The MAGA field is littered with failed kiss-asses

I won’t deny reading this story about the Fall of Stefanik with considerable pleasure:

Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, was willing to be the team player with the stiff upper lip.

But everyone has their limits.

After a series of public humiliations delivered to her by President Trump — his yanking of her nomination to serve as U.N. ambassador; his Oval Office love fest with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, during which the president undercut her; and the coup de grâce of his refusal to endorse her in the Republican primary for governor — Ms. Stefanik on Friday afternoon announced she’d had enough.

She was done with the governor’s race, for which she had raised more than $12 million from donors who may now be frustrated with her decision to pull out. And done with Congress altogether: She said she would not seek re-election next year.

Now, at war with Speaker Mike Johnson, privately livid at Mr. Trump and deeply frustrated with her job in Congress, it is not clear whether Ms. Stefanik even has any interest in finishing her term, although people close to her said she planned to stay until the end of her term.

“My most important title is Mom,” she wrote in a long post on social media on Friday.

People close to Ms. Stefanik said she was not upset with the president, noting that the two had spoken multiple times, including in person, over the past few weeks, conversations in which they saw eye to eye about Ms. Stefanik’s decision and her future.

To detractors, Ms. Stefanik’s shoddy treatment by the president amounted to karmic comeuppance for a Republican lawmaker who came to Congress as a Harvard-educated moderate but tacked unapologetically to the MAGA right when it suited her political purposes. They said she personified the opportunistic shape-shifting that gripped her party.

“My greatest disappointment is Elise Stefanik, who should know better,” Representative Don Beyer, Democrat of Virginia, said in an interview last year, describing her as a one-time friend. “She went off the deep end.”

Her tumble from grace crystallized the limits of MAGA loyalty and the risks of building a political identity around Mr. Trump, who can turbocharge or torpedo a career — sometimes both. Once one of the president’s most stalwart defenders, Ms. Stefanik, who referred to herself as “ultra MAGA” and styled herself after Mr. Trump, ultimately found herself undermined by him and politically adrift.

For every Marco Rubio who can endure humiliation to obtain actual power there are dozens of people like this.