Elise Stefanik, the election-denying self-described “Ultra-MAGA” Republican rep from the 21st district of New York, talked upstate rubes into electing her in 2014 by touting her self-made humble beginnings. But turns out the construction of her image is shoddier than Carmela Soprano’s spec house, and the Daily Beast has the receipts!
When she was running for her seat back in 2014, she snarked to Democrat rival Aaron Wolf that he was “the only multimillionaire” in the race. “I’m proud of my experience working in my family’s small business. We sell plywood.” She said of her parents, “they risked, really, everything we had as a family to start a business from scratch, and it was very, very difficult,” she told C-SPAN host Steve Scully, evoking images of little Elise dressed in a hand-me-down flour sack, dining on gruel.
But not exactly. Her parents started their company in 1991 with a Small Business Administration-guaranteed loan worth $335,000, or about $750k today, even though they owned a second home in Lake Champlain. Their business was successful enough that they put Elise through private school at Albany Academy for Girls (where she was a classmate of Cuomo-administration toxic avenger Melissa DeRosa), and bought Elise a $1.2 million townhouse on Independence Ave in DC when she was 26 years old, which is surely worth a shit ton more 12 years later. So much bootstrapping!
When the existence of the townhouse was uncovered in 2014, Stefanik told the Adirondack Daily Enterprise that she was a minority investor, and that the company is in no way affiliated with her family’s business. Turns out, according to the DC Recorder of Deeds, shocker, that was a big fat lie! The only other “investors” in the house were Stefanik family members, who in 2016 refinanced the home, “splitting off a six-figure chunk of the mortgage to an entity called SKMM Properties, which bears her parents’ and brother’s initials.” Mmm, that silver spoon sure is delicious!
A decade ago, Stefanik ran as a moderate, condemning Donald Trump’s attack on the family of a Muslim soldier who died in Iraq, his proposed Muslim immigration ban, and his pussy-grabbing tape. In a message obtained by the New York Times, she called him a “whack job.” But he’s a whack job her constituents love, and in New York State, the farther North you go, the deeper South you get.
Though she voted against certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election, on January 6 she did condemn the insurrection:
This is truly a tragic day for America. I fully condemn the dangerous violence and destruction that occurred today at the United States Capitol. Americans have a Constitutional right to protest and freedom of speech, but violence in any form is absolutely unacceptable and anti-American. The perpetrators of this un-American violence and destruction must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
But that sanity didn’t last long, and her lip service to principles was quickly subsumed by the lip service of kissing Trump’s droopy ass. Two years later she was teaming up with MTG to “un-impeach” Trump, as if that is a thing, has taken to calling the January 6 poop-smearers “hostages” and “political prisoners,” and has been screaming about how Hunter Biden opened the southern border with his dong. She pushed great replacement theory narratives, called her Democratic co-workers “pedos,” and slobbered on “Meet The Press” how honored she would be to work in the Trump administration.
Here’s her ass hiding from those “hostages” on January 6, BTW.
Will the constituents who support her care that she’s a nepo baby? Do they care that she’s been too busy obstructing and complaining to deliver one dingdonged thing for her district? That she’s a sellout who will say whatever thing seems politically opportune at the moment? Probably not. But let us point out that she’s a lying liar anyway.