The Bulwark Podcast - Nick Confessore: The Theater of Elise Stefanik

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

Rep. Elise Stefanik was a star pupil and the future of the GOP — now she's joined the kids in the back of the class, whose only role in Congress is to generate outrage. Plus, Trump turned the party into a roadshow and McCarthy is paying the price. Nick Confessore joins Charlie Sykes today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This message comes from BetterHelp. Can you think of a time when you didn't feel like you could be yourself? Like you were hiding behind a mask, at work, in social settings, around your family? BetterHelp Online Therapy is convenient, flexible, and can help you learn to be your authentic self. So you can stop hiding. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10%

off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P, dot com. This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes, but some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to. At work, in social settings, around our family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself so you can stop hiding and take off the mask. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Therapy is a great tool for facing your fears and finding ways to overcome them. If you're thinking of starting therapy, but you're afraid of what you might uncover, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient,

flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is January 5th, 2023, and everything is amazing. And I don't necessarily mean that in a good way. I mean, amazing in an incredibly shambolic, chaotic, schadenfreude inducing way. That's also a little bit scary. So joining me to break all this down, once again,

Nicholas Confessori, reporter for the New York Times, staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, and a political analyst for MSNBC. Welcome back on the podcast, Nick. Hey, Charlie. It's great to be back. For regular listeners, we ran an encore edition of our last conversation where you did a really deep dive into Tucker Carlson's program and how it was the most racist program on cable television, which is still worth reading. And you've done a deep dive into one of the more extraordinary figures, extraordinary in quotation marks, extraordinary figures in the House, GOP Elise Stefanik, who, as of right now, is the number three Republican in an absolutely, bizarrely chaotic

House conference. She's gone all in on Donald Trump. She describes herself as ultra-MAGA. And I want to talk about that in just a moment. But can we just start with this unprecedented series of events that we've seen, the multiple votes for speakers, something we haven't had in 100 years, Kevin McCarthy continuing to engage in what I've described as self-gelding, surrendering almost on every single point to the crazies in the caucus. It feels at this point as if it's almost irrelevant whether McCarthy survives. I mean, it's not irrelevant, but whoever becomes the speaker is going to have an absolutely impossible job. They'll be the superintendent of crazy town. And, you know, for all the people saying, well, we cannot let the

crazies win. Nick, my sense is the crazies have already won. And it's kind of remarkable that people haven't fully realized how dysfunctional this Congress is going to be. This is a fight over the worst job in Washington, which is the great irony of it. And I think that to understand how we got here, it's partly the story of Donald Trump and his influence and impact on the party. It's partly the story of the conservative ecosystem on media, right? Which for years and years has monetized a story of betrayal by party elites. And stoking outrage. Stoking outrage. And the product is outrage and betrayal. And I think that what has happened is that with the success for the right on abortion and with the passage of the big tax cut bill in 2017 and total control of the Supreme Court by the right, I think that the party has sort of lost a sense of what the issues are

that they're actually running on and the conservative infotainment infrastructure that exists to peddle this idea that the elites in the party are always betraying the real Americans has taken over, has basically displaced what might be a conventional sense of aims and means and policy. And this perpetual outrage machine predates Donald Trump. And I think your colleague Maggie Haberman made this point on CNN yesterday that Donald Trump thinks that all of this outrage and energy came from him. The reality is it was a pre-existing condition. He was able to feed off of it and latch onto it, but it's taken on a life of its own now, hasn't it? That's right. And look, he was the first candidate for president to really

successfully tap into what was already happening in the party. And he did it, I think, in large part on one substantive issue, which is immigration. And so I want to put an asterisk on that, because I think that immigration and its discontents is the big substantive issue that has cleaved the party. But just beyond that, he came in and he's like, wait a second, like, instead of being a candidate who's allied with K Street in an open way, who's going to try and tamp down these forces, I'm going to ride them. And he did. And he delivered on that count more effectively than anyone could imagine. He made the White House a

spectacle. He made the presidency a spectacle. The things that he accomplished substantively were mostly thanks to Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. And now that he is at Mar-a-Lago hanging out with a Potemkin presidential campaign, those forces have resumed. And we've seen comments in recent days and talk radio hosts and others who say, look, it's great that Donald Trump wants McCarthy, but it's not his decision. And I think that the movement that he brought to the fore within the conservative coalition, it took from being a minority perspective to the dominant one, has now outgrown him to a large extent. Well, he's not irrelevant because he still has the power to destroy. So if you and I are having this conversation and suddenly we see that he's issued a statement on truth social that McCarthy has to go, that's it for McCarthy, right? I mean, he can still destroy

McCarthy. But what do we make of the fact that he tried to save McCarthy yesterday and he did not move a single vote? One of the things about Donald Trump, his reptilian instinct, has been that he's never allowed any daylight between himself and the entertainment wing of the party, the base. So how do we explain what's going on right now? What's happening right now? Because he can turn on Fox News and see that, well, you know, Tucker Carlson and Hannity are still behind Kevin McCarthy. But clearly, this is a strange moment for him, isn't it? Well, look, I think what we're seeing right now is that at this moment in time, Trump's power to destroy far exceeds his power to build. Exactly. He can still end the career

of a Republican running for office. He can do that. But can he put someone over the top? He failed to do it in the general election, in the Senate races. The candidates he endorsed in House races all ran several points behind on average. The candidates he didn't. So he is both the most potent force and the biggest headache for the Republican Party right now. So let me just play what I thought was really a remarkable moment on the floor yesterday in a series of remarkable moments where one of the most deplorable members of the House GOP conference, Lauren Boebert, who is weirdly enough having a feud with Marjorie Taylor Greene. By the way, I did not have that on my bingo card, Marjorie Taylor Greene versus Lauren Boebert. But Lauren Boebert pushes back against Donald Trump's endorsement. This came

just hours after Trump issued what in his world would feel like a full-throated endorsement of Kevin McCarthy. And apparently he has been on the phone trying to whip votes for Kevin McCarthy without any discernible effect. But this is Lauren Boebert, who has been a Trump loyalist pushing back against the ordained God King. Let's play that. Let's stop with the campaign smears and tactics to get people to turn against us. Even having my favorite president call us and tell us we need to knock this off. I think it actually needs to be reversed. The president needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that,

sir, you do not have the votes and it's time to withdraw. Okay, so Nick, what do you make of that? She felt free to call him out on the floor of the House. I think that's right. And look, what I didn't hear in that quote was, what does Lauren Boebert want? Why did she run for Congress? What does she want to achieve? And what I've observed, and this was in my reporting on Tucker Carlson, but I think it also relates to Elise Stefanik, who we'll talk about, is that right now, for a certain kind of office holder on the right, being in Congress is like being a host on Fox. It's kind of the same business. You're basically in the content business. You're in the outrage business. You're in the confrontation. Is it on tape? Is there a moment I can sell on social that I can monetize? And I think Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert are in the

same business as Tucker Carlson, even though one's a talk show host and one's in Congress. And I think that's what we're seeing there. And it goes back to this idea, like, this is about like feuds and rivalries, not entirely. I don't want to paint too broadly. I think there are guys like Chip Roy of Texas, some in the Freedom Caucus who have substantive procedural things that they want, an ability to participate more in the House processes, to offer amendments. They've had those longstanding. I don't think those are all obviously unreasonable. But for some of this crew, I think that the spectacle almost feels like the point right now. No, I think it is the point. And for Matt Gates, whether you're in Congress or a host on Newsmax, pretty much does not make a difference. But why did not one vote move? Is there any fear factor? I mean, normally you would have Republicans,

particularly in that world. I mean, I described it on MSNBC yesterday. This is the lowest hanging fruit in the megaverse, right? Donald Trump calling up Lauren Boebert, you know, calling up people like Matt Gaetz. And yet they didn't feel any compunction whatsoever. I'll tell you why. I'll tell you exactly why. Okay. So if you're not actually in the policy business and you're in the content business, what are the levers that house leaders have to exert power over you? Okay. The usual levers, the old levers are fundraising help and committee assignments and help on your bills, right? Right. Well, if you live in this infotainment part of the party, you don't need K Street to raise money. You're

generating outrage to monetize it on social media and in your direct mail. If you don't want to pass a bill, it doesn't matter what committee you're on, right? And so I think that's the idea. But aren't they afraid that Donald Trump will denounce them? He'll put out a truth social statement saying that they are crazies or rhinos or something. But now Donald Trump has to wonder, he was always very good at, remember those rallies, right? To use the rallies as focus groups. I'm going to listen, what works, what makes them cheer louder, and I'm going to repeat that. I'm going to give them more of what they want. Yes.

He's going to listen to the audience and he's going to start to wonder, okay, are actually those members who are voting against McCarthy more in touch with what my base wants than I am? That's the question. Well, and also with Trump, there are red lines and there are not red lines. You could break with Trump on a variety of issues, and Lindsey Graham demonstrated that time and time again. But on the red line issues, like the legitimacy of the election, you can't cross them. I get the sense from the Gateses and Boebert and the others that they heard what Trump said, but they also understood that he has red lines that you cannot cross, but Kevin McCarthy is not that red line right now. I totally agree. Oh, okay. I think that's right. Look, you can't attack Trump and you can't go soft on immigration,

right? And those are kind of the big red lines in the movement that he built, which is now evolving past him. What we're seeing right now on this House floor fight, on the speaker fight, is a movement that now has its own energy and needs and priorities. And Trump is a big part of it, the most important part of it, but he's not necessarily dictating to it. Right before we began this podcast, you tweeted out a link to a piece by two of your colleagues, Lisa Lehrer and Reid Epstein. Can I just read a little bit of it? Because I think it really sort of captures where this house is at, and I think is a good segue into the discussion of Elise Stefanik. They write, after two days of chaos and confusion on the House floor,

Republicans have made it abundantly clear who is leading their party. Absolutely no one. From the halls of Congress to the Ohio Statehouse to the backroom dealings of the Republican National Committee, the party is confronting an identity crisis unseen in decades. With no unified legislative agenda, clear leadership, or shared vision for the country, Republicans find themselves mired in intra-party warfare defined by a fringe element that seems more eager to tear down the House than to rebuild the foundation of a political party that has faced disappointment in the past three national elections. Even as Donald J. Trump rarely leaves his Florida home in what so far appears to be little more than a Potemkin presidential campaign, Republicans have failed to quell the anti-establishment fervor that accompanied his rise to power. Instead, those tumultuous political forces now threatened to devour the entire party. I think that's really

a smart analysis. I mean, and it really goes to the heart of this, that there is no legislative agenda. There is no clear leadership. There is no clear vision. And so there is this huge vacuum for the extremists, the crazies, the grifters, the self-promoters. So I went back this morning and, you know, doing some reading on the contract with America in 1994. And people kind of forget a couple of things about it, right? With Newt Gingrich and the contract. Almost everything in it was extremely popular in a basic way. They actually wrote bills. They had detailed bills. Each plank in that was like a piece of legislation. There was a child tax credit. There was a balanced budget amendment. There was a tort reform thing. There

was a job creation act. When you look at what House leadership did for this run-up, and no one can remember what it's called anymore because nobody cares about it, it's not a real document, but they were like, we'll take on Bidenflation by cutting wasteful government spending. And that's fine as far as it goes, but how far does it go? That's substituting like a basic idea of conservatism for an actual program to run on. And I think the thinness of the McCarthy-Stefanek message, right, that whole thing they did, reflects the lack of consensus that you're talking about, the inability to come up with a policy agenda. And look, you know, as I was reporting out my story on Elise Stefanik, just as a way of illustrating it, I asked every Republican I

talked to in the story in Washington, what's the hot free market healthcare idea right now on the right? What's the idea bubbling up, the big idea? And I could never get an answer because there wasn't one. When you think about it, this is the biggest issue probably for a lot of people aside from inflation. What's the conservative movement response? What's the big idea? There are certainly people out there at think tanks who have ideas. But the fact that I can't think of like, what's the up and coming thing, right, that the party is coalescing around in a substantive way. It just shows you how, again, Trump moved the party so far away from the idea of a party as a vehicle for policy and so deeply into the notion of a political movement being essentially a roadshow, right? A series of rallies, direct mail

that I think Kevin McCarthy is sort of paying the price for that in a way. Well, and of course, in 2020, the Republican Party decided not to even have a platform other than whatever Trump wants, which of course was a towel. Okay, so this is what makes the story of Elise Stefanik even more extraordinary, because she was considered the model moderate millennial, right? She is what Paul Ryan called the future of hopeful aspirational politics in America. She was a policy wonk, a very bright woman. And yet she has now gone all in on the politics that you have just described. So your piece, your major deep dive is called The Invention of Elise Stefanik. So let's just walk through this. I mean, Elise Stefanik had a lot

going for herself, right? I mean, she, you know, has a Harvard degree. She was a bright rising star. What was it? What was the turning point for her? If we're telling the story of, you know, how the Republican Party lost its mind in the way that we're talking about here, you know, it's one thing to go to the, you know, the complete, you know, the George Santos's and the Lauren Boebert's, but, you know, the heart of this is that Elise Stefanik decided that she was going to grab this banner. What was the turning point for her, do you think?

So I think you have to go back to the 2018 midterms and the aftermath. That was the first general election that Donald Trump led his party to defeat on. Remember the caravan? Yep. The fear-mongering on immigration on the caravan that it was an invasion. And until then, Elise Stefanik had really tried to hold position as a center-right bipartisan

figure in Washington. She criticized Trump carefully in a modulated way, but she would take shots at him when he would say things like, shit whole countries, or go back to where you came from. She voted with him most of the time, but against important thing. She did not go with him on his effort to basically find money to fund the border wall. There was a fight over that. She voted against the tax bill because it was bad for people in her district. But after 2018, when Trump led his party to this defeat, and there was no reconsideration of his influence over the party, just lockstep, what happened then was, what's happening in the life of Elise Stefanik? She's now in the minority.

Paul Ryan, her mentor, has basically retired early. She is being attacked on Fox and from the right for being a squish. Her friends from Harvard, her kind of center right and left friends are all saying to her, come on, stand up to this guy. You got to go harder. And she's thinking, I got to like hold position. And yet, what are the rewards for trying to occupy that center right space in the Republican Party on the Hill in 2019? Nada. There are no rewards. Since it's integrity, purpose. Yeah. Well, there are no political rewards if you're an ambitious person,

if you've been talked about since you were elected as a potential future speaker. All of a sudden, you're in the slow lane. A friend of hers described it to me using a metaphor. He's like, you're the A student all your life. And all of a sudden, you're in class and this substitute teacher shows up and is just falling asleep at the desk and doesn't care if you did the reading, doesn't care how smart you are. So what do you do? Well, she joined the kids at the back of the class, in a sense. Now, she would argue she's still bipartisan, she's still substantive, you can see her name on all kinds of wonky bills. But what she did, starting with the first impeachment,

but then really accelerating, was to simply adopt wholesale and apply her intelligence rigorously to the act of imitating and aping Donald Trump. His Twitter mannerisms, his rhetoric, his obsessions, and most of all, this is important, the conspiracy theories that animate his base. She made an allusion to QAnon. She went from being an immigration dove to, you know, putting ads on Facebook that reference replacement theory, which, as you know, is this idea that there are elites in America who are conspiring to replace, you know, the native born Americans with a new class of immigrant serfs. To go from, I want to force a vote on DACA in 2018 to replacement theory in 2021 shows you the

journey and the ambition at work. As you wrote, she embarked on one of the most brazen political transformations of the Trump era, and her reinvention has made her a case study in the collapse of the old Republican establishment and its willing absorption into the new Trump-dominated one. But I think part of what was extraordinary about her transformation was it was so complete and it was so utterly shameless. I mean, she became this fervent apologist. She adopted, as you point out, his style. Part of what was extraordinary about her transformation was it was so complete and it was so utterly shameless. I mean, she became this fervent apologist. She adopted, as you point out, his style.

You know, the adoption of the conspiracy theories, it wasn't simply enough for her to move right. She had to adopt all of the memes. It was almost as if she was reverse engineering what Trump had done and said, you know, how do I get on Tucker Carlson's, you know, good list? How do I get on his show? And the extraordinary thing about it is all of this has worked for her. I mean, others may look at this as humiliating and embarrassing, but she rocketed from the back bench to the number three house leadership position as conference chair. So in terms of a blueprint for success, she figured it out, didn't she? I mean, this is what works. It absolutely worked for her and has worked for her so far.

I think the interesting question is whether it continues to work for her. I don't think there's anybody, including Kevin McCarthy, in the leadership ranks of the GOP right now who has tied themselves more thoroughly to Trump as a person whose success is more intimately bound to whether Trump himself rises or falls. That's why she remains one of the only senior Republicans to endorse his bid for president. And she preemptively endorsed him. She endorsed him before he declared back in November. She's made her bet. And I think it'll be interesting to see, and I'm not going to predict if that continues to be the right bet, because as we've been discussing today, it's not clear if he has the hold on his party that he

might've had three years ago, four years ago. And it's not clear whether he can build in addition to being able to destroy. Well, what is interesting about that particular point is that, you know, since Trump announced his his reelection campaign, he has not cleared the field. No major candidate dropped out of the race. He has not been flooded with endorsements. So Elise Stefanik doubling down by endorsing him before he even got in seemed to me to be a signal that her ambition has not yet been satisfied. I, at this point, wouldn't be surprised if it was a Trump-Stefanik ticket. I mean, do you think that's what's on her radar screen? Well, look, one thing that I found in my reporting, and although her campaign lied

about it at the time, as soon as she was elected and won the primary in 2014 for her House seat, her campaign registered Stefanik for president, Stefanik for Senate. They clearly had in mind this long and successful career, and she clearly did too. What I think is interesting is her choices have to some extent locked her into the path she's on now. She has gone MAGA so hard that I think a successful statewide race in New York is all but impossible to imagine. She's not going to be governor. She's not going to be senator. I could be wrong.

I could be surprised. But I think that'll be hard. And Lee Zeldin has handled this stuff very differently. And he came pretty close in 2022. So then what's left for her? She can rise through the House leadership and she might, although again, it's kind of a poison chalice. We'll see what happens. Or she can hook into Trump to be his running mate or his cabinet secretary somewhere. Now, I think that's why she was really early this year, last year, I should say, in endorsing his not yet announced campaign.

He's kind of her ticket out of the house. She's kind of locked into that path. What I think is ironic is in my reporting, I saw all of these clips in the New York Post and Politico, great outlets, all of them saying, you know, she's a potential candidate for VP. And so I made some calls on this. And what I found out was that at Mar-a-Lago, that's not really a serious idea. They look at those stories and see them as plants by Stefanik's comms team. And that, you know, as is often the case with Trump, his loyalty goes kind of one way. And while he loves having turned her and made her come to his

side, he loves watching her defend him and she's good at it. He loves the display of loyalty and the dominance of his that it expresses. He doesn't trust her. And I think it's unlikely he'll pick her. That is interesting. I mean, you know, the problem with naked ambition is that it is so naked. Her alliance with Trump obviously has come at a rather significant personal cost. I mean, you know, the problem with naked ambition is that it is so naked. Her alliance with Trump obviously has come at a rather significant personal cost. I mean, Paul Ryan, her former mentor, now considers her the biggest disappointment of his political career from, you know, being on one of the advisory committees. Part of it is how zealous she's become. So, I mean, talk to me about this, because what I found interesting is she's declared herself that she's ultra MAGA. And she has gone out of her way to endorse, you know, that candidate from North Carolina who endorsed the execution of people responsible for the fraud of Trump's defeat. She endorsed George Santos. You know, she attacked

the White House and House Democrats and the usual pedo, as in pedophile, grifters for the infant milk shortage. You know, she warned that the surge of Haitian immigrants would overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington. I guess part of it is that she has become so shrill. And given her background, given her education, given the fact that she was one of the people who was working on Reince Priebus' post-2012 autopsy, what is going on in her mind, do you think? I know you've given a great deal of thought to this. Is there any sense of personal embarrassment or is it just like, I'm all in, which means that I need to be more all in than anybody else who's all in? Just imagine, Charlie, if all of your closest friends, right, in your personal life were

telling you and signaling to you that you were going on a terrible path, that you were losing touch with yourself, and implored you, pleaded with you over years, like, please don't do this. Please stop. And you said, nope, I'm going for it. I have all my friends who are coming to me like that. And that's what my reporting shows is that like, I mean, for years, more and more, and over time, people dropped away from her, but they would say, this is not you. And she would say, well, you don't get how hard this is. I'm trying to keep this balance. What I think is interesting is that although she clearly has no genuine attachment to Trump populism, and she thinks Trump is a whack job, as she called him to a friend in a text message that I saw.

She has never acknowledged, and still doesn't, I think, that there has actually been a change. Her private story and her public story is I'm the same person I've always been. So she's responded to this upheaval in her life, first of all, by just shedding friends and colleagues and advisors and mentors, and then telling herself and the public a story that actually, like, you people are out of career. If you look at early Elise Stefanik, there's this charming and earnest quality to her that kind of went with the intelligence. And what you see now is something kind of brittle and harsh. Well, I think in part of it, it's artificial, right? I mean, she's playing a role that is not natural necessarily to her.

This is Water Under the Bridge now, but remember when Mitt Romney said, I'm severely conservative? That's exactly what I was thinking of, yeah. And you could feel him trying to reach for the language that didn't come naturally to him so that he could get people to identify with him who didn't normally.

And when she goes out there and says, I am ultra-MAGA, I'm proud of it, there is not a single person who knows her who believes for a second that that is anything but a theater. And it makes them laugh, but also cry because people who have known her forever, it's like, this is not you. This is not who you are. And for what? That's the ultimate question. For what? And this is all very, very recent. You know, as you point out, you know, as recently as the 2020 campaign, I was amazed to read this in your reporting that she'd offered unsolicited advice to Pete Buttigieg after

the Democratic debates and asked whether she might be considered for a cabinet job if he won. I mean, this is not that long ago. Yeah. And this was happening during the 2019 impeachment. At that point, again, it happened quickly, but it did happen in a couple of stages when she made the move. And at first, I think she genuinely thought that the impeachment drive, the first one especially,

was unjust, that it was also theater, that Adam Schiff was corrupt, that the rules were rigged, and that she was going to attack the process. And she told friends in the run-up, look, I'm going to take a bigger role in this. I'm not going to carry Trump's water. I think the process is really wrong. And then I think she found that if she carried Trump's water a little bit, the money just came flooding in. My gosh, she raised so much money. So that's my question, whether that was her star turn, because that's the way I remember it, that she was like reasonable, moderate. And then she played this role defending Trump. And immediately, you know, she made these theatrical interjections and Fox just loved her.

Trump loved it. Trump goes on Fox and Friends and says, I know a lot about stardom. She's a star. She raised all these grassroots. So, I mean, was that the moment where she looked around and go, wow, this is cool. This is the kind of celebrity and attention that I've always craved my whole life. I mean, was it pre-planned or was it like, was it a reaction to, I'm enjoying this. I'm going to ride this roller coaster now.

I think it was more of the latter. You know, I think as one friend who talked to her around that was telling me, she didn't intend to like travel as far as she did. She's like, I'm going to edge out here. I'm going to offend him. And all of a sudden she found herself like in front of this, this whirligig, right? This contraption. And she was like, well, if I just, if I just crank it up more, then like more money comes in and more adulation and more praise. And if I crank it a little bit higher, I get even more money and more adulation and more praise. And for a person who had been caught in the middle, in her mind, who is occupying this untenable space in the House and in politics, who is basically being criticized for being a squish and not strong enough against Trump at the same time.

To suddenly be beloved, I think it takes a lot of strength of character and a sense of why you're really there to hold fast. And I don't think she did. I think she wanted to be in the room, and now she was in the room. She's definitely in the room. Okay, so this is where it brings us back to what's happening with the house writ large, how she personifies so much of this, that once you get yourself into that world, once you have fed the fires of outrage and you're part of that machine, you have to keep feeding it, don't you? To a certain extent, you become a prisoner of that.

They demand certain things. So, for example, she thought she would sort of edge over a little bit by Christmas. She's tweeting, fire Fauci, save Christmas. She's buying the election law. She's, you know, tweeting about, you know, dead people voting, all of these things, because that's what now this base and this outrage machine demands. I mean, in some ways, that's what's been happening to the House Republican conference, to Kevin McCarthy, is that, you know, those are my people. I'm their leader. I need to catch up with them. Again, it comes back to this idea of the infotainment complex. And I'm not saying that to like belittle its power at all, but fundamentally, it is an outrage cycle. There has to be something to be outraged about.

It's got to be they're trying to cancel Columbus Day. It's got to be trans kids. It's got to be woke. It's got to be something. There's always got to be something because the engagement apparatus for cable TV, for talk radio, for social media, for direct mail, for email marketing, something terrible always has to be happening. That's how you get the money. That's how you get the eyeballs. And, you know,

that has been a feature of the right since the 70s, a feature, right? There's always been that direct mail culture on the right. And there's been talk radio for decades and decades. Sure. But man, it has really become systematized. And's become like it's almost taken on a life of its own. You kind of can't escape the outrage cycle because it has to be fed. That's why it's impossible to lead the House Republican caucus, because in the absence of a strong counterweight of a policy agenda, here's why we're here. Here's what unites us. Here's our agenda. In the absence of that, the need to like play out the theater of outrage every day and find new targets, eventually those targets become the leadership itself, inevitably. Right. And it goes faster and faster. Okay. So let's talk about Lee Stefanik, Liz Cheney, and the price of loyalty? Because, of course, one of the most dramatic reversals of this party, an indication, again, a warning of how we would get to where we are right now, the ouster of Liz Cheney. Did Elise Stefanik set out to replace Liz Cheney? What role

did she, how did she end up, given her lack of seniority, how did she end up as the number three member of House leadership? Well, I think there were a couple things going on. First of all, as you remember, Liz Cheney survived the first vote to oust her. It was a roll call vote. And she had a lot of support. And at the time, she had been saying, we've got to deep six Donald Trump. We've got to stand against this. And after she survived the first vote, she kept saying it because she believed it. She was like,

Trump is not the future of our party. And I think her courage in saying that was really an embarrassment to people who just wanted to put their heads down and kind of let him do his thing and keep their jobs in Congress. a courageous person always embarrasses people who are less courageous. Sometimes it can inspire them, but not here. And so as Liz Cheney kept pushing and kept pushing these buttons, Kevin McCarthy, others who had tried to sort of stick with her the first time said, all right, forget about it. This is untenable. And then the question is, you have this party that knows it has a problem with women voters, that doesn't have enough women in leadership ever. So you had to replace Liz Cheney, at least with another female candidate.

And what we saw pretty soon after Liz Cheney voted for Trump's impeachment in the second impeachment, we saw a story in Politico where Stefanik is floating herself as a replacement. And Cheney wouldn't budge. He's like, I'm going to keep saying this. And the message, the selling that at least Stefanik did to win over enough people to get over the Freedom Caucus hump, the people who thought she was too liberal for the job, was to say, look, I'm going to move us past this. I'm young, I'm reasonable, I'm female. We got to stop focusing on January 6th. We got to move past it. I'm going to go on offense against the Democrats. And that's what people wanted to hear. And look, it's certainly a tribute to her

intelligence and her work ethic. And she's in. And she had Trump's endorsement, obviously. And that was like the final blow against, and actually, this is interesting, Charlie, right? In 2021, when she was running for conference chair, Chip Roy and others on the right in the caucus were like, look at her voting ratings. Club for Growth was against her. You know, she's got much more liberal votes than Liz Cheney. Donald Trump endorsed her. And that was the end of that. And I think the gap and the distance we've traveled from he can make Elise Stefanik versus he can't make Kevin McCarthy happen kind of shows you this next evolution we're seeing. That is a great point. So her conversion, of course,

is responsible for her meteoric rise, but it's also a problem for her, isn't it? I mean, she went from having a rating by the conservative heritage action from, they rated her at 24% in 2018. She boosted that up to 86%. As you pointed out, she's endorsed Trump. She didn't say anything about the dinner with neo-Nazis. But occasionally, she's mentioned as a possible compromise candidate for speaker, but you make the point that that's unlikely because she's never really offered a convincing MAGA conversion story. So talk to me about that. There are still members of this caucus that look at her and are not totally buying this conversion? I think the problem is she's never acknowledged it's a conversion because, and this

goes back to like, how does she deal with this personally, right? And the way she dealt with it was, I haven't changed, you've changed. You're out of touch. You people are crazy. I'm the same person I've always been. I'm going to do my job and represent the 21st District of New York. Movements will always adopt converts, especially as foot soldiers. Movements don't punish you if you convert

convincingly, but they like to have a story about why you converted. And Elise Stefanik, because she kind of wants to have her cake and eat it too, she wants to try to pretend to be the same person she's always been while rising in a very different party, she's never acknowledged a real change. And so what you hear on the Hill is not like open hatred, but just to like, we don't really think she's one of us. And because she's obviously made a transformation, she's not a natural candidate of like the moderate faction in the House. So she doesn't have a really obvious constituency in a street fight. I think the conference chair job, people thought she was doing a good job in it. It's the messaging job. There was a challenger, Byron Donalds of Florida. But essentially, the stakes in that

job are very different than for Speaker. So I think people are content to let her have it again. What's interesting is she was thinking about running for House whip. And she basically backed out of the race because in a street fight, the conservatives wanted a true believer. And the moderates don't trust her anymore. And as you pointed out before, you know, Trump loves the fact that she defends him all the time, but he doesn't necessarily trust her. And this, of course, is the problem of somebody who is a complete shapeshifter. So let's go back to Kevin McCarthy because, you know, he's front and center at the moment. He has tried to make himself all things to all people as well. He has, you know, made one

concession after another. And yet it seems that the more concessions he makes, the weaker he looks, that it turns out that you cannot shrink yourself into a position of power. So talk to me about the leadership right now, because, you know, Elise Stefanik has done everything she possibly can to get power. Kevin McCarthy is willing to be anyone, say anything to be speaker. And at the moment, it's not working for them. We have to be real about one thing. If Republicans had won 15 more seats, right, in Congress, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Everything is made impossible by the narrowness of the majority. Then you have to ask, why is the majority so narrow? That's Donald Trump. And so I think the dilemma for Elise Stefani, for Kevin McCarthy,

is the same as for the party as a whole. Do we bind ourselves to this potent but ultimately very handicapping force? Or do we bite the bullet, take the short-term pain, set ourselves free, and go win elections? And I think that's what we have to wait and see unfold. Yeah, but they have had so many opportunities to do that before now, and they've taken none of them. And we've seen that story before, right, for years now, since 2015. But now, I mean, political parties do exist to win, and maybe not anymore. But I think that's the big question. Now, you're asking me, could there be a Speaker of Stefanik?

It's certainly possible. She appears on these lists in the way that like people just appear on these lists, right? Reporters are like, who could it be? And they just pick, they kind of pick the obvious people. She's one of the obvious people. Maybe if the marginal opposition, right, the edge cases against Kevin McCarthy are really about Kevin, right? As they say, then sure, maybe a fresh start, somebody who is obliging, who will give them what they want, and isn't Kevin McCarthy, then gets the votes. Maybe everyone's just exhausted. I don't know why it wouldn't first be Stephen Scalise, but who knows? I think the question is, okay, then for what? What will the

House do? And I'm sure if they get this together and elect a speaker, we'll see a lot of investigations of Hunter Biden. Will that keep the majority? I don't know. I'm not a politician. But the fundamental big question is, like, what do you do about a problem like Donald Trump? This is what makes it so interesting, because Elise Stefanik has given everything away on her bet.

She's pushed everything into the middle of the table betting on Donald Trump. I can imagine other people taking exit ramps. I can't imagine her at this point. So she's all in. She made this bet. What do you think is going on in her head right now? I think what's going on in her head is

I sure hope that I made the right bet on Donald Trump and I sure hope he's the nominee. Okay. I'm going to wrap it up there. Nick, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. We always appreciate it. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we will do this all over again. Landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained.

If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash RentSafeTO.