. If he wins, it’s even odds that his vice president will take over the top job at some point before January 20, 2029.

Stefanik is well aware of all of this. She’s gone through the actuarial tables in her mind. She can glimpse the pathway to power, just as Isiah Pacheco knows exactly which hole to run through to take it to the house. She has ambitions, and she has plans, and I’m not keen on giving her the opportunity to put them into motion.

And yes, for sure, I’ve been wrong about Elise Stefanik before. I hope that I am wrong again. Back in 2019, I underestimated her; maybe today I’m overestimating her. Even so, there is a non-zero chance that the tyrant running the United States in 2025 and beyond will not be Donald Trump, but Elise Stefanik, American Führerin. Beware.