Vice President Stefanik? She’s the fourth highest-ranking Republican in Congress. She just faced down the presidents of Ivy League colleges. She was elected in one of the most Democratic states in the union. She’s the only major Republican still defending President Trump. 

And she’s about to show up in New Hampshire. 

Ms. Stefanik hasn’t declared that she will be Mr. Trump’s running mate, but the increasingly close friendship between the two of them raises the question of whether her loyalty to the former president will soon be rewarded with a plum political position. While other Republicans are reluctant to endorse Mr. Trump, Ms. Stefanik, as one of the youngest members of the House, is seen as a rising star in his orbit and the GOP at large.

“I’m so proud to join my friend President Donald Trump on the campaign trail in New Hampshire on behalf of #NY21 and America!” Ms. Stefanik said in a post on X Wednesday night. She added: “6 days until victory in NH! America will elect President Trump the next President to Save America.”

“She’s a killer,” Mr. Trump said during a late December dinner at Mar-a-Lago when Ms. Stefanik was suggested as a potential running mate. That’s what a person at the dinner told NBC News. Several people close to the former president also told the network that Mr. Trump and his allies have eyed Ms. Stefanik as a potential vice presidential pick since early December.

That was when she skewered the leaders of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during a Congressional hearing on antisemitism. Ms. Stefanik has since been thrown into the national spotlight as a prominent critic of her alma mater, Harvard. The Committee on Education and the Workforce, on which she serves, is vigorously probing that campus and others accused of harboring antisemitism.

Ms. Stefanik is increasingly seen as a leader within her party, a Trump loyalist while many Republicans disapprove of him returning as the GOP’s figurehead. She was the first member of GOP leadership to endorse his 2024 campaign. “Republican voters determine who is the leader of the Republican Party,” Ms. Stefanik said in a statement in November of 2022, “and it’s very clear President Trump is the leader of the Republican party.”

Ms. Stefanik’s profile has swelled since she entered the U.S. House in 2014 at age 30 — at the time the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. In November, her run for House Conference Chair, a position she has held since 2021, was challenged by Congressman Byron Donalds, who appears to prefer Governor DeSantis as an alternative to Mr. Trump in 2024. Yet House Republicans elected Ms. Stefanik in a firm 144-74 victory. 

Ms. Stefanik also easily won her reelection to represent New York’s 21st Congressional District in November. She has received the unanimous backing of the Republican county chairs while campaigning for another two-year term. In August, she was reported to have raised $100 million for her party to secure key swing districts in New York. 

As a sign of her loyalty to Mr. Trump, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” earlier this month, she called the January 6 Capitol Hill rioters “hostages”  and expressed concerns about “election integrity.”

The comments have prompted a Democratic House colleague, Daniel Goldman of New York, to call for Ms. Stefanik to be censured for what the New York Times describes as “peddling voter fraud conspiracy theories that fueled” the January 6 breach of the Capitol “and supporting rioters who violently threatened members of Congress.” Ms. Stefanik was one of 147 Republicans in Congress who voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election on January 6.

In the early days of Mr. Trump’s first term in office, however, Ms. Stefanik wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about him. She criticized the president’s rhetoric as lacking “substance,” disapproved of his border policies, and asserted during the 2016 Republican primary that he would not become the party’s nominee. Her tune changed after the 2020 election, though, as Ms. Stefanik campaigned to replace Congresswoman Liz Cheney as the House GOP conference chair.

Ms. Stefanik’s tenure in Congress has not been long — but political inexperience need not come in the way of a successful White House campaign. President Lincoln had only served as an Illinois Congressman for one term before becoming President. Five US presidents, including Mr. Trump, entered the Oval Office without ever being elected to public office.

If Ms. Stefanik entered the White House as Mr. Trump’s vice president, she’d be the same age as President Nixon was — 40 — when he served as President Eisenhower’s vice president, and just a year or two younger than other, relatively young vice presidents, including Dan Quayle, Theodore Roosevelt, and John C. Calhoun. 

“I’ve been underestimated from the beginning,” Ms. Stefanik said in an August interview in her upstate New York district while campaigning to secure a Republican win in 2024. “That’s been a trend my entire time in Congress.”