Trump selects Rep. Elise Stefanik to be UN ambassador
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(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump selected Rep. Elise Stefanik to be his U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, multiple Trump officials told ABC News.
“I am honored to nominate Chairwoman Elise Stefanik to serve in my Cabinet as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Elise is an incredibly strong, tough, and smart America First fighter,” Trump said in a statement to ABC News.
Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman from New York’s 21st District, was elected last week to her sixth term in the House. Born in 1984, she was at time of her 2014 election the youngest woman to ever win a seat in Congress.
She joined House leadership in May 2021, when she was elected as chair of the House Republican Conference. She replaced former Rep. Liz Cheney in the role after Cheney was denounced by her party for her criticism of Trump in the wake of Jan. 6.
Stefanik came to Congress as a relatively moderate Republican and skipped the 2016 Republican National Convention when Trump first became the party’s presidential nominee.
But she became one of Trump’s most vocal allies, denouncing his first impeachment in 2019 and later challenging the 2020 election results.
In the past year, she played a leading role in House Republicans’ response to antisemitism on college campuses. She grilled university presidents on their handling of campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war, several of whom later stepped down from their roles.
Stefanik, a staunch supporter of Israel, has also repeatedly accused the United Nations of antisemitism. She has called for defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, the chief distributer of aid in Gaza, amid Israel’s allegations that Hamas infiltrated the group.
Stefanik told the New York Post, which first reported developments of Trump’s decision, that she was “truly honored to earn President Trump’s nomination to serve in his Cabinet as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.”
Stefanik said that when speaking with Trump, she “shared how deeply humbled I am to accept his nomination and that I look forward to earning the support of my colleagues in the United States Senate.”
Control of the House remains in the balance as several key races have yet to be called, though Republicans are closing in on the number of seats they need to secure the majority.
Stefanik will have to vacate her seat to become ambassador, though she would not be confirmed for her new role until after the presidential inauguration at the earliest.
New York law mandates that Gov. Kathy Hochul set a special election date via proclamation for within 10 days of the seat’s vacancy — and the election date itself must occur no sooner than 70 but no more than 80 days from the date of proclamation.
Stefanik handedly won reelection last week, beating her Democratic challenger by 24 points. While the New York State Republican Party told ABC News they have “no comment on candidates at this stage,” chairman Ed Cox said he was sure the seat would remain Republican.
“On behalf of the New York Republican Party, I congratulate Elise Stefanik and her team on this well-deserved honor and commend President Trump for making such a wise and thoughtful selection,” Cox said, in part, in a statement.
ABC News’ Alexandra Hutzler, Brittany Shepherd, Lauren Peller and Oren Oppenheim contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — For the better part of 2023 and 2024, President Joe Biden plotted a course to Nov. 5, 2024. As the incumbent, the veteran politician was the presumptive Democratic nominee, clinching enough delegates in March, and locked in a tight race with former President Donald Trump.
But instead of spending Election Day preparing for an evening speech, the president’s daily schedule is empty beyond his daily briefing by aides: No public events.
The president and first lady Jill Biden will spend election night watching the election results in the White House residence with “long time aides and senior White House staff,” according to a White House official.
“The President will receive regular updates on the state of races across the country,” the official added.
Monday night, Biden also held calls with Democratic state party chairs across the country. Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin state Democratic Party, told ABC News’ MaryAlice Parks that the call was “electrifying.”
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” he wrote, in part, in a letter posted on social media. “And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”
Biden created last-minute controversy on Oct. 29 when he seemed to call Trump supporters “garbage” during a campaign call hosted by the nonprofit Voto Latino.
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been,” Biden said.
Trump quickly seized on the comments, saying Biden “meant it,” though the president posted a clarification, saying his comment was about the comedian who made the joke and “referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage — which is the only word I can think of to describe it.”
“His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable. That’s all I meant to say. The comments at that rally don’t reflect who we are as a nation,” Biden said in the post on X.
(WASHINGTON, D.C) — Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in portions of a New York Times podcast interview published Friday, blamed Vice President Kamala Harris’ election loss on President Joe Biden’s late exit from the presidential race and the lack of Democratic primary.
Pelosi told Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a host of “The Interview,” that “had the president [Biden] gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” the paper said in a story about the Thursday interview. The exchange won’t be posted in full until Saturday.
“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” Pelosi said.
“And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different,” she added.
As ABC News has reported, Pelosi worked behind the scenes to urge Biden to drop out of the presidential race following his performance at CNN’s debate.
The Times reported Pelosi also took issue with Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders saying, after Harris’ loss, that “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
“Bernie Sanders has not won,” she said. “With all due respect, and I have a great deal of respect for him, for what he stands for, but I don’t respect him saying that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working-class families.”
The paper reported she suggested that cultural issues were more to blame for Democrats’ losses among working-class voters.
“Guns, God and gays — that’s the way they say it,” she reportedly said. “Guns, that’s an issue; gays, that’s an issue, and now they’re making the trans issue such an important issue in their priorities; and in certain communities, what they call God, what we call a woman’s right to choose.”
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday thanked supporters during a virtual call and vowed that the “fight’s not over” in her first remarks since conceding defeat to President-elect Donald Trump three weeks ago.
“The fight that fueled our campaign, a fight for freedom and opportunity, that did not end on Nov. 5. A fight for the dignity of all people? That did not end on Nov. 5,” Harris said. “A fight for the future, a future in which all people receive the promise of America No. A fight that is about a fight for the ideals of our nation, the ideals that reflect the promise of America That fight’s not over.”
“That fight’s still in us, and it burns strong,” Harris later added. “And I know this is an uncertain time. I’m clear-eyed about that. I know you’re clear-eyed about it, and it feels heavy. And I just have to remind you: Don’t you ever let anybody take your power from you. You have the same power that you did before Nov. 5 and you have the same purpose that you did and you have the same ability to engage and inspire. So don’t ever let anybody or any circumstance take your power from you.”
The grassroots call came immediately after Harris held a call with her campaign’s finance committee. The finance call was attended by more than 400 donors, according to a source familiar.
On the grassroots call, Harris also briefly discussed the historic sum of money that ran her campaign, though she did not address what went wrong as she and her campaign face intense scrutiny over how they could raise that money and lose to Trump so resolutely.
”The outcome of this election, obviously, is not what we wanted. It is not what we work so hard for,” Harris said. “But I am proud of the race we ran. And your role in this was critical. What we did in 107 days was unprecedented.”
Harris said that over the course of those 100-plus days, her campaign raised $1.4 billion, much of which was from grassroot donors: “Nearly 8 million donors contributed an average donation of about $56.”
“You gave all that you could to support our campaign. Because of your efforts — get this — we raised an historic $1.4 billion, almost $1.5 billion from grassroots supporters alone, the most in presidential campaign history,” she said.
“Being involved can make a difference, and that remains true. And that’s one of the pieces that I just want us to please take away — that our fight for freedom and for opportunity and for the promise of America, it included, for example, nearly almost 4 million first-time contributors to our campaign because of the work you did, of helping people know that they can be engaged and that they’re not outside, that they’re inside, that we’re all in this together,” she added.
Harris was joined by her former running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on both calls — a rare appearance from the two, though Harris joined the call from San Francisco and Walz from Minnesota.
Walz on the grassroot donor call also spoke to supporters’ feeling of loss following the election and repeated Harris’ claims that she is not finished with fighting.
“I think all of us saw the possibility, and I know there’s a bit of a feeling of loss because we saw what a real leader looks like,” Walz said.
“She did deliver the best of our better angels,” he added. “She delivered a vision where all of us mattered. She did it with grace and dignity and continues to do that every single day. She is still in this fight. She is doing it every single day. She is not done with her current job. She’s not done being part of it with all of you.”
Harris’ and Walz’s remarks follow some postelection analysis from Harris campaign senior officials during an episode of “Pod Save America” that aired on Tuesday, including some reaction to finances.
Harris campaign Chairwoman Jennifer O’Malley Dillon said that during the cycle, the bulk of the campaign’s spending was used to reach out to “very-hard-to-find voters,” including low-propensity and young voters, while investing across all swing states because polling reflected that each was in play.
“We were trying to, yes, spend more resources on digital … because we’re trying to find young people, we’re trying to find these lower-propensity voters that were tuned out to politics,” O’Malley Dillon said.
“We had some unique things that we had to do in this race that I think were really critical to do early and spent a lot of resources at an earlier stage than we would have to,” she added, noting those resources were spent on both advertising and field programming. “We saw, up until the very end, that … every single state was in such a margin of error. There was nothing that told us we couldn’t play in one of these states.”
During the podcast, O’Malley Dillon and senior campaign adviser David Plouffe accused the Trump campaign of coordinating with its super PACs, a practice that is not legal, but noted the Democrats need to take note and do the same.
“We have to stop playing a different game as it relates to super PACs and the Republicans. Love our Democratic lawyers. I’m tired of it, OK? They coordinate more than we do. I think amongst themselves, I think with the presidential campaign, like I’m just sick and tired, OK? So, we cannot be at a disadvantage,” Plouffe said.
“I think our side was completely mismatched when it came to the ecosystem of Trump and his super PACs and ours,” O’Malley Dillon said.
“We had a super PAC that was helpful, very important and necessary for the work that they did because they were the kind of central recipients of a lot of the funding on our side and they staked a strategy and a plan, and we clearly could see it, and we knew what it was [going] to spend, but we did not have the ability to have people come in with us early. And so every ounce of advertising, every ounce of carrying these strategic imperatives, of defining the vice president and trying to bring down Trump’s numbers, all sat with us as a campaign,” O’Malley Dillon added.
Harris has rarely been seen since she delivered her concession speech at Howard University the day after the election. She attended the Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery a week later and was seen making her first return to the White House a day after that. The vice president also spent the last week on vacation in Hawaii.
Walz, in the month since the election, has remained almost entirely out of the national spotlight, resuming his duties as the governor of Minnesota.
He delivered his final speech of the 2024 campaign cycle on Nov. 8 from suburban Minneapolis, joining a chorus of fellow Democratic governors who said they would protect their states from threats to reproductive freedoms, citizenship and other things under the Trump administration. The former vice presidential nominee also said he’d work to find common ground with swaths of people who voted “for the other side” on Nov. 5.
Harris and Walz remained mostly separate on the campaign trail in the roughly 15 weeks she had him as her running mate. The governor was present at Harris’ concession speech at Howard University the night after the election but did not speak or publicly interact with her. Before that, the two held a joint rally on Oct. 28 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, their first event together since late August, when they were seen together in Savannah, Georgia, on a bus tour.
Prior to that, their last time at a rally together was in Milwaukee for programming linked to the Democratic National Convention in August.
