Well, folks say if you go to dig a grave for one person, dig two. And that’s just what Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik just might have to do. Her fall from MAGA grace was swift; nearly two years to the day after Stefanik “politically scalped” Black Harvard President Claudine Gay, the congresswoman messed around and found out MAGA isn’t so loyal after tucking tail from the New York governor’s race.
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It all started when Stefanik hauled the presidents of the world’s most elite universities before Congress to grill them about the reported rise of antisemitism on their campuses in December 2023.
She cornered Claudine Gay, who had been Harvard University’s first Black president for only six months and two days, about “the University’s response to the Hamas attack on Israel” and “allegations of plagiarism and doubts about her personal academic integrity.”
Stefanik seemed to smell blood in the water, didn’t let up during her viral “yes or no” questioning and Gay was forced to resign just days into 2024, making her tenure the shortest in Harvard’s history. And Stefanik took credit for Gay’s resignation during her victory lap and famously bragged “Two Down,” as if she were collecting Marvel Infiniti Stones.
But while she probably thought she was cementing her status as a right-wing heavyweight, she was actually tying her entire legacy to a moment of public “scalping” that many, especially in the Black community, would never forget or forgive.
“When you set out to destroy a Black woman, you better make sure you’re not standing on the edge of your own grave,” Instagram user @iamnikkifree said. She added on Threads how Stefanik “spent years caping for a man who’s loyal to nobody. Now she’s trying to rewrite the ending like we didn’t watch the whole story unfold.”
Stefanik, ironically a Harvard alumna, had built political momentum and created her brand on “taking people down.” For a minute there, Stefanik looked nearly untouchable. She had transitioned from a moderate Upstate New Yorker to Trump’s fiercest “ultra-MAGA” warrior, but the higher you climb on a ladder built by someone else, the harder the shake feels when they decide to move it.
The former chair of the House Republican Conference was offered the prestigious role of U.N. Ambassador per CNN, but in March 2025, Trump snatched the nomination right back. While the official reason was because the GOP needed her in the House for her vote, other critics slammed her as “racist,” according to The Guardian.
Ibram X Kendi, the founder of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, wrote in part on X: “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism.”
Ousted out of D.C., she set her sights on the New York Governor’s mansion. When a primary challenger emerged, she looked to Mar-a-Lago for a blessing that never came. Trump stayed neutral, the New York Times reported, effectively telling his “biggest ally” to figure it out herself. Her solution? To drop out of the race altogether…but not because she would’ve lost (according to her).
“While we would have overwhelmingly won this primary, it is not an effective use of our time or your generous resources to spend the first half of next year in an unnecessary and protracted Republican primary, especially in a challenging state like New York,” she told supporters, CBS News reported. But that’s not all.
In December, she announced she wasn’t running for her House seat again either.
Two years after digging a grave for Claudine Gay’s career, Elise Stefanik seemingly traded her reputation for a loyalty that turned out to be a mirage, leaving her exactly where she started. But this time, the bridge behind her is burnt to a crisp.
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