Rep. Stefanik Responds to Negative Comments She Made About DJT

Elise Stefanik, a Republican representative, faced criticism for her shifting stance on former President Donald Trump, leading to backlash on social media. The controversy was sparked by a Fox News interview where Stefanik was confronted about her past comments calling Trump a ‘whack job.’

Rep. Stefanik admitted she said he was insulting to women. Her argument is she’s been his strongest ally all along. Stefanik filibustered, so we don’t know if she called him a “whack job,” but people did go on the record to quote her to the New York Times. Stefanik didn’t directly deny she made the comments.

What she says here is that it’s a disgrace that Shannon would take only the negative quotes from the New York Times when she voted for him and supported him from day one.

It would have been better if she had admitted to the comments she had made but realized she was wrong or something along those lines.

Watch:

The NY Times was a hit piece, but I still think it would have been better to address it directly. The Times wants to demonize her as much as they want to trash Mr. Trump in case she becomes his running mate. They paint her as an opportunist and attribute motives to her based on third-party gossip.

An excerpt:

For years, Ms. Stefanik had crafted her brand as a model moderate millennial — “the future of hopeful, aspirational politics in America,” as her mentor, Paul Ryan, would describe her in Time magazine. But as her third term unfolded, according to current or former friends and advisers, it was becoming painfully clear that she was the future of a Republican Party that no longer existed. The party was now firmly controlled by Donald J. Trump, a populist president she didn’t like or respect — a “whack job,” as she once described him in a message obtained by The New York Times. Fox hosts attacked her for not supporting Mr. Trump enough. Her friends criticized her for not opposing him more forcefully. You don’t understand, she would tell them. You don’t get how hard this is. Democrats were back in charge in the House. Mr. Ryan was gone, driven into early retirement. She told friends she was thinking of joining him.

Instead, she embarked on one of the most brazen political transformations of the Trump era. With breathtaking speed and alacrity, Ms. Stefanik remade herself into a fervent Trump apologist…

The entire piece was like that. Rep. Stefanik has been gaining positive notoriety lately for her courage and sharp-witted questioning. The Times is under pressure from Biden to do more damage to the Trump brand.

The piece is propaganda. It is a negative attack with no effort to get the other side except for a call to her for an interview, which she wisely declined.

It’s doubtful that the people who quoted her are friends. In any case, Republicans now worry about her loyalty.

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