Tag: elise stefanik
Trump Veep Favorites Once Called Him 'Noxious' And 'A Whack Job'

Trump Veep Favorites Once Called Him 'Noxious' And 'A Whack Job'

Many of the candidates now vying to be presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's 2024 running mate are now having their loyalty scrutinized, and may have to answer for past statements criticizing the ex-president.

According to NBC News, allies of the former president are reckoning with how to assess how committed top Republicans are to the former president now in spite of past disparaging comments. Between the past decade and the past year, nearly all of the potential vice presidential candidates rumored to be on Trump's shortlist have called him everything from "noxious" and "reprehensible," as Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) once said of the former president, to a "whack job," as Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) previously said.

"No one’s clean on this," an unnamed Republican close to Trump told NBC. A separate "longtime Trump ally" anonymously told the outlet that despite past criticism, Trump is willing to "look at this more holistically than ever."

“Everybody’s a sinner in some form or another," the source said. "The only question is whether something’s a mortal sin or not.”

Earlier this week, Axios' Mike Allen reported that Stefanik and Vance are finalists to be Trump's 2024 running mate, along with Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Tim Scott (R-SC). Others who received vetting paperwork include Reps. Byron Donalds (R-FL), former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and North Dakota Republican Governor Doug Burgum.

Among those, NBC reported that the favorites are Burgum, Rubio, Scott and Vance. However, a source told the outlet that the VP finalist list is "fluid." Trump's loyalty test is reportedly including criteria like "whether a contender stood by the former president after the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, whether they endorse his false claims of malfeasance involving the 2020 election and how vigorously they’ve defended him amid the four separate criminal cases he faces, particularly in hostile TV interviews."

In addition, Trump is considering how effective of a fundraiser a potential VP pick would be, and is also looking closely at their stances on abortion and how they would do in a televised debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Even among those favorites, criticism of Trump may hurt their efforts to become his running mate. In 2016, Vance once described himself as a "Never Trump guy" who "never liked him" in an interview with journalist Charlie Rose. After the deadly 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in which a white supremacist killed counter-protester Heather Heyer with his car and injured nearly two dozen others, Trump famously said there were "very fine people on both sides" of the fracas. Scott criticized Trump's remarks, saying there was “no question” Trump's “moral authority is compromised."

During a Republican debate last year, Scott notably praised then-Vice President Mike Pence for his actions on January 6, 2021, in which he didn't attempt to overturn the 2020 election while presiding over Congress' certification of Electoral College. In the wake of the insurrection, Stefanik called on the DOJ to prosecute January 6 participants, though she has since deleted that statement from her website.

Burgum has also come under scrutiny for past negative statements he made about Trump as recently as a year ago. During a 2023 interview with NBC's Chuck Todd, the billionaire North Dakota governor said he wouldn't go into business with Trump, saying "it’s important that you’re judged by the company you keep."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Elise Stefanik

Expose Of Stefanik's Privileged Life Blows Up Her 'Humble Origins' Myth

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) has often painted herself as someone who came from a humble working-class background but pulled herself up by the bootstraps.

Stefanik, who Donald Trump is reportedly considering as a possible running mate in the 2024 presidential race, acknowledges that she attended Harvard University. But she paints her Ivy League education as an example of beating and overcoming the odds — not an example of privilege.

In an article published on April 14, however, Daily Beast reporters William Bredderman and Jake Lahut stress that Stefanik has had a much more comfortable life than she claims.

"If Stefanik was supposed to remember where she came from," Bredderman and Lahut explain, "she seems to have forgotten — to the point of making blatantly misleading statements, beginning in her first congressional campaign — how her family's wealth has given her a leg up, from providing her with an expensive private-school education to her parents buying her a $1.2 million D.C. townhouse when she was just 26. Instead of acknowledging those advantages, Stefanik has repeatedly downplayed her wealth, including in a statement to The Daily Beast."

Bredderman and Lahut add that Stefanik's "humble origin story falls away under a little pressure."

"From the start, she has maintained that she saw her parents 'risk everything' to establish Premium Plywood Products when she was a child," the reporters note. "But even the story she has told of the company's founding is incomplete. While every business venture involves risk, the Stefaniks didn't shoulder it alone: less than two months after incorporating Premium Plywood Products in late 1991, public records show they secured a Small Business Administration-guaranteed loan worth $335,000 — roughly $755,000 in today's money."

According to Bredderman and Lahut, Stefanik's "private education at Albany Academy for Girls offered a crash course in the ways of the New York capital’s moneyed elite."

"The children of political tycoons, from former President Theodore Roosevelt to former Gov. Mario Cuomo, have sent their children to its all-male counterpart across the street, The Albany Academy, where students pay the same tuition — $25,600 for the most recent academic year," Bredderman and Lahut report. "After graduating from Harvard in 2006, Stefanik decamped to D.C. to serve in then-President George W. Bush's administration — a role one of her Ivy League mentors helped her land. She would work her way up into the White House Chief of Staff's Office."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Elise Stefanik

'Serial Liar' Stefanik Grabs Credit For Infrastructure Funds She Voted To Kill

House Republican Conference chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) recently patted herself on the back for a $1.8 million federal grant a community within her district received. However, that money came from a bill she and every other Republican opposed.

Local publication North Country This Week — based in Stefanik's 21st House District in upstate New York — reported that the US Department of Agriculture grant went toward the South Raquette Water District in Massena, NY. Stefanik took credit for the funding, telling the outlet that she helped fast-track the grant application through the House Appropriations Committee to quickly get the funds approved.

"Infrastructure has been a top priority for some time and I am able to offer assistance in a very targeted way, whether it be for water projects, sewer projects or supporting our first responders," she said.

"I am proud to announce that I secured $1,857,000 for a Water District Development Project for the Town of Massena in this year’s appropriations process," Stefanik wrote in a Tuesday tweet. "This funding will go toward providing public water service to the residents of Massena."

Stefanik didn't actually vote for those funds, which were part of the Inflation Reduction Act that passed the House of Representatives in 2022. In a now-deleted statement posted to her House.gov website, she called the legislation a "radical spending bill that will raise taxes and crush hardworking families and small businesses."

"[Democrats] have made their priorities clear, and they are not for the American people. I will continue to stand up against reckless government spending and any tax increases," Stefanik said at the time, adding that the bill "also wastes $350 billion on 'Green New Deal' provisions that prioritize large cities over rural communities."

Others on X/Twitter took issue with Stefanik boasting about her district receiving the funds she voted against. In addition to a community note (a public fact-checking feature on the platform) specifying that Stefanik "voted Nay along party lines with every other Republican" against the bill, she was also slammed by various journalists, public figures and commentators for her tweet.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

How Unscrupulous Stefanik Punked Those Elite University Presidents

How Unscrupulous Stefanik Punked Those Elite University Presidents

Watching coverage of The Three Equivocating Presidents on TV, I found myself marveling that such a trio of seeming nonentities had been put in charge of prestige universities in the first place. Never mind the Ivy League, I told a friend. The athletic director at the University of Arkansas would have explained himself far better. Of course, that fellow faces hostile public inquisitions all the time.

Despite the chronic ugliness of campus politics, academic administrators are less familiar with televised interrogations. By trying to please everybody, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT ended up satisfying nobody.

Never mind that the gist of what they said was entirely correct. Whether or not students or faculty should be punished for expressing anti-Semitic tropes on campus depends completely upon context. Are they expressing an unpopular opinion about the Israeli-Palestine conflict or actively threatening violence? The first is permissible, the second is a crime.

Particularly in Republican hands, a congressional hearing is anything but a search for understanding. Basically, the three academics allowed themselves to be sandbagged by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), previously famous for embracing the White Supremacist “replacement” theory alleging that American Jews are conspiring with elitist Democrats to grant citizenship to illegal immigrants for the purpose of out-voting white Christians.

That’s what those torch-bearing geeks who marched across the University of Virginia campus a few years back chanting “Jews will not replace us” were talking about. It’s also the reason a crazed gunman murdered ten black people in a Buffalo supermarket in Stefanik’s own state.

But American Jews, who mainly vote Democratic, are one thing; Israeli Jews quite another. As a self-described “Ultra MAGA warrior,” Stefanik has no problem using QAnon rhetoric to describe political opponents as “pedo grifters.” It will be recalled that then-President Trump also had no problem with the Charlottesville marchers, which as somebody who spent four of the best years of my life on the University of Virginia campus, I confess to taking personally.

How Stefanik trapped the three college presidents in their own rhetoric was outlined in a brave column by the New York Times' Michelle Goldberg, a proud Jew. First, Stefanik got Harvard’s Claudine Gay to agree “that the use of the term ‘intifada’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews.”

But a call for armed resistance during a war isn’t the same thing as a call for genocide, and Gay was foolish to play along. Having declared that such “hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me,” she found herself intellectually disarmed when Stefanik came back later in the hearing demanding to know why Harvard students weren’t being expelled for using it.

But “intifada” means rebellion, not genocide. Also, it’s entirely possible to express sympathy for the Palestinian cause without supporting Hamas. “After all,” Goldberg wrote, “even if you’re disgusted by slogans like ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ their meaning is contested in a way that, say, ‘Gas the Jews’ is not.” Although it’s also true that Harvard probably leads the Ivy League, and probably the USA, in “cancelling” speech deemed offensive by protected categories of people.

In that sense, the three presidents can be said to have been hoist by their own petard. No less an authority than former Harvard president Lawrence Summers has written that “it seems to be that there is a kind of creeping totalitarianism in terms of what kind of ideas are acceptable and are debatable on college campuses.” A veteran controversialist, Summers wouldn’t have been so easily buffaloed by the likes of Elise Stefanik.

Meanwhile, I’ll tell you who should resign: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose incompetent scheming set this whole appalling disaster in motion. But that would require a sense of shame, and there’s no sign he’s got any. He’s the Vladimir Putin of the Middle East.

Over years, Netanyahu’s government funneled hundreds of millions in cash to the extremist, murdering lunatics of Hamas, whose monstrous terrorist attack on October 7 began the slaughter of innocents it was meant to provoke.

Netanyahu’s Likud faction did that even as it encouraged extremist Jewish “settlers” to seize Palestinian property in the West Bank by violence on the (pardon me) mad premise that God had promised “Judea and Samaria” to the Jews and that Palestinians who’d lived there for centuries had no valid rights.

By encouraging Hamas fanaticism, Netanyahu openly intended to prevent a “two-state” solution. As many centuries of European history can attest, the slaughter of infidels is what happens pretty much whenever God becomes the head of state. What’s going on in Gaza today fits the very definition of genocide. Except it’s not Israeli Jews being massacred.

How like us to quibble over legalisms in the face of catastrophe.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

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