The Trump/Musk team is governing like it’s 1984 or 1972, but we have a window into what the would-be autocrats are really thinking, in the form of the withdrawn nomination of Elise Stefanik to to be the UN ambassador.
“With a very tight (m)ajority, I don’t want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise’s seat. The people love Elise and, with her, we have nothing to worry about come Election Day,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social page on Thursday, announcing that Stefanik would need to remain in her House seat.
This has to be incredibly awkward for Stefanik, a New York House Republican, who had been attending Cabinet meetings, took a seat in the Cabinet section during Trump’s joint address to Congress last month, and had been using her social media over the past few days to say goodbye to her congressional career.
She even went out and got herself the requisite Mar-a-Lago facework done, so that she can look like the other Stepford wives.
Stefanik won re-election to her House seat in November by 24 points, which is among the reasons why Trump picked her name out of the hat to move up to the Cabinet, so, it’s interesting that the political calculus has changed this much this quickly, for the Trumpers to have to go in another direction.
Republicans currently hold a narrow 218-215 majority in the House, with two special elections in Florida next week to fill out the terms of Mike Waltz, who moved up to become Trump’s National Security Adviser, based apparently on his ability to inadvertently invite reporters into classified chats, and Matt Gaetz, who Trump had wanted to be his attorney general, even as it was readily apparent that a sex scandal involving a 17-year-old would derail that abomination of a nomination.
Both of their House seats, which will be filled in special elections next week, are safe, 30-plus-point safe, Republican districts, but both are nonetheless being looked at as being in play, with Democratic supporters from across the country flooding millions into the districts, and early voting suggesting that the races could be uncomfortably close for the MAGAs on Election Night.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., is trying to tamp down expectations, which could be strategy, to be able to sell a reasonably close loss in a safe MAGA district as progress.
“These districts are so Republican, there would ordinarily be no reason to believe that the races will be close,” Jeffries said this week. “But what I can say, almost guaranteed, is that the Democratic candidate in both of these Florida special elections will significantly overperform.”
That could also just be Jeffries covering the bases.
The move by Trump to pull back on the nomination of Stefanik suggests that the Republicans’ own internal polling is telling them her seat, and her House vote, is needed going forward.
Wonder why.
“The Republican agenda is extremely unpopular, they are crashing the economy in real time, and House Republicans are running scared. What happened to their so-called mandate?” Jeffries said.
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Chris Graham
