Elise Stefanik's post-Trump defense

Stefanik also fought Schiff in front of the cameras. She objected to his rules for handling the impeachment hearings and limitations on Republican lines of questioning. “What is the interruption this time?” she asked him at one point, drawing comparisons to Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “nevertheless, she persisted” moment during Jeff Sessions’s confirmation hearings. Conservatives complained there was a double standard involved in lionizing Warren as a feminist icon while criticizing Stefanik.

Yet Stefanik was willing to defend Trump on substance as well as process. “For the millions of Americans watching: President Obama’s own State Department was so concerned about potential conflicts of interest from Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma that they raised it themselves while prepping this wonderful ambassador nominee before her confirmation,” Stefanik said to the White House’s delight. “And yet, our Democratic colleagues and the chairman of this committee cry foul when we dare ask the same question … but we will continue asking it.”

The optics could not be ignored: Here was a young Republican woman amid the sea of white, male faces on her side of the committee offering the firmest defense of Trump in his hour of need.

Now, it almost seems obligatory to pronounce Stefanik a star. The New York Times, no fan of Republicans, did so. “Rising star” frequently precedes Stefanik’s name in news stories. Bonafide celebrities such as Chrissy Teigen, Rosie O’Donnell, and Chelsea Handler have taken notice of Stefanik, helping her Democratic challenger raise money and gain social media followers. Stefanik is hoping voters back home are uninterested in the opinions of famous liberals. “Any day of the week, I choose North Country families over Rosie O’Donnell and Chelsea Handler,” Stefanik told a conservative website. Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw chimed in, saying, “Democrats fear Elise so much they began a nationwide fundraising campaign for her opponent. Let’s help out Elise.”

Republican Reps. Devin Nunes of California and Jim Jordan of Ohio were always expected to be high-profile Trump defenders during the impeachment process. The perennially jacketless Jordan was placed on the Intelligence Committee by party leadership for that specific purpose. Stefanik’s role, attacking a process she argues is cloaked in secrecy and persistently biased against both Trump and Republicans in general, came as a bit more of a surprise.

The youngest woman ever elected to Congress when she first won her House seat in 2014, a title that has since been taken from her by fellow New Yorker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Stefanik cuts a very different profile than the aging baby boomer populism associated with Trump. She is a Harvard-educated, telegenic, millennial woman who served as an aide to George W. Bush, whose positions on immigration, trade, and foreign policy were as much the object of Trump’s scorn as the legacy of Barack Obama.

Stefanik was one of just 13 Republicans to vote against the 2017 tax cut that arguably is Trump’s biggest legislative achievement (changes to the SALT deduction made the law less of a clear-cut winner for some of her constituents). She sought to block Trump’s national emergency declaration, issued to fund his signature campaign promise, a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. And she declined to defend Trump amid some of the most serious controversies of the 2016 campaign, instead often sharply criticizing him.

“I think there is no excuse to be attacking Gold Star families,” Stefanik said during the dust-up between Trump and the family of a slain soldier. “Military families deserve our utmost respect.” When the release of the Access Hollywood tape appeared to wound Trump’s electoral prospects, perhaps fatally, she decried his lewd comments about women as “inappropriate,” “offensive,” and “just wrong.” “No matter when he said them or whatever the context,” Stefanik continued, “I hope his apology is sincere.” She was not, however, among the Republicans who withdrew their endorsements or called upon Trump to drop out of the presidential race in the aftermath of his Billy Bush braggadocio becoming public.

“There will be a post-Trump era,” journalist Tim Alberta quotes her as saying in American Carnage, his book chronicling the Trump campaign. “And I think there’s going to be a new generation of voices in the Republican Party that push back on some of the trends we’ve been seeing — the isolationist, anti-trade, anti-intellectualism trends that are not moving us in the right direction.” She also expressed concern about recruiting women to run for Congress as Republicans. “This was a problem pre-Trump, and it’s going to be a problem post-Trump,” she said. “Although, it’s been exacerbated by the president’s rhetoric.”

When Stefanik stepped down from her post recruiting candidates for the National Republican Congressional Committee following the 2018 midterm elections, in which the GOP faced a bloodbath in suburban districts such as her own, she did not mention Trump or Trumpism by name. But she did pen a letter with other Trump-skeptical GOP lawmakers warning their party that further losses could be ahead. “Neither our Republican caucus, nor our party as a whole, can afford further erosion among key demographics,” she wrote.

But, not for the first time, one of Trump’s most outspoken intraparty critics has emerged as one of his most vocal defenders. It happened with Sens. Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul, both 2016 campaign rivals of the president. The same could be said of former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, whose preferred Republican presidential candidate, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, has also become more Trump-friendly. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan held out against endorsing Trump, even as the businessman’s path to the nomination became clear, and appeared to waver in his support following the Access Hollywood bombshell. But he remained steadfast after the upset victory over Hillary Clinton (Stefanik oversaw vice presidential debate preparation for Ryan in 2012).

Graham and Paul hope to influence the president on policy, having learned the hard way that anti-Trump attacks got them nowhere with GOP voters. Haley has 2024 presidential ambitions. Ryan had tax legislation he wanted to pass and saw in Trump a president who would sign his handiwork into law. Graham and Haley watched their fellow South Carolinian Mark Sanford tweeted out of Congress for running afoul of the president; Paul may see libertarian fellow traveler Justin Amash meet the same fate.

What explains Stefanik’s star turn? The Alberta book in which she is quoted as a rare anti-Trump holdout weaves examples such as the above into a story about the party’s wholesale capitulation to the 45th president, though Ryan reemerges therein as a Trump skeptic: “The Reagan Republican wing beat the Rockefeller Republican wing. And now the Trump wing beat the Reagan wing.” The journalist’s takeaway is even more unsparing: Special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report “offered a verdict not just on the integrity of President Trump but on the soul of his Republican Party.” He added that “the GOP had committed itself to a binary view of politics that safeguards Trump’s survival.”

That’s why some Never Trump types reacted as hostilely to Stefanik’s impeachment performance as Democrats and Hollywood liberals. George Conway, acidly anti-Trump husband to Kellyanne Conway, called the congresswoman “trash.” Commentator Tom Nichols blasted her as “Jim Jordan’s mini-me.” “The hunger to retain power and the promise of a career in some post-Trump universe if she doesn’t rock the boat now apparently override common sense and decency,” contends the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, who operates on the reflexive extreme of Never Trumpism. “Rather than encourage good behavior, she gives cover to the worst elements in her party and degrades her office, her party and the nation’s politics.” It was reminiscent of the disappointment and outrage that followed Ryan, Rubio, Graham, and Haley all achieving detente with Trump. Not even Republican Will Hurd, a persistent Trump detractor who is retiring from Congress, was spared when he said he did not think the Democrats had made a persuasive case for impeachable offenses.

Stefanik and her allies dismiss this criticism, saying her motivation is more straightforward: She is saying what she believes and standing up to what she perceives to be an unfair process. “When I asked [whether Schiff had met with the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower], I was the first member of Congress to do so, and I was ridiculed by the mainstream media for just asking that question,” Stefanik said on Fox News. “And it turns out it was a really important question to ask because we now know that Adam Schiff’s Democratic staff did meet with the whistleblower before the whistleblower complaint was even issued. That means that there was coordination ahead of time.”

“We need to hear from the whistleblower,” Stefanik continued. “He needs to be one of our witnesses. Of course, he should be protected from retaliation or firing. But this is what started off this entire impeachment process, which has taken up two months of work on the Intelligence Committee.”

The debate is ultimately larger than impeachment, however consequential the removal or acquittal of Trump would ultimately be. At issue is how Republicans who are concerned about Trump’s conduct and character flaws should navigate the political environment that gave rise to him in the first place. Trump’s nomination and subsequent election was to some extent a vote of no confidence by center-right voters in the Republican Party’s governing class. Short-lived presidential boomlets for Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann, a decade of constant activist carping about Republican congressional leadership, the Tea Party, and the fascination with earlier Trump presidential trial balloons were all warning signs that went largely unheeded.

At least some of what is commonly described as Republican self-abasement before Trump is actually responsiveness to GOP voters, which in a democratic republic is not entirely a bad thing. Republican voters chose Trump and keep choosing him, no matter your view on whether party leaders should have done more to persuade them otherwise. This raises questions about how to lead the party constructively as it actually is rather than as one might wish it to be.

But to acknowledge the dilemmas involved is not to say elected Republicans have grappled with these questions effectively or that there is no limit to what party loyalty can demand. As Edmund Burke said, “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” It is simply to recognize that it is not realistic to expect a successful political party to repudiate its own electoral base.

It is entirely possible that Trump will go down and take the rest of the party with him. That initially happened to Republicans following Watergate. But it is worth recalling that within six years of Richard Nixon’s resignation, in a far less polarized media and political climate than exists today, Ronald Reagan was elected president. The party did not end up purging all Nixon loyalists as a price for reclaiming power. “This too shall pass,” Reagan reassured Nixon on Watergate in 1973. George H.W. Bush came to favor Nixon’s resignation, but he did so relatively late.

Elise Stefanik is making a much simpler case than how to balance representation and judgment: She maintains that Trump is innocent of anything that merits impeachment. But she is on record as saying a post-Trump era will come. She knows it hasn’t come yet, and she isn’t willing to let Adam Schiff hasten its arrival.

W. James Antle III is the editor of the American Conservative.