WASHINGTON — 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.

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York was back.

This had not been the plan. Stefanik, the self- proclaimed “ultra MAGA” warrior whom President Donald 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, Stefanik was back here on Capitol Hill amid the peanuts, contemplating her next steps and pinning most of the blame for what happened on House Speaker Mike Johnson.

To detractors, the president’s decision to pull 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 Trump.

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’d 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 GOP donors, who are now encouraging her to enter the New York governor’s race for 2026.

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 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.

Stefanik is doing little to hide the fact that she finds Johnson to be dishonest. On Tuesday, she publicly called him a liar after he told reporters he was “having conversations” with her and Rep. 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 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 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, Johnson told her that he was considering removing another Republican — either Rep. French Hill of Arkansas or Rep. Pat Fallon of Texas — to make a space for Stefanik.

But Johnson has not done so or even discussed it with them, and has yet to resolve the issue of how to return Stefanik to the committee.

In early April, when a White House official called Stefanik to whip her vote on the president’s budget, she expressed frustration that Johnson had yet to deliver on any of the promises he had made to her on an earlier three-way call with Trump following the withdrawal of her nomination.

Under pressure from the White House, Johnson called her and told her he had a lot of angry members to deal with, according to two people familiar with the exchange.

Stefanik, who was once close with Johnson and spent part of election night with him in his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana, 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 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 Reps. Matt Gaetz and Mike Waltz of Florida resigned to pursue positions in the Trump administration, 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,” 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.”

Stefanik was always aware of the math problem, people close to her said. But her senior aides now blame 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.

Johnson, who said publicly that Stefanik would make a great ambassador, has maintained that he did nothing to stand in her way.

The president has privately and publicly promised Stefanik a position in his administration down the line. And she is now free to appear 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.