Styrofoam packing peanuts littered an empty office in the Rayburn House Office Building across from the Capitol on Monday morning as two moving men unpacked a plush couch, an upholstered armchair, lamps and a lucite side table.
Representative Elise Stefanik of New York was back.
This had not been the plan.
Ms. Stefanik, the self-proclaimed “ultra MAGA” warrior whom President Trump nominated to serve as ambassador to the United Nations, had expected to sail through her Senate confirmation vote, which was to be scheduled in early April.
So she boxed up her office. She sent off her longtime chief of staff, Patrick Hester, to start a new job at the State Department, where he ended up working for seven days. She completed a “farewell tour” of her district, checked out schools for her son in New York City and was looking forward to moving into the $15 million Manhattan penthouse that comes with what is considered a fairly cushy job.
Instead, Ms. Stefanik was back here on Capitol Hill amid the peanuts, contemplating her next steps and pinning most of the blame for what happened on Speaker Mike Johnson.
To detractors, the president’s decision to pull Ms. Stefanik’s nomination was something akin to karmic comeuppance for a Republican lawmaker who was elected as a moderate but tacked unapologetically to the MAGA right, coming to personify the opportunistic shape-shifting that has gripped her party in the age of Mr. Trump.
Ms. Stefanik’s plight seemed to crystallize in one succinct cautionary tale the limits of loyalty in the MAGA universe. Even one of the president’s most stalwart defenders, an effective ally since his first impeachment trial, ultimately did not get what she had long been promised.
To her supporters, however, the implosion of her cabinet dream was a gift in disguise, one that proved her mettle as someone willing to stomach a personal setback for the good of the team and set her up for something potentially better down the line. The result has been a new level of admiration from the president and among top G.O.P. donors, who are now encouraging her to enter the New York governor’s race for 2026.
Ms. Stefanik, for her part, is taking the long view.
“Resilience is one of my strengths,” she said in a brief interview. “We have bounced back pretty quick. The reality is almost everyone prominent in American politics has a twist and turn.”
What has completely disintegrated since her return, however, is her relationship with Mr. Johnson, a dynamic that sets up a clash between two Trump loyalists and leaders in the House that could turn ugly as the speaker tries to pass the president’s domestic policy agenda.
Ms. Stefanik is doing little to hide the fact that she finds Mr. Johnson to be dishonest. On Tuesday, she publicly called him a liar after he told reporters he was “having conversations” with her and Representative Mike Lawler, another New York Republican flirting with a run for governor, about that race.
“This is not true,” she wrote on social media. “I have had no conversations with the Speaker regarding the Governor’s race.”
The post prompted an immediate phone call from Mr. Johnson, who then corrected himself publicly.
“Elise is one of my closest friends,” he told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday. “We haven’t specifically talked about her running for governor. She’s coming in to visit with me and it’s all good.”
Behind the scenes, however, the relationship has collapsed.
After Ms. Stefanik’s nomination was pulled, the speaker promised her a position back at the leadership table — in the last Congress, she served as conference chair, the No. 4 Republican — and said publicly that she would also return to the Intelligence Committee. That would require removing a Republican from the panel, to keep the number of Democrats and Republicans even.
Privately, according to three people familiar with the exchange, Mr. Johnson told her that he was considering removing another Republican — either Representative French Hill of Arkansas or Representative Pat Fallon of Texas — to make a space for Ms. Stefanik.
But Mr. Johnson has not done so or even discussed it with them, and has yet to resolve the issue of how to return Ms. Stefanik to the committee.
In early April, when the White House called Ms. Stefanik to whip her vote on the president’s budget, she expressed frustration on a three-way call with Mr. Trump and Mr. Johnson that the speaker had yet to deliver on any of the promises he had made to her.
Under pressure from the White House, Mr. Johnson called her and told her he had a lot of angry members to deal with, according to two people familiar with the exchange.
Ms. Stefanik, who was once close with Mr. Johnson and spent part of election night with him in his hometown, Shreveport, La., pushed back and told him bluntly, “I’m the angriest one.”
It was only after that heated conversation, and at a moment when she was a needed vote on the budget, that Mr. Johnson finally announced her as the new “chairwoman of House Republican Leadership.”
Before the election, Kevin McCarthy, the former speaker, warned her that she could face headwinds in getting out of the House if Republicans managed to keep control with a tight margin.
After they did just that, it was immediately clear that poaching House Republicans for cabinet positions was going to be dicey.
After former Representatives Matt Gaetz and Michael Waltz of Florida both resigned to pursue positions in the Trump administration, Ms. Stefanik was stuck in a sort of purgatory.
“If we get the budget resolution passed this week, which is the plan, then it’s possible that Elise Stefanik would go ahead and move on to her assignment at the U.N. as the ambassador there,” Mr. Johnson said in February, a blunt acknowledgment of the political reality of his slim majority. “I had 220 Republicans and 215 Democrats, and then President Trump began to cull the herd.”
Ms. Stefanik was always aware of the math problem, people close to her said. But her senior aides now blame Mr. Johnson for avoiding a direct conversation with her about his concerns over the vote margin. Instead, they said, he quietly tried to delay her hearing and poison the well against her nomination along with other secretive moves to slow walk it while saying he supported it.
Mr. Johnson has maintained that he did nothing to stand in her way. A spokesman for Mr. Johnson, Taylor Haulsee, said the timing for Ms. Stefanik’s confirmation was “a matter for the White House and the Senate to resolve” and that the speaker was supportive of whatever they decided.
Still, the Republican Conference is already a place of little trust among members, who often assume that their colleagues are trying to stab them in the back. And the blowup between Ms. Stefanik and Mr. Johnson has led to more widespread distrust of the speaker, according to other lawmakers who did not want to speak on the record about a fight between colleagues.
For now, Ms. Stefanik is pulling in campaign donations because of what her allies are framing as a selfless decision to be a team player. She has $10 million in cash on hand, aides said.
After Mr. Trump officially pulled her nomination at the end of March, Newt Gingrich, the former speaker, called Ms. Stefanik to remind her that when cabinet nominees implode, it is typically because their own issues have jeopardized their confirmation chances. In this case, it wasn’t really about her, he said.
Careers are long, he assured her, and after all, she was only 40 years old.
Mr. McCarthy has also been counseling her to keep things in perspective.
“My first advice is get up back on the horse, go on TV right away, set the stage as it is,” he said he told her. “The party needs her; she is such a strong voice. No one’s going to remember this next week. She’s been in leadership longer than the speaker has.”
The president has privately and publicly promised Ms. Stefanik a position in his administration down the line. And she is now free to appeal on television, which she could not do while her nomination was pending.
“In many ways, this has been more freeing in opening multiple paths for me to serve New Yorkers stronger than ever,” she said in the interview.
Winning a governor’s race in New York State is a long shot for any Republican candidate, but donors and operatives pressing Ms. Stefanik to enter see it as a win-win for her to challenge Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul. Running in New York would earn her plenty of attention and could set her up for something else down the line. Some of her allies point to the case of Lee Zeldin, who lost the New York governor’s race in 2022 and landed as Mr. Trump’s E.P.A. administrator.
Not everyone wants her to leave Washington.
“You’re calling about the future speaker of the House?” Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser and influential podcast host, said when asked to speak about Ms. Stefanik. “I’m advising her to keep all options open right now. She’s in a perfect position. Trump just think she walks on water right now. She was a trooper. She’s rock solid.”
“I haven’t made a decision yet,” Ms. Stefanik said of the governor’s race, “but I am honored for the tremendous outpouring of support from voters across the state.”
Alex DeGrasse, a longtime adviser to Ms. Stefanik, said that during her 10 years in Congress, Ms. Stefanik has consistently won independents and over 20 percent of Democrats.
“She has the largest donor base of any Republican in New York ever,” he said. “So of course, she’s taking a strong look at it.”
