Elise Stefanik Is the First Casualty of the Great Trump Disillusionment
Elise Stefanik Is the First Casualty of the Great Trump Disillusionment
March 28, 2025
By David Firestone
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/opinion/elise-stefanik-democrats-trump.html
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The decision to drop Representative Elise Stefanik’s nomination as ambassador to the United Nations could not have been an easy one for a White House that is loath to acknowledge any misstep, and it was clearly a humiliation for Stefanik. She had already begun a social-media farewell retrospective for her upstate New York district and stepped down from a leadership position, and as recently as Wednesday she posted a photo of herself with people she presumptuously called her “cabinet colleagues.”
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The decision to eject Stefanik from the bus was due not just to House Republicans’ needing her vote in the next few weeks, however. If that were the case, Trump could have kept her in the House until after the budget reconciliation votes this spring and then sent her to the U.N.
Instead, it was most likely because Republicans knew they might struggle to keep her congressional seat in a special election. The warning signs are everywhere: As Nate Cohn of The Times wrote Friday morning, Trump has already blown his post-election honeymoon; more Americans disapprove of his performance than approve of it. A Democrat flipped an Iowa State Senate seat in January, and in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, another Democrat startled the political world by winning a State Senate district that Trump took by 15 points last November. Politico reports that Republicans are worried about an upcoming special congressional election in a deep-red Florida district.
It’s not that voters are suddenly drawn to the Democratic Party, which has yet to coalesce around a message or even a strategy. But as a series of raucous town halls around the country have demonstrated, voters are both angered and disillusioned by the administration’s early priorities. There are dozens of possible reasons: Consumer prices have yet to go down, and Trump’s inexplicable love of tariffs is likely to push them up further. The stock market has sunk, along with the retirement savings of many voters, and the White House seems unperturbed by the prospect of a recession. The administration is doing real damage to middle-class foundations like Social Security, and red states will pay the heaviest price.
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David Firestone is a former member of the New York Times editorial board and was a reporter and editor for the Washington bureau and the Metropolitan and National desks.
The White House seems oblivious to a growing sense of anger and fear among voters about the Mango Jebus's polices. however there is a clear signs his team is well aware he is not playing well to US voters.
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