MANCHESTER, New Hampshire—Just a few days before the New Hampshire primary, and several years into her campaign to be Donald Trump’s next vice presidential pick, Elise Stefanik had finally arrived.
It was Saturday morning, and the No. 4 House Republican stood before Trump’s state headquarters in Manchester and told the MAGA faithful what they wanted to hear: that they were “hearty” America First patriots, that the Department of Justice was unfairly going after Trump, and that Nikki Haley raised the gas tax in South Carolina.
It was familiar, and mostly false, territory. Haley didn’t, in fact, raise the gas tax, and across the two cases special prosecutor Jack Smith has pursued against Trump, most charges appear to be open-and-shut felonies. But just as important as looking the part to these Trump diehards is showing your willingness to tell easy lies and avoid hard truths, to project and to mislead, in service to the former president. Stefanik is nothing if not a willing participant in that deal.
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Eventually, the crowd returned the favor and gave Stefanik what she wanted to hear—a chant of “V-P! V-P! V-P!”
As far as auditions for Trump’s vice presidential nominee go, it couldn’t have gone any better.
Stefanik has emerged as the clear favorite to be Trump’s vice presidential pick. While Trump is prone to frequently changing his mind about the people surrounding him and their utility, he’s been remarkably consistent about Stefanik—mostly because Stefanik has been remarkably consistent about him.
Stefanik may have had her reservations about Trump in 2016, but she quickly realized Trump represented the id of her upstate New York constituents. And through every Trump embarrassment since then, through every private disclosure or public tweet, Stefanik has stood by Trump.
On the night of Jan. 6, after Trump pushed a violent mob through the halls of Congress, Stefanik was the first lawmaker to speak supportively of moving ahead to overturn the election. In his darkest hour, she was a beacon of light for Trump.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) works the phone while visiting with volunteers at Team Trump New Hampshire Headquarters ahead of the state's nominating contest in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Kevin Lamarque/ReutersIn the years since, Stefanik has proved her willingness to feed into Trump’s most extreme instincts. Far from a moderating influence, as many have perceived her because of her Harvard degree and penchant for promoting women running for Congress, Stefanik has been a MAGA pitbull.
On Friday and Saturday, she showed her teeth.
“In New Hampshire, we cannot have a candidate supported by Never Trumpers,” Stefanik said to the Manchester volunteers, adding that Haley had been “disloyal to President Trump” as his U.N. ambassador.
When The Daily Beast asked Stefanik whether she had spoken with Trump about serving as his VP, Stefanik demurred. She would not address any private conversations with the former president, she said, though in a typical show of devotion, she didn’t use the word “former.”
Stefanik has consistently done Trump’s bidding in Congress, often serving a critical attack role that Trump can’t perform. She recently called for additional perjury charges against former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, a key witness Trump is prohibited from intimidating during his New York bank fraud trial, and she baselessly went after the law clerk in Trump’s bank fraud trial. (The clerk committed the unforgivable sin of contributing to Democrats, something she’s allowed to do.)
All the same, Stefanik filed an ethics complaint with a state court commission against the clerk, feeding into Trump’s narrative that the case is a political witch hunt. (The Twitter troll who brought a lawsuit against the clerk over this whole controversy dropped his suit on Friday—just ahead of the deadline where he would be liable to pay her legal fees.)
Perhaps most embarrassingly, Stefanik more recently made it clear she sides with the insurrectionists who violently stormed the Capitol. Two weeks ago, a day after the third anniversary of Jan. 6, Stefanik went on Meet the Press and called the rioters in jail “hostages.”
Wherever Stefanik goes these days, she seems to invite controversy—either purposefully or naturally.
During her New Hampshire swing this weekend, at a Trump rally in Concord Friday night, Stefanik sparred with reporters over the former president’s treatment of women
In an exchange with NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard before the rally, Stefanik dismissed E. Jean Carroll’s claims that Trump sexually assaulted her in the mid-1990s.
Stefanik said she “of course” did not believe Carroll.
“A jury found that Donald Trump sexually abused her,” Hillyard noted, referring to the civil trial last May when a jury ruled that Trump was liable for rape and fined him $5 million.
“They’re all witch hunts against President Trump, and the reason why is because he’s polling ahead of Joe Biden, and Joe Biden is the weakest candidate we’ve ever seen. No, I don’t believe that. And I support President Trump. And you know what? The media is so biased,” Stefanik said. “This is just another example of the media being out of touch.”
“It’s not me, it’s not the media,” Hillyard said, as a Stefanik aide tried to interject. “It’s a jury that found he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll.”
“Again—again!—the media is so out of touch with the American people,” Stefanik shot back. “Like 2016, you are going to see the American people speak out loudly and clearly with their vote. We are tired of the biased media shilling for Joe Biden every single day.”
These types of exchanges—as embarrassing as they may seem for someone whose initial claim to fame in Washington was being a moderate champion for women launching GOP campaigns—are what make Stefanik so appealing to Trump.
Her debasement for Trump knows no bottom—at least not yet. But despite her eagerness, she’s somehow avoided the taint of fanaticism that’s clung to other potential picks, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kari Lake—both of whom, as The Daily Beast reported last January, are on the VP shortlist with Stefanik.
Back in late 2022 and early 2023, Trump aides conveyed that Trump was interested in choosing a woman to be his vice president, potentially blunting some of the Democratic attacks he’s withstood on abortion and bringing back crucial suburban women who have left the GOP.
Stefanik could be valuable in that regard, in addition to already showing Trump that she wouldn’t stand up to him in the way that former Vice President Mike Pence did at a critical time.
But there’s no sure thing when it comes to Trump. Even though Trump recently said he knows who he’s picking for vice president, his thinking can change over the course of a single dinner at Mar-a-Lago.
Importantly, Stefanik seems to have the favor of the Mar-a-Lago members at the moment. NBC reported this week that Trump went around the table during a recent candlelit dinner at his club, polling guests on whom he should pick.
When one guest brought Stefanik as his running mate, Trump nodded approvingly, according to one of the people at the Mar-a-Lago event.
“She’s a killer,” Trump said, according to this person.
While Trump may already be largely convinced, Stefanik’s trip to New Hampshire didn’t seem to do much in terms of convincing anyone to vote for Trump who wasn’t already supporting the former president.
After her flight into Manchester was delayed Friday, Stefanik got to New Hampshire just in time for the Concord rally, where the most newsworthy thing she did was get into that spat over Carroll.
On Saturday, she headlined a get-out-the-vote phone bank session at the Trump campaign headquarters in Manchester, where her former press secretary, Karoline Leavitt—a failed congressional candidate who’s now Trump’s national press secretary—introduced her to several dozen campaign volunteers and supporters. Stefanik delivered her sermon to the already converted. She met with some of her constituents from Upstate New York, who made the roughly three hour drive east, and she put in a phone banking shift alongside other volunteers for the cameras.
She also made a perfunctory diner stop in Londonderry before flying back to Washington Saturday afternoon.
For a state famous for insisting on retail politics, Stefanik got a bargain.
But Stefanik seems to realize that her stint on the campaign trail isn’t designed to convince anyone but Trump. In that regard, the controversy she was able to kick up defending the former president made the voyage more successful than she could have possibly imagined.
“It’s gonna give her a couple anecdotes,” Jim Merrill, a longtime New Hampshire GOP strategist told The Daily Beast. Merrill said Stefanik coming into town as a MAGA celebrity surrogate for Trump has pure upside for any future presidential ambitions.
Merrill was realistic about her sway, however, over New Hampshire voters.
“There’s no cultural connection between Upstate New York and New Hampshire,” Merrill said.
Still, among the throngs of MAGA volunteers at the Trump campaign headquarters on Saturday, Stefanik seemed right at home.
It was, after all, the type of moment she’d been preparing for ever since she was a kid.
Stephen Brown, a history teacher at Stefanik’s alma mater, the Albany Academy for Girls, told The Daily Beast that Stefanik stood out in honing her oratory skills at mock trial when other students were just trying to grind out another extracurricular activity.
A teenage Stefanik, the daughter of a plywood distributor, emerged from the corridors of old money Albany as “a bulldog of a lawyer” and “a relentless perfectionist.”
After graduating from Harvard and landing an internship in the George W. Bush White House, Stefanik demonstrated her natural political instinct by inviting Brown and his family for a visit.
But since Trump’s rise to power, the two lost touch, a sign of the price she’s been willing to pay to reach the seat of the MAGA kingdom.
“Still,” her former mentor said, “I choose to remember the fun moments instead of her political side.”
For now, Stefanik will continue taking on a more prominent role in the Trump campaign. She’s already scheduled to headline an event in South Carolina for the former president on Feb. 10.
