Elise Stefanik Is the First Casualty of the Great Trump Disillusionment

President Trump and his crew may appear oblivious to the growing sense of discomfort and fear among voters about the administration’s excesses, but there was a clear sign on Thursday that his team is well aware the first two months of his term are not playing well outside the MAGA cave.

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.”

But all her fawning subservience to the Trump agenda went for naught. “There are others that can do a good job at the United Nations,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, demonstrating yet again that loyalty to his cause is easily disregarded when there are more pressing and self-serving matters at stake.

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.