Former President Donald Trump gave Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) his backing after Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) was removed from House Republican leadership, Raw Story reports. But while she kept her comments away from public ears, she apparently trashed Trump behind closed doors.

He welcomed her to Mar-a-Lago on January 20, 2022, and heaped plenty of praise on her, even suggesting she could be the first female president of the U.S. in six years.

“I want to congratulate Elise on her success,” Trump said, according to The Daily Gazette. “Man, is she moving fast. That means at this rate, she’ll be president in about six years.”

“I haven’t thought about the ’24 race, forget the ’28 race,” he said. “I was really more focused on the ’22 races. Call me crazy. Certainly, [the Mar-a-Lago fundraiser] is going to help her balance sheet, and it’s going to help her with her base.”

But according to a report from The New York Times, Stefanik wasn’t returning the compliments. At least not in public. And in private she was definitely trashing him.

“In private conversations, Ms. Stefanik sometimes conceded to former colleagues and confidants that Mr. Trump was a disaster for the party, though she did not see an upside to publicly criticizing him,” the Times reported. “She vented to confidants that the administration made ‘dumb’ decisions that left Republicans in Congress shouldering the blame — frustrated, for example at Mr. Trump’s on-again, off-again backing of sweeping immigration legislation to grant legal status to unauthorized immigrants broughts to the United States as children, often known as ‘Dreamers.'”

But her adviser told the Times she never said any of that.

Writing for Raw Story, Sarah K. Burriss notes:

“Whether they like Trump or not, Republicans can always copy his frequently used phrase ‘fake news,’ and tell the ex-President the media is lying. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) blamed the media when there were questions about his participation in the Jan. 6 rally. He went on to say that the date was supposed to be a great day of debate on the House floor, but that MAGA-loving crowd eliminated that. A year later, Brooks is claiming that Trump told him to overthrow the government and remove President Joe Biden from office eight months after the inauguration.”

And even Stefanik herself seemed to jump on this bandwagon. While she apparently doesn’t have much praise for Trump now, at one point she had this to say:

“He’s an incredibly important voice in terms of growing the party among the working class.”

But then again she claimed in 2016 that Trump would never become president.

Oops.

Too bad she was wrong.