Nick Confessore: The Theater of Elise Stefanik

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast on Travex. It is January fifth two thousand twenty three, and everything is amazing. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way. I mean, amazing and incredibly symbolic, chaotic, Sh broaden fried inducing way. It’s also a little bit scary.

So joining me to break all this down. Once again, Nicholas Contessori, 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 me

back.

For

regular listeners, we ran a an encore edition of our last conversation where you did a really deep dive into Tucker Carlson’s program and, you know, how it was the most racist program on cable television, which is still a 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 abs absolutely bizarrely chaotic house conference. She’s gone all in on on Donald Trump. She described herself as Ultramaga. And I wanna 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 speaker something we haven’t had in a hundred years.

Kevin McCarthy continuing to engage in what I’ve described as self glding surrendering almost on every single point to the crazies in the caucus. It feels at this point is 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. Mhmm.

Right? Which for years and years has monetized a story of betrayal by party elites. And stoking outrage. Stoking outrage. And 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 twenty seventeen, and total control 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 pedal this idea that the elites and 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 policies. And

this perpetual outrage machine predates Donald Trump and I think your colleague Maggie Abramsman 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 preexisting condition he was able to feed off of it and latch onto it, but it’s taken on the 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 wanna put an asterisk on that because I think that immigration and its discontent is the big substantive issue that has plagued the party. But

beyond

that — Right. He came in and he’s like, wait a second. Like, instead of being a candidate who’s allied with Case Street in an open way, he was gonna try and tamps down these forces. I’m gonna ride them. And he did.

And he delivered on that count more effectively than anyone could imagine. He made the White House a Spectacle. It made the presidency a spectacle. The things that he accomplished substantively were mostly thanks to mister McConnell and Paul Bryant. And now that he is at Mar a Lago hanging out with a potential presidential campaign, those forces have resumed and we’ve seen comments in recent days and talk radio host 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, you know, 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 in 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? Well, what’s happening right now? Because he can turn on Fox News and see the 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 are 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 Beaubert, who is weirdly enough having a feud with Marjorie Taylor Green. By the way, I did not have that on my Bingo card. Marjorie Taylor Green

versus Lauren Boulder.

But Lauren Boulder, 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 Beaubert who has been a Trump loyalist pushing back against the Ornie 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 Beaubert want? Why did she run for Congress? What does she want to achieve? And what I’ve observed, and this is in my reporting on Tucker Carlson, but I think it also relates to at least Defanuk who will 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. Mhmm. You’re in the outrage business. You’re in the confrontation. You know, is it on tape?

Is there a moment I can sell on social that I can monetize? And I think Matt Gates and Lauren Barber are in the same business as Tucker Carlson even though one that talks to host and one that in Congress. And I think that’s what we’re seeing there. And it goes back to this idea, like, this is about, like, fuge and rivalries, not entirely. I don’t wanna paint too broadly.

I think there are guys like Chipotle, Texas, some in the fumed caucus who have substantive procedural things that they want, an ability to participate more in the house processes, to offer in them they’ve had those long standing. 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 No. I

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 not one vote move? Is there any fear factor. I mean, normally, you would have Republicans, particularly in that world, I mean, I described on MSNBC yesterday, this is the lowest hanging fruit in the Magiverse.

Right? Donald Trump calling up Lauren Barber, you know, calling up people like Matt Gates. 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 CaseStack to raise money. You’re generating outrage to monetize it on social media and then your direct mail. If you don’t wanna pass a bill, 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 would denounce them? Do you 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 member of those rallies. Right? They used the rallies focused groups. I’m gonna listen. What works?

What makes them hear louder? And I’m gonna repeat that. Gonna give more of what they want. Yes. He’s gonna listen to the audience and he’s gonna 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 know, that you could break with Trump on a variety of their in Lindsay 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 gazes and and Beaufort and 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. And I think that’s right. Look, I 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 Warfight, on a 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. We’re all

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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 is a good segue into the discussion of Lisa Fonik. 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 State House, 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 a 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 nineteen ninety four. And people kind of forget a couple of things about it, right, with new Cambridge in the contract. Almost everything in it was extremely popular. In a basic way.

Yeah. They actually wrote bills. They had detailed bills. Each plank in that was like a piece of legislation. You know, there was a child tax credit.

There was a balanced budget amendment. There was a tort reform thing, but there there was a job creation act. When you look at what House leadership did for this front 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, well, take on by inflation by cutting wasteful government spending.

And that’s fine as far as it goes. But how far does it go? That substituting like a basic idea of conservatism for an actual program to run up. And I think the thinness of the McCarthy’s Stephanic message Right? That whole thing they did reflects the lack of consensus that you’re talking about, the inability to come up with the policy agenda.

And look, you know, as I was reporting out my story on Lisa Fye, just as a way of illustrating it, I asked every public I talked to in the story in Washington. What’s the hot free market healthcare idea right now on the right. Like, what’s the like? The idea bubbling up? The big idea.

And I could never get an answer because there wasn’t one. Like, when you think about it, like, 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 clussing around in a substantive way. It just shows you how, again, Trump moved to 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 and, of course, in twenty twenty, 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 Straybelize to Fauna 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 want, 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 Stefanic. So let’s just walk through this.

I mean, Alyssa Fonik had a lot going for herself. Right? I mean, she you know, it’s 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 Santoses and Lauren Bauberts, but you know, the heart of this is that Elise Stefanik decided that she was gonna grab this banner. What was the turning point for her, do you think? So I think

you have to go back to the twenty eighteen 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 in invasion?

And until then, Elise Tufonic had really tried to, like, hold position as a center right bipartisan figure in Washington. She criticized Trump carefully in a modulator way, but she would take, you know, shots at him when he would say things like shit hole countries or go back to where he came from. She evoted with him most of the time, but against important thing. You know, she did not go with him on his effort to basically find money to fund the border wall. Right?

There was there was a fight over that. She voted against the tax bill because it was bad for people in her district. But

after

twenty eighteen, 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 the least to find it? She’s now in the minority. Paul Ryan Hermentor has basically retired early.

She is being attacked on Fox and from the right for being a squish. Her friends from Harvard were kind of center right and left friends are all saying to her, come on, stand up to this guy. You gotta go harder. And she’s thinking, I gotta, 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 two thousand nineteen.

Nada. There are no reward. Integrity purpose?

Yeah. Well, there are no political wars 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 he did the reading. Doesn’t care how smart you are. So what do you do? Well, she joined the kids of the back of the class in a sense. Now she would argue she’s still by a partisan.

She’s substantially. You can see her name on all kinds of wacky 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 raping 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 illusion 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 were elites in America who were conspiring to replace the native born Americans with a new class of immigrants serves. To go from, I wanna force a vote on DACA in twenty eighteen, to replacement theory in twenty twenty one shows you the journey and the ambition at work.

As you wrote,

she embarked on one of the most brazen political transformation of the Trump era, and her reinvention has made her a case study in the collapse of the old Republican establishment, and it’s a willing absorption into the new Trump dominated one. But I think part of what was extraordinary about our transformation was it was so complete and it was so utterly shameless. I mean, she became this furb an apology she adopted as you pointed out his 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 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 interesting question

is whether it continues to work for her. I don’t think there’s anybody including Kevin McCarthy in 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 pricing it falls. That’s why she remains, you know, one of the only senior Republicans to endorse has 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 it.

I’m not gonna 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 have 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 since Trump announced his his reelection campaign. He he has not cleared the field. No major candidate dropped out of the race. He has not been flooded with endorsements. So at least Stephanic, 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’s Stephanic 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 twenty fourteen for her house suit. Her campaign registered as Stephanic for Presidents, Stephanic 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 gonna be governor. Mhmm. She’s not gonna be sadder.

I could be wrong. He’d be surprised, but I think that’ll be hard. And Lee Zelvin has handled this stuff very differently. Right? He came pretty close.

In twenty twenty two. 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, 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 political Great outlets.

All I’m saying, you know, she’s a potential candidate for VP. And so I made some calls on this. What I found out was that at Maranaga that’s not really a serious idea. They look at those stories and see them as plants by Stephanix comms team. And that, you know, as is often the case with Trump, his loyalty goes kinda one way.

And while he loves having turned her, and made her come to his side. He loves watching her defending 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 health picker.

That is interesting. I mean, you know, the problem with naked ambition is

that it is so naked. Hurt alliance with Trump obviously is coming up, you know, rather significant personal cost. I mean, Paul Ryan or former mentor now considers her the biggest disappointment of his political career. And I imagine there’s a lot of different candidates there. She’s lost a lot of her oldest, closest friends have stopped speaking with her, she was pushed out at Harvard 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 manga. And she has gone out of her way to endorse, you know, that candidate from North Carolina who endorsed the excution of people responsible for the fraud of Trump’s defeat. She endures George Santos. You know, she attacked the White House and House Democrats and the usual Peddo as in pedophile. Grifters for the the infant milk shortage.

You know, she warned that the surge of Haitian immigrants would overthrow our current electorate 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 Ryan’s preaches, post two thousand twelve autopsy. What is going on in her mind? Do you think? I 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 like 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’ve all my friends were 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 and she calls him to a friend and 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 in the public a story that actually, like, few people are at a touch, you don’t get it, I’m serving my district.

And there’s a kind of abrittleness to it that I think you didn’t see earlier in her career if you look at early elistofonic, there’s this charming and earnest quality to her that kinda went with the intelligence. And what you see now is something kinda brittle and harsh. Well, I think in part

of it, yeah, it’s artificial. Right? I mean, she’s playing a role that is not natural necessarily to her.

This is water under the bridge. No. But never when I met Romney’s, you know, said I was you know, I’m severely conservative. That’s exactly

what I was thinking of. Yep. And you

could feel him like trying to, like, 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 Ultramaga, I’m proud of it. There is not a single person who knows her, who’s pleased 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 twenty twenty 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 if he won. I mean, This is not that long ago. Yeah. And and this was happening during the twenty nineteen impeachment. At that point, again, it happened quickly, but, like, it did happen in a couple of stage 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 it was also theater. That Adam Schiff was corrupted, the rules were rigged, and that she was gonna attack the process. And she told friends in the run up, looked I’m gonna take a bigger role in this. I’m not gonna, like, 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 kind of came flooding in. My gosh. She raised so much money. Yeah.

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 trickle 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 preplanned or was it like was it a reaction to I’m enjoying this.

I’m gonna 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 was telling me, she didn’t intend to, like, travel as far as she did. She’s like, I’m gonna edge out here. I’m gonna offend him. And all of a sudden, she found herself, like, in front of this this world again.

Right? This contraption. And she was like, well, if I just if I just crank it up more than, 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 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 her in 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 that 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 at large, how she personifies so much of this, that once you get yourself into that world, once you have, you know, fed the fires of outrage and you, you know, 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 launch. She’s 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 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. Right.

It’s gotta be they’re trying to cancel Columbus Day. It’s gotta be trans kids. It’s gotta be woke. It’s gotta be something. There’s always gotta 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 a feature of the right since the seventies of feature. Right? There’s always been that direct mail culture on the right.

And has been talk radio for decades and decades. Sure. But, man, it has really become systematized and it’s become like it’s almost taken on a life of its own. You you kinda 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 or outrage every day and find new targets eventually Those targets become leadership itself, inevitably.

Right. And it goes faster and faster.

Okay. So

let’s talk about least aphonic Liz Cheney in the price of loyalty because, of course, one of the most dramatic reversals of of this party, indication, again, a warning of how we would get to where we are right now. The ouster of Liz Cheney Did Lisa Fonic 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 of things going on. First of all, as you remember, Liz Cheney survived the first vote to oust her. It was a it was a roll call vote. And she had a lot of support And at the time, she had been saying, we’ve we’ve got a deep sixth Donald Trump. We gotta 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 kinda 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, alright, forget about it. This is untenable. And then the question is, you have this party that knows it has a problem with them and 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 was Cheney voted for Trump’s impeachment and the second impeachment, we saw a story in political or a stephanica slurring herself as a replacement. And Cheney went bad. She’s like, I’m gonna keep saying this. And the message, the selling that Lisa Fonig did to win over enough people to get over the Freedom caucus, the people who thought she was too liberal. For the job, why does it say, look, I’m gonna move us past this.

I’m young, unreasonable, and female. We gotta stop focusing on January sixth. We gotta move past it. I’m gonna go on offense against the Democrats. And that’s what people wanted to hear.

And I look at 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, like, this thing, Charlie. Right?

In twenty twenty one, when she was running for a 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 got much more liberal votes than than this shady. Donald Trump endorsed her, and that was the end of that.

And I think the gap and the distance we traveled from, he can make Elyse DeFonik versus he can’t make Kevin McCarthy happen, kinda 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 twenty four percent in two thousand eighteen. She boosted that up to eighty six percent as you pointed out. She’s endorsed Trump.

She didn’t say anything about the 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 as a conversion because then this goes back to, like, how did 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 wanna do my job and and represent the twenty first districts of New York. You know, 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 convert it. And Elise Tufonic, because she kind of wants to have her cake eat it to, 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 so she doesn’t have a really obvious constituency in a street fight. I think the conference share job, people thought she was doing a good job in it. It’s a messaging job. There was a challenger, Byron Donald’s of Florida. But essentially, like, the the stakes in that job are very different than for speakers.

So I think people are content to let her have it again. What’s interesting is she she was thinking about running for house whip, and she basically backed out of the race because in a street fight, that conservatives wanted a

true believer. And the moderates don’t trust her anymore. And and as you pointed out before, you know, Trump loves the fact that defends him all the time, but he doesn’t necessarily trust her. And this, of course, is the problem of somebody who has a complete shape shifter. So let’s go back to Kevin McCarthy because you know, he’s a 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 that one thing. If Republicans had won fifteen more seats. Right? In Congress, we’ll be having this conversation. Yeah.

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 at least defining 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. But David’s 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 twenty fifteen. But now, I mean, political parties do exist to whim and maybe not anymore, but I think that’s the big question. Now, you know, you’re asking me, could there be a speakers to find it? It’s certainly possible.

You know, she appears on these lists in the way that, like, people will just appear on these lists. Right? Reporters are like, who’s gonna be? And they just pick they kinda 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 get the votes. Maybe everyone’s just exhausted. I don’t know why it wouldn’t first be Stephen’s Coles, 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 let the 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 Tufonic has given everything away on her batch. She’s pushed everything into the middle of the table betting on Donald Trump. I can imagine other people taking extra grams. 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

gonna 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 sure sites, we will be back tomorrow and we will do this all over again.

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