'The politics of ugliness': Elise Stefanik buried by Bill McKibben for choosing the path of Trump

In a column for the New Yorker, noted author and environmentalist Bill McKibben shamed Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) for willfully embracing the politics of Donald Trump in her quest for power after being elected to Congress as a moderate from a safe red district.

Echoing comments made by Stefanik's conservative Harvard college mentor who deplored her decision to embrace "power without principle ,"McKibben piled on by accusing her of adopting the "politics of ugliness" so that she could hasten her rise to the number three Republican in the House.

After noting that Stefanik has her eye on possibly becoming the House Speaker after the midterms, leap-frogging current House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and pointing out that Trump has suggested she could be president in six years, McKibben called her out by writing, "Stefanik, who was educated at Harvard and began her career as a moderate Republican, has since learned both rhetoric and style from Trump, adopting his attitude as her own," and then adding, "Yet her district is by no means a right-wing stronghold, or at least it wasn’t before Trump emerged: it voted for Barack Obama twice. That would suggest that Stefanik did not need to become an aggressive ideologue in order to hold her seat, making her political calculation all the sadder."

Writing that he lived in the district she represents for a number of years, he lamented, "...this Trumpiness is helping Stefanik raise a lot of cash—and turning her into a national figure, a fact that’s too bad for America, and particularly for the district she represents."

READ MORE: Trump adviser Peter Navarro gets indicted on two contempt of Congress charges

Pointing out her habit of tweeting out unfounded accusations about the Democrats and President Joe Biden, the author wrote, "Republican Party politics in the twenty-first century have devolved into an attack on the national limbic system, using fear as the chief tool," after suggesting she "engages in other far-right role play, too."

"If, however, the Stefaniks of the G.O.P. let ambition override both moral and practical sense, we’ll end up in a nation where every transition becomes a precipice, every change an attack, and every new accent an imposition, rather than something that can make us—in all senses of the word—a little richer," he concluded.

You can read more here.