Trump, Donald J

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Andrew Giuliani to Run for GOP Nomination for NY Governor

      by

      The son of Rudolph W. Giuliani joins two other candidates in a primary that could demonstrate former President Trump’s continued hold on their party.The field of Republicans vying to challenge Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in next year’s race for governor grew on Tuesday as Andrew Giuliani, the son of the former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, formally unveiled his candidacy.Mr. Giuliani is the third Republican to see an opportunity for the party to seize the governor’s mansion for the first time in nearly two decades, joining Representative Lee Zeldin of Long Island, a staunch conservative, and Rob Astorino, a former county executive of Westchester County and the party’s 2014 nominee for governor.With Mr. Cuomo engulfed in overlapping investigations into accusations of sexual harassment, his handling of nursing homes and the use of state resources for his pandemic memoir, Republicans in New York appeared eager to take on a newly vulnerable governor hobbling into his run for a fourth term.And the entrance of Mr. Giuliani, a former special assistant to President Donald J. Trump, along with Mr. Zeldin, an ardent backer of the former president, suggested that Republican candidates with ties to Mr. Trump may see a distinct advantage, even in deep blue New York.“We need a leader who is going to light the economic furnace in New York and keep our streets safe again,” said Mr. Giuliani in a telephone interview. “Stop the war on police that has been going on. End bail reform.”Mr. Giuliani, in first announcing his candidacy in The New York Post, likened himself to a heavyweight boxer about to enter the ring for a title bout with Mr. Cuomo. “Giuliani vs. Cuomo. Holy smokes. It’s Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier,” he told the paper.But for many New Yorkers, particularly in the city, the image that jumps to mind — one that the 35-year-old Mr. Giuliani has struggled to live down — is of his 7-year-old self fidgeting about the lectern at City Hall as his father gave his inaugural address as mayor in 1994. The moment was satirized by “Saturday Night Live,” with Mr. Giuliani played by the comedian Chris Farley. (Mr. Giuliani said he loves the skit.)In 2017, Mr. Trump hired Mr. Giuliani, a former professional golfer, to work as a special assistant and associate director of the Office of Public Liaison. Since leaving the White House this year, he has been an on-camera contributor for Newsmax Media, the conservative media company. (He left that position to run for governor.)Mr. Giuliani, who only began raising money in recent days, faces a difficult path in the Republican primary.Mr. Zeldin, an outspoken supporter of Mr. Trump, has already raised $2.5 million in campaign cash since announcing his candidacy last month, according to his campaign, and has worked to position himself to gain Mr. Trump’s endorsement.“It’s clear that Congressman Zeldin has the support, momentum and dogged determination to win and restore New York to glory,” said Ian Prior, a campaign spokesman for Mr. Zeldin.Mr. Trump made it clear to Mr. Giuliani when they saw each other at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s estate in Florida, a few weeks ago that he was leaning toward Mr. Zeldin, according to two people with knowledge of the discussion.Mr. Giuliani, in the conversation, suggested that the former president wait until after the next campaign filing, in mid-July, so that Mr. Giuliani could demonstrate his viability, the people said.Mr. Giuliani did not dispute that account. “All I can say is the president has been a friend for a long time and somebody I have been honored to work for,” he said. “I think he is going to be very impressed.”A confident speaker, Mr. Giuliani made a favorable impression on some Republican Party operatives in meetings before county chairs last month. He is scheduled to travel around the state over the next week, according to his campaign. State party officials had hoped to avoid a primary, but with one now all but assured, they appear to have embraced the energy.“Rudy will forever be known as the man who transformed New York City, and Andrew can be the one to do it statewide,” said Nick Langworthy, the party chairman, in a statement. “New York is broken and in need of the type of overhaul that the Giuliani administration ushered in during the 1990s.”How much currency the Giuliani family name holds for New York voters, particularly upstate, is an open question. Rudolph Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and onetime personal attorney to Mr. Trump, was aggressive in publicly questioning the results of the 2020 election and in the failed effort to overturn the election in court. His work in Ukraine during Mr. Trump’s administration is under federal investigation.And any Republican faces daunting math when trying to run statewide in New York, where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one and the party’s last statewide win was in 2002, when George Pataki was elected governor.Still, some Republicans see Mr. Cuomo’s troubles as a reason to hope.“When you have Andrew, Lee and Rob all running for governor, it shows how excited New Yorkers are to have Andrew Cuomo on the ballot as a Democrat seeking his fourth term,” said Joseph Borelli, a Republican member of the New York City Council from Staten Island. “Good luck, Governor Cuomo!”Maggie Haberman contributed reporting. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Michigan Judge Dismisses Suit Questioning 2020 Election Result

      by

      A Michigan state judge on Tuesday dismissed one of the last, high-profile court cases questioning the results of the 2020 presidential election, a case former President Donald J. Trump cited to claim fraud after unofficial results in one county initially assigned some votes for him to President Biden.The plaintiff, William Bailey, a local resident, and his lawyer, Matthew S. DePerno, had sought to use the case to cast doubt on the vote nationwide, suggesting that a flawed count by Dominion Voting System machines in Antrim County, Mich., meant that all such machines were open to manipulation and deliberate fraud. The suit was also an attempt to force another statewide audit.Although Mr. DePerno and the various experts he tapped to analyze the vote repeatedly said that various flaws with the voting machines left them open to hacking, they did not cite any specific evidence that it had occurred. A computer expert hired by the state also noted some security weaknesses, but said there was no indication that they had been exploited.Mr. Trump cited Antrim County in his speech on Jan. 6 in Washington claiming that the vote was corrupt and has continued to site the case as an example of “major” fraud. The critical mistake made by local election officials was readily evident right after the Nov. 3 vote. Unofficial results posted online by the county clerk indicated that Mr. Biden won the heavily Republican country with 7,769 votes versus 4,509 votes for Mr. Trump.A quick analysis by county and state election officials determined that the mistake was because of human error — a failure to update the software in some voting machines to account for new ballot lines for local issues had thrown the machine count off, with votes for Mr. Trump attributed to Mr. Biden.After several attempts at correcting the count using paper ballots, including a hand recount released last December, the numbers basically flipped, with Mr. Trump outpolling Mr. Biden by more than 3,000 votes in Antrim County. Mr. Trump lost Michigan by some 154,000 votes.Judge Kevin A. Elsenheimer of the 13th Circuit Court, a former Republican legislator in Michigan, granted the motion on Tuesday by the combined state and county legal team for a summary dismissal on fairly narrow technical grounds, saying the legal requirement for voters to request an audit had already been met.The statewide vote audit demanded by Mr. Bailey and his lawyer had already been completed by Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state, earlier in the year, he said. The ruling did not address the issue of possible manipulation.Ms. Benson had said two audits confirmed the accuracy and integrity of the vote, with a random sample of ballots in the second one mirroring the machine count.In a statement on Tuesday, Ms. Benson said that the dismissal of the “last of the lawsuits” seeking to further the “big lie” confirmed that the election was fair and secure.Dana Nessel, the Michigan attorney general, said in a statement that she hoped the ruling would be a “nail in the coffin” for any remaining conspiracy theories surrounding the outcome of the presidential election.Mr. DePerno did not respond to a telephone call and an email seeking comment, but he is expected to appeal. The case continues to roil the waters in Antrim County, with public discussion of it taking up many hours of recent county commission meetings. Democrats have generally expressed support for the county’s explanation while Republicans demand the county clerk, a Republican, be dismissed.County officials have fretted aloud that they would have to replace all the voting machines because a significant number of voters had lost faith in them, and at their last meeting in early May decided to summon their lawyer for a briefing.“Is everybody OK with just a quick update and not 8,700 questions for four hours?” pleaded Terry VanAlstine, the chairman of the board of commissioners. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Giuliani Seeks to Block Review of Evidence From His Phones

      by

      Prosecutors investigating Rudolph W. Giuliani’s work in Ukraine have seized his electronic devices, a move his lawyers are now questioning.Rudolph W. Giuliani on Monday opened a broad attack on the searches that federal investigators conducted of his home, his office and his iCloud account, asking a judge to block any review of the seized records while his lawyers determine whether there was a legitimate basis for the warrants, according a court filing made public on Monday.Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers are seeking copies of the confidential government documents that detail the basis for the search warrants, a legal long shot that they hope could open the door for them to argue for the evidence to be suppressed. Typically, prosecutors only disclose such records after someone is indicted and before a trial, but Mr. Giuliani, who is under investigation for potential lobbying violations, has not been accused of wrongdoing.A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment on Monday.In a 17-page letter to the judge who authorized the searches, Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers argued that it would have been more appropriate — and less invasive — for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan to seek information through a subpoena, which, unlike a warrant, would have given him an opportunity to review the documents and respond.Justice Department policy recommends that prosecutors use subpoenas when seeking information from lawyers, unless there is a concern about destruction of evidence.The defense lawyers wrote that prosecutors “simply chose to treat a distinguished lawyer as if he was the head of a drug cartel or a terrorist, in order to create maximum prejudicial coverage of both Giuliani and his most well-known client — the former president of the United States.”The lawyers also disclosed that the government had claimed in a November 2019 search warrant for Mr. Giuliani’s iCloud account that the search needed to be a secret because of concerns he might destroy records or intimidate witnesses.Though the government routinely cites concern about potential destruction of records when seeking search warrants, Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers attacked the idea that their client, himself a former federal prosecutor and onetime personal lawyer to President Donald J. Trump, would ever destroy evidence.“Such an allegation, on its face, strains credulity,” the lawyers, including Robert J. Costello and Arthur Aidala, wrote. “It is not only false, but extremely damaging to Giuliani’s reputation. It is not supported by any credible facts and is contradicted by Giuliani’s efforts to provide information to the government.”The judge who approved the warrants, J. Paul Oetken of Federal District Court, will ultimately decide whether Mr. Giuliani will have access to the confidential government materials underlying them.Mr. Giuliani’s court filing came in response to the government’s request that Judge Oetken appoint a so-called special master to review cellphones and computers seized in the search of Mr. Giuliani’s home and office in Manhattan on April 28.The special master — usually a retired judge or magistrate — would determine whether the materials contained in the devices are covered by attorney-client privilege and as a result cannot be used as evidence in the case. He or she would filter out privileged communications not only between Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump, but also between Mr. Giuliani and his other clients.Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers called the appointment of a special master “premature,” because they are first seeking copies of the search warrant materials.The authorities want to examine the electronic devices for communications that might reveal whether Mr. Giuliani violated lobbying laws in his dealings in Ukraine, The New York Times has reported.While serving as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer before the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Giuliani sought to uncover damaging information on President Biden, then a leading Democratic contender.At issue is whether Mr. Giuliani was at the same time lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian officials who were assisting him in the search.It is a violation of federal law to lobby the U.S. government on behalf of foreign officials without registering with the Justice Department. Mr. Giuliani never registered as a lobbyist for the Ukrainians. He has maintained that he was working only for Mr. Trump.One day after the search, the U.S. attorney’s office told Judge Oetken in a letter that the F.B.I. had begun to extract materials from the seized devices but had not yet begun reviewing them.In the letter, the prosecutors said the appointment of a special master might be appropriate because of “the unusually sensitive privilege issues” raised by the searches, citing, for example, Mr. Giuliani’s representation of Mr. Trump.Communications between lawyers and their clients are generally shielded from investigators in the United States, and communications between presidents and their aides enjoy a similar protection, known as executive privilege.“Any search may implicate not only the attorney-client privilege but the executive privilege,” the office of Audrey Strauss, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, wrote.In seeking the appointment of a special master to review Mr. Giuliani’s materials, the prosecutors cited their office’s investigation of Michael D. Cohen, another of Mr. Trump’s former lawyers.In that case, federal agents seized documents and electronic devices in an April 2018 search of Mr. Cohen’s office, apartment and hotel room. A judge appointed Barbara S. Jones, a retired judge, to determine whether those materials were off-limits to investigators because of attorney-client privilege.Ms. Jones ultimately concluded that only a fraction of Mr. Cohen’s materials were privileged and that the rest could be provided to the government. That August, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and other crimes. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      ‘We Can’t Indulge These Insane Lies’: Arizona G.O.P. Split on Vote Audit

      by

      Top local Republicans are hitting back at Donald J. Trump and fellow party members in the State Senate over a review of Arizona ballots.For weeks, election professionals and Democrats have consistently called the Republican-backed review of November voting results in Arizona a fatally flawed exercise, marred by its partisan cast of characters and sometimes bizarre methodology.Now, after a week in which leaders of the review suggested they had found evidence of illegal behavior, top Republicans in the state’s largest county have escalated their own attacks on the effort, with the county’s top election official calling former President Donald J. Trump “unhinged” for his online comments falsely accusing the county of deleting an elections database.“We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer,” the official, Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder and a Republican, wrote on Twitter. “As a party. As a state. As a country. This is as readily falsifiable as 2+2=5.”Three times, the county has investigated and upheld the integrity of the November vote, which was supervised by Mr. Richer’s predecessor, a Democrat.It is not the first time Republicans in county government have been at odds with the Republicans in the Legislature over the review of the vote. But Mr. Richer is among various Republicans in Maricopa County sounding like they have run out of patience.The five elected supervisors, all but one of whom are Republicans, plan to meet on Monday afternoon to issue a broadside against what Republican sponsors in the State Senate have billed as an election audit, which targets the 2.1 million votes cast in November in metropolitan Phoenix and outlying areas. The planned meeting follows a weekend barrage of posts on Twitter, with the hashtag #RealAuditorsDont, in which the supervisors assailed the integrity of the review.Those posts followed a letter from the leader of the audit, State Senator Karen Fann, implying that the county had removed “the main database for all election-related data” from election equipment that had been subpoenaed for review. Mr. Trump later published the letter on his website, calling it “devastating” evidence of irregularities.The supervisors’ Twitter rebuke was scathing. Real auditors don’t “release false ‘conclusions’ without understanding what they are looking at,” one post said, ridiculing the allegation of a deleted database. Nor do real auditors “hire known conspiracy theorists,” a reference to the firm hired to manage the review, whose chief executive has promoted theories that rigged voting machines caused Mr. Trump’s loss in Arizona.The Arizona Senate president, Karen Fann, has defended the ballot review. Ross D. Franklin/Associated PressJack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the board of supervisors, issued a statement calling the suggestion that files were deleted “outrageous, completely baseless and beneath the dignity of the Arizona Senate,” which ordered the audit. In an interview, he said the meeting on Monday would refute claims in the letter from Ms. Fann, the Senate president.“Basically, every one of our five supervisors said, ‘Enough is enough,’” Mr. Sellers said in an interview on Sunday. “What they’re suggesting is not just criticism. They’re saying we broke the law. And we certainly did not.”The real target of the accusations, he said in the interview, “are the professionals who run the elections, people who followed the rules and who did an incredible job in the middle of a pandemic.“A lot of the questions being asked right now have been answered,” he said of those challenging the November results. “But the people asking them don’t like the answers, so they keep on asking.”At issue is the Maricopa County vote. But Ms. Fann’s letter raises the prospect that an exercise dismissed by serious observers as transparently partisan and flawed could become a potent weapon in the continuing effort by Mr. Trump and his followers to undermine the legitimacy of the vote in Arizona, and perhaps elsewhere.The review has no formal electoral authority and will not change the results of the election in Arizona, no matter what it finds.One poll by High Ground, a Phoenix firm well known for its political surveys, concluded this spring that 78 percent of Arizona Republicans believe Mr. Trump’s false claims that President Biden did not win the November election. A recent Monmouth University poll found that almost two-thirds of Republicans nationally believe that Mr. Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election. More than six in 10 Americans overall believe that he did.Beyond the dispute over supposedly deleted files, Ms. Fann is also pressing the county and the manufacturer of its voting machines, Dominion Voting Systems, to release passwords for vote tabulating machines and county-operated internet routers.Dominion, which has been fighting a series of election-fraud conspiracy theories promoted by Trump supporters and pro-Trump news outlets, has said it will cooperate with federally certified election auditors. But it has spurned the firms hired to conduct the Arizona vote review, whose track record in election audits is scant at best.Maricopa County officials have refused to turn over router passwords, which the auditors say they need to determine whether voting machines were connected to the internet and subject to hacking. County officials say past audits have settled that question. The county sheriff, Paul Penzone, called the demand for passwords “mind-numbingly reckless,” saying it would compromise law enforcement operations unrelated to the election.The review has no formal electoral authority and will not change the results of the election in Arizona, no matter what it finds.Pool photo by Matt YorkThe election review was born in December as an effort by Republican senators to placate voters who had embraced Mr. Trump’s lie that Mr. Biden’s 10,457-vote victory in the state was a fraud. Maricopa County, where two-thirds of the state’s votes were cast, was chosen in part because Republicans refused to believe that Mr. Biden had scored a 45,000-vote victory in a county that once was solid G.O.P. territory.What once seemed an effort to mollify angry supporters of Mr. Trump, however, has become engulfed in acrimony as Ms. Fann and other senators have steered the review in a decidedly partisan direction, hiring as its manager a Florida company, Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive had previously suggested that rigged voting machines caused Mr. Trump’s Arizona loss.An accounting of the review’s finances remains cloudy, but far-right supporters, including the ardently pro-Trump cable news outlet One America News, have raised funds on its behalf. Nonpartisan election experts and the Justice Department have cited troubling indicators that the review is open to manipulation and ignores the most basic security guidelines.Most Arizona Republican officials who have spoken publicly have doggedly supported the review. But State Senator Paul Boyer, a Republican from a suburban Phoenix district evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, made headlines last week after saying that the conduct of the review made him embarrassed to serve in the State Senate.Senator T.J. Shope, another Republican from a Phoenix swing district, has been more circumspect, saying he believed Mr. Biden’s election was legitimate but that he had been too busy to follow the controversy. But in a Twitter post on Saturday, he wrote that Mr. Trump was “peddling in fantasy” by suggesting that the county’s election records had been nefariously deleted.The Maricopa County vote review has been forced to suspend operations this week while the Phoenix work site, a suburban coliseum, is cleared out to host high school graduations. Mr. Sellers, the chairman of the board of supervisors, said he hoped the supervisors’ effort to refute the review’s claims on Monday would be the end of the affair.“It’s clearer by the day: The people hired by the Senate are in way over their heads,” his statement said. “This is not funny; it’s dangerous.” More

    • 50 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      The G.O.P.’s Big Cancellation

      by

      The party’s cancel mob runs wild on Capitol Hill.Mr. Potato Head is under siege.So are the Muppets, baseball and Coca-Cola.Even a horse fell victim. “It was like a cancel culture kind of thing,” the trainer of Medina Spirit told Fox News after the Kentucky Derby-winning horse failed a drug test.In the Biden era, wailing about cancel culture has emerged as a major tenet of Trumpism, a defining principle of a Republican Party far more focused on fighting culture wars than promoting any kind of policy platform.Yet in recent weeks, it has been Republicans who seem most focused on canceling ideas they don’t like. And on Wednesday morning, the G.O.P. cancel mob came for Liz Cheney.After a defiant speech on Tuesday evening, she was purged from House Republican leadership for refusing to echo Donald Trump’s lies about the election and holding him responsible for the deadly riot on Jan. 6 at the Capitol.Her extraordinary address on the House floor came immediately after Republicans finished a series of remarks condemning the cancellation of a long list of characters that included Pepé Le Pew, J.K. Rowling, Miss Piggy, Goya Foods, George Washington, “the My Pillow guy” and kids wearing MAGA hats.Ms. Cheney made only a sly reference to the irony of the moment.“I know the topic, Mr. Speaker, is cancel culture,” she said, taking her place at the lectern. “I have some thoughts about that. But tonight, I rise to discuss freedom and our constitutional duty to protect it.”Republicans were left tying themselves into knots over whether Ms. Cheney had, in fact, been canceled.“Liz Cheney was canceled today for speaking her mind and disagreeing with the narrative that President Trump has put forth,” Representative Ken Buck of Colorado said on Wednesday after her ouster.Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who built his postelection brand by casting himself in his media appearances as a victim of cancellation, disagreed.“It’ll give her, certainly, a media platform,” he said. “I don’t think it’s being canceled in terms of she’s being silenced.”Republican cancel culture isn’t limited to Ms. Cheney. At times, the party seems to be trying to cancel the truth entirely.When Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, was asked about Ms. Cheney’s replacement — Representative Elise Stefanik of New York — and her vote to object to the 2020 election results, he gave a head-spinning answer.“I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election,” Mr. McCarthy replied after leaving a meeting at the White House with President Biden on Wednesday. “I think that is all over with, sitting here with the president today.”Six days earlier, Ms. Stefanik had raised doubts about the integrity of the election in interviews with Trump allies that helped cement her status as the front-runner for Ms. Cheney’s post.In Florida and Texas, Republican officials who once praised the handling of the 2020 election in their states now argue that a widespread lack of faith in the electoral system necessitates broadly restrictive voting laws. That justification is widespread: Lawmakers in at least 33 states have cited low public confidence in election integrity in their public comments as a reason to pass bills that restrict voting.It’s also slightly dizzying: As election experts told my colleague Maggie Astor for an article this week, it was the “fear of fraud” stoked by Republicans with their false claims of voter malfeasance that eroded public trust in the 2020 results.And in a congressional hearing on Wednesday, Republicans cast the riot at the Capitol in January as little more than a normal day, rewriting what many of them personally witnessed while huddling for safety on the House floor. Several downplayed the violence of the day, describing the Trump supporters who attacked the complex as “peaceful patriots.”“Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall, showed people in an orderly fashion in between the stanchions and ropes taking pictures,” Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia said. “If you didn’t know the footage was from Jan. 6, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”Sure, an average tourist stop that involved violently crushing police officers, stealing historic property and urinating in Nancy Pelosi’s office.There are plenty of reasons to believe that despite this effort to rewrite history, voters will not cancel Republicans at the polls in 2022. The party out of power typically picks up seats in a new president’s first midterm elections. Redistricting favors Republicans. And a number of House Democrats are opting against re-election bids, a sign of anxiety about their political prospects.But internal strife is never good for a party’s re-election chances. Nor is staking your political brand on the pet issues of a former president whose never-all-that-healthy favorability ratings have slipped further since leaving office. Voters generally don’t respond well to lies that are easily disproved by video footage and their own memories of a national trauma.The question that worries some Republican strategists as they look toward next year’s midterm elections is not whether the country agrees with their fears of cancellation.It’s whether voters still believe in consequences.Drop us a line!We want to hear from our readers. Have a question? We’ll try to answer it. Have a comment? We’re all ears. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com or message me on Twitter at @llerer.By the numbers: 1.7 million… That’s the number of people who traveled through airports on Sunday, the most since the start of the pandemic.… SeriouslyYou’re all invited to my mask burning party. Just let me dig out my lipstick first.Thanks for reading. On Politics is your guide to the political news cycle, delivering clarity from the chaos.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Elise Stefanik Is Playing a Dangerous Game With Her Career

      by

      The rapid rise of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York to the post of chief pro-Trump messenger in the ongoing battle for the soul of the G.O.P. has sparked a flurry of media reports about how a supposed onetime moderate Republican metamorphosed into a full-fledged fire-breathing far-right conservative.But for those who have been following Ms. Stefanik’s career since she emerged on the political scene in the 2014 battle for an open congressional seat in New York’s North Country, her embrace of Trumpism and elevation on Friday to the No. 3 role in the House G.O.P. don’t come as any big surprise.The reality is that Ms. Stefanik has always been a shape-shifter, driven more by the political zeitgeist than any strongly rooted ideology.Her single-minded drive to succeed has long been well known, starting from her first congressional run, at the age of 30, when she successfully sought to be the youngest woman elected to the House at the time. Her ambition, a trait for which her male colleagues are frequently praised, sparked routine — and frankly sexist — comparisons to Reese Witherspoon’s cutthroat student politician character Tracy Flick in the 1999 film “Election.”Ms. Stefanik has a well-established track record of recognizing opportunities and seizing them, molding herself and her message to fit the moment. When her Democratic predecessor Representative Bill Owens abruptly announced in January 2014 he would not seek re-election, she was already six months into her campaign — positioning herself as a fresh-faced newcomer who would usher a new generation of Republican leaders, especially women, into office.Ms. Stefanik ran as a self-described “independent voice,” even though she was strongly backed by the national G.O.P. — from the House speaker at the time, John Boehner, on down. She espoused conservative positions on a host of litmus test social and fiscal issues: opposing most abortions, the complexity of the tax code, gun control and the Affordable Care Act.She also ran on an anti-establishment platform — declaring that she understood “firsthand that Washington is broken” (sound familiar?) — despite the fact that she was steeped in the establishment. She previously served in George W. Bush’s White House and was a campaign adviser for the former vice-presidential candidate and House Speaker Paul Ryan.Ms. Stefanik’s path to victory in 2014 was made easier by the fact that her Democratic opponent was unusually weak — Aaron Woolf, a documentary filmmaker who was a first-time candidate, like Ms. Stefanik, and a transplant to the district. Ms. Stefanik routinely touts her significant margins of victory in that race and each of her re-election bids, but the reality is that the national Democrats have never truly made ousting her a top priority.Damon Winter/The New York TimesMs. Stefanik criticized Donald Trump on personal and policy fronts in 2016 and in the first years of his administration, but she read the political tea leaves — not only the rightward shift of her district but also the full tilt of the House G.O.P. to a pro-Trump caucus.As she chose the Trump side in the national G.O.P.’s internal power struggle, a similar intraparty battle has been taking place in her home state at a time of political flux. Multiple scandals and investigations plaguing Gov. Andrew Cuomo present the Republican Party with its best chance to regain the Executive Mansion since the last standard-bearer to hold it, George Pataki, departed at the end of 2006.As recently as late April, Ms. Stefanik was reportedly considering a challenge to Mr. Cuomo in 2022, with a senior staff member releasing a statement touting her status as the “most prolific New York Republican fundraiser ever in state history” and insisting she would “immediately be the strongest Republican candidate in both a primary and general gubernatorial election.”Yet Republicans are coalescing around a pro-Trump challenger to Mr. Cuomo, Representative Lee Zeldin of Long Island. And a 2022 race for governor is looking tough for any Republican, given how New York is leaning steadily leftward and democratic socialist candidates are expanding the left’s electoral power by attracting new progressive voters.With Republican registrations dwindling across the state, Ms. Stefanik’s political options back home are increasingly limited. Against that backdrop, a short-term gamble that propels her up the D.C. food chain is a classic Trumpian power grab — one requiring that she cast off the moderate mantle she was perceived to wear.New York has a long history of shape-shifting elected officials who willingly and even eagerly changed their positions — and in some cases, their party affiliations — based on how the political winds were blowing.Mr. Pataki, for example, was elected on an anti-tax, pro-death penalty platform, defeating Democratic incumbent Mario Cuomo, a national liberal icon, in 1994. Over his 12 years in office, Mr. Pataki shifted steadily leftward, embracing everything from gun control to environmental protection to assure his re-election by the increasingly Democratic-dominated electorate.Another prime example: Kirsten Gillibrand. She was once a Blue Dog Democrat infamous for touting how she kept two guns under her bed. But when former Gov. David Paterson tapped her, at the time an upstate congresswoman, to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton, Ms. Gillibrand quickly changed her tune. Critics accused her of flip-flopping, much the way a different set of critics is currently targeting Ms. Stefanik.Ms. Gillibrand at the time said her evolution signaled political courage and a willingness to “fight for what’s right.” Ms. Stefanik, by contrast, has thrown her lot in with a former president who was impeached not once but twice and consistently sought to undermine — if not outright overthrow — the very democratic foundation of this nation. It is no doubt a dangerous game for the up-and-coming congresswoman, and one that could well cut short her once promising political career in a re-election bid in New York. But given her history, was this choice surprising? Not in the least.Liz Benjamin is a former reporter who covered New York politics and government for two decades. She’s now the managing director for Albany at Marathon Strategies, a communications and strategic consulting firm.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      How Republicans Could Steal the 2024 Election

      by

      Erica Newland serves as counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit organization founded in 2017 to fight democratic breakdown in America. Before Joe Biden’s victory was officially confirmed in January, she researched some of the ways that Donald Trump’s allies in Congress might sabotage the process. She came to a harrowing conclusion. More