Good morning, rulers! So glad to be back after some R&R. Thanks to Sophie Gardner for your help putting this newsletter together every week.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) has been on a trajectory the past few years from White House staffer to top House Republican leadership — an arc that has no doubt been aided by her MAGA conversion during the same time. Before her election in 2014, Stefanik was an advocate for a more diverse, inclusive GOP. Shortly after her election, she was skeptical of Donald Trump and worried that his influence in the party would undermine a newer, more welcoming Republican Party. But sometime around the first Trump impeachment hearings, when she defended the president as the lone Republican woman on the House intel committee, something shifted. She began to embrace the then-president. He began to tweet praise of her, too. Soon, she was not only embracing Trump’s policy positions but also mimicking his messaging tactics, including errant capitalization and casual references to conspiracy theories in public statements. In May, she attacked “the White House, House Dems, & usual pedo grifters,” apparently a reference to the pedophilia element of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Politics reporters have been puzzling over this change for years, but two of the most comprehensive looks at Stefanik and her MAGA shift were published in late December. Washington Post reporter Ruby Cramer published hers on December 23;New York Times reporter Nicholas Confessore followed with his a week later. I took a look at both of the deep dives, which both contradict and complement each other, to mine for answers to the question that has hovered over one of the most powerful women in politics for years: What happened to Elise Stefanik?

A driving ambition: Both articles went back to formative moments in Stefanik’s young life, but the Post piece focused more on her high school years, while the Times piece focused more on college. In both chapters of her life, though, the reporters found former friends and acquaintances who were struck by her ambition. “It’s not how smart you are. It’s how hard you work,” her dad told her growing up, according to the Post profile.

In the Times article, sources struggled to recall deeply held political beliefs but remembered the other qualities that seemed to propel her. “Most recalled, instead, her generic loyalty to the Republican Party, her intense competitiveness and her unerring ability to absorb what she thought people around her wanted and to reflect it back at them,” Confessore writes. “Eager to advance, skilled at impressing more powerful figures with her intelligence and work ethic, she has spent years embedding herself wherever the action seems to be at the time.”

“She was running for something from the second she got there,” Clarke Tucker, a former Harvard classmate, said.

When did she make the leap to Trump supporter? The Times article highlights one moment where Stefanik’s feelings toward Trump apparently began to shift: right around the time of the Access Hollywood tape news cycle. When news of the recording broke, Stefanik drafted a statement demanding Trump drop out of the race, according to a source in the piece. But a week later, she told news media at a local debate that she was supporting the party’s nominee — and quickly exited before questions could be asked.

After Trump’s election, the piece continued, it became harder and harder for Stefanik to continue as an establishment figure during the Trump makeover of the Republican Party. When Trump agreed to make an appearance with her at a military base in her district in 2018, she received the kind of applause she was not used to. At that event, she also delivered news of the defense bill, including an item she helped write which would increase support for military spouses — and the feeling of having the president behind her agenda was powerful, according to the article. “It was a taste of the influence she had always imagined having,” Confessore writes.

At this time, though, she was still thinking of other ways to advance, reportedly asking an acquaintance who worked for Pete Buttigieg, then running in the primary campaign, if she could be considered for a cabinet job if Buttigieg were elected.

Then came the impeachment hearings in 2019, when her spirited defense of the president and attacks on Democrats in the proceedings earned her the attention of Fox News and praise from Trump himself.

Then came WinRed, the small-donor platform founded by former Trump campaign operatives. Stefanik’s team opened an account on the platform after the second day of impeachment hearings — and she watched the money pour in, according to Confessore. Armed with money from the MAGA base and praise from Trump, she rapidly ascended in the president’s inner circle — and her transformation only accelerated.

The Post piece pinpoints a different hinge moment, with some input from Stefanik herself. When Stefanik started scoring wins, Cramer writes, the media went on the attack — and Stefanik’s shift sped up.

“The more effective she felt she was, the more she felt attacked. And the more attacked she felt, the further the change took hold,” Cramer writes. “’The smears and the meltdown of the media,’ she said, ‘sort of began this chapter.’”

Stefanik’s future plans: Both articles highlighted Stefanik’s continued commitment to Trump and the possibility that she has 2024 ambitions. On Nov. 11, Stefanik became the senior-most official to endorse the former president.

But both writers were also less sure about Trump’s take on Stefanik.

“’The president likes and appreciates Stefanik,’ according to a person who speaks regularly to both Stefanik and Trump,” Cramer writes, “but he doesn’t mention her often.”

Confessore’s kicker was even more stinging.

“Within the former president’s inner circle, according to two people close to Mr. Trump, stories casting Ms. Stefanik as a potential running mate are regarded as clumsy plants by her own team, and inspire bemusement and mockery,” he writes. “Mr. Trump liked her, they said, and liked watching her defend him. But even he didn’t trust her.”

“How Justice Kagan lost her battle as a consensus builder,” by Josh Gerstein for POLITICO: “Speaking at a small university in Rhode Island earlier this year, Justice Elena Kagan committed an act of Supreme Court heresy.

“For years, justices have told the same anecdotes to assure the public that — despite the court’s increasingly polarized decisions in high-profile cases— the powerful jurists are committed to putting the best interests of the institution ahead of their personal agendas. …

“But Kagan, the Democratic appointee who has sought to be a consensus-builder for much of her legal career, broke sharply with the court’s tradition of downplaying disagreements and emphasizing off-the-bench bonhomie. In her speech at Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I., last September, she even went so far as to argue that these mundane staples of the justices’ public patter may actually now be obscuring the dysfunction on the nation’s highest court.”

“Biden aides struggle to respond to Taliban’s latest curbs on women,” by Nahal Toosi for POLITICO: “The Biden administration is grappling with how to respond to new Taliban restrictions on women’s rights in Afghanistan, knowing that punishing the ruling Islamists risks rupturing the limited relationship the United States has with them.

“The discussion among administration officials is fluid and positions have varied depending on the proposed penalties, a current administration official and a former U.S. official familiar with the talks said. Those proposals include new economic sanctions and tighter bans on Taliban leaders’ travels abroad, as well as limiting certain types of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan.”

“Justice Department clears Postal Service to carry abortion drugs into red states,” by Josh Gerstein and Alice Miranda Ollstein for POLITICO.

Read more here.

“The Pelosi Era Comes to a Close,” by Carl Hulse for the New York Times: “With a popular Democratic president in the White House and big Democratic majorities in Congress, an emboldened Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2009 pushed through a major climate change measure despite warnings of a political backlash. …

“It was a rare miscalculation. Her immediate future turned out to be in the minority as Democrats were crushed in the 2010 midterm elections by a public recoil to the climate bill, which died in the Senate, and a health care bill that was signed into law.

“Ms. Pelosi refused to throw in the towel and step aside. She remained head of the defeated House Democrats and rose again in 2019 as a more pragmatic speaker, one who had learned from both her failures and successes and would preside over a period of remarkable legislative productivity. In the process, she sealed a legacy as the most powerful woman in American politics to date.”

“First woman elected Massachusetts governor sworn in,” by Steve LeBlanc for the Associated Press.

“South Carolina Constitution Includes Abortion Right, State Supreme Court Rules,” by Kate Zernike for the New York Times: “The South Carolina Constitution provides a right to privacy that includes the right to abortion, the state’s Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, saying ‘the decision to terminate a pregnancy rests upon the utmost personal and private considerations imaginable.’

“The decision overturns the state’s law banning abortions after roughly the sixth week of pregnancy. More broadly, it is a victory for abortion rights in the South, where states have severely restricted access.”

“Barbara Walters, a First Among TV Newswomen, Is Dead at 93,” by Alessandra Stanley for the New York Times.

Read more here.

Reilly Knecht is now senior account executive at AdFero. She most recently was studio director at the NRSC. … Naofa Noll is now director of operations for Rep. Carol Miller (R-W.Va.). She most recently was director of external relations at the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue. (h/t Playbook) …

Teresa Carlson will be the next president and chief commercial officer at Flexport . She was most recently corporate vice president and executive-in-residence at Microsoft and is an Amazon Web Services alum. (h/t Politico Influence)