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    Liz Cheney urges US supreme court to rule quickly on Trump’s immunity claim

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    The former congresswoman and co-chair of the House January 6 committee Liz Cheney is urging the US supreme court to rule quickly on Donald Trump’s claim that he has immunity from prosecution for acts he committed while president – so that his 2020 election interference trial can begin before the 2024 election this November.“If delay prevents this Trump case from being tried this year, the public may never hear critical and historic evidence developed before the grand jury, and our system may never hold the man most responsible for January 6 to account,” Cheney wrote in an opinion article for the New York Times, published on Monday.Trump faces four federal election subversion charges, arising from his attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, fueled by his lie about electoral fraud and culminating in the deadly attack on Congress by extremist supporters, urged on by the then president, on 6 January 2021.Cheney warned: “I know how Mr Trump’s delay tactics work,” adding: “Mr Trump believes he can threaten and intimidate judges and their families, assert baseless legal defenses and thereby avoid accountability altogether.”The special counsel Jack Smith, prosecuting the case against Trump, has urged the court to reject Trump’s immunity claim as “an unprecedented assault on the structure of our government”.Cheney, a Republican and the daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney, was ousted from her congressional seat, representing Wyoming, after she became one of the strongest voices from the GOP demanding Trump be held accountable for inciting and failing to stop the January 6 insurrection.She has since said she would prefer Democrats to win in the 2024 elections over members of her own party as it has become more extreme, because she feared the US was “sleepwalking into dictatorship” and that another Trump White House presented a tangible “threat” to American democracy.Cheney said in her New York Times article: “The special counsel’s indictment lays out Mr Trump’s detailed plan to overturn the 2020 election … [and that] senior advisers in the White House, Justice Department and elsewhere repeatedly warned that Mr Trump’s claims of election fraud were false and that his plans for January 6 were illegal.”She added: “If Mr Trump’s tactics prevent his January 6 trial from proceeding in the ordinary course, he will also have succeeded in concealing critical evidence from the American people – evidence demonstrating his disregard for the rule of law, his cruelty on January 6 and the deep flaws in character that make him unfit to serve as president. The Supreme Court should understand this reality and conclude without delay that no immunity applies here.”The court’s nine-member bench leans very conservative, especially after Trump nominated three rightwing justices while he was president. The court hears oral arguments in the immunity case on Thursday.Trump and his team urged the court to find that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts they take in office and therefore dismiss the federal criminal case. More

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      Liz Cheney says ex-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel ‘enabled’ Trump’s ‘criminality’

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      The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “enabled criminality and depravity” with her support for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the former congresswoman Liz Cheney said as controversy swirled over McDaniel’s new career in media.“Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome,” Cheney, a Republican who was vice-chair of the House January 6 committee, wrote on social media.“She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”McDaniel – a member of the powerful Republican Romney family who reportedly dropped the name at Trump’s behest – became RNC chair in 2017.In February 2022, the RNC said Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the other anti-Trump Republican on the committee that investigated the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, were engaged in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”.Cheney lost her seat in Congress later that year. Kinzinger chose to retire.McDaniel was eased out of the RNC last month, to be replaced in part by Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law.McDaniel’s move to NBC was announced last week. On Sunday, she appeared on Meet the Press, the flagship politics show.Characterising her support for Trump’s election fraud lies as “taking one for the whole team”, she said she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse” and that Biden won “fair and square” – but still claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [with battleground state elections] in 2020”.A former Meet the Press host, Chuck Todd, issued an on-air protest.“There’s a reason why there’s a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this,” he told the current host, Kristin Welker, “because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination”.Monday brought more reports of staff discontent – and its open expression by two of the network’s biggest names.On Morning Joe, the MSNBC show that often sets the Washington agenda, co-host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, said: “We’ve been inundated with calls this weekend, as have most people connected with this network, about NBC’s decision to hire” McDaniel.“We learned about the hiring when we read about it in the press on Friday. We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons including, but not limited to, as lawyers might say, Miss McDaniel’s role in Donald Trump’s fake elector scheme and her pressuring election officials to not certify election results while Donald Trump was on the phone.”Scarborough’s wife and co-host, Mika Brzezinski, said: “To be clear, we believe NBC news should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage.“But it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier. And we hope NBC will reconsider its decision. It goes without saying that she will not be a guest on Morning Joe in her capacity as a paid contributor. Here’s why.”There followed a compilation of McDaniel’s comments about the 2020 election, which Brzezinski called “exhausting”.Disquiet was also reported over McDaniel reportedly being paid $300,000.“Across MSNBC they have been cutting contributors,” an unnamed host told Politico. “So everyone’s like, what the fuck? You found 300 for her?” More

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      Trump calls for Liz Cheney to be jailed for investigating him over Capitol attack

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      Donald Trump has renewed calls for Liz Cheney – his most prominent Republican critic – to be jailed for her role in investigating his actions during the January 6 Capitol attack launched by his supporters in 2021, a move that is bound to raise further fears that the former president could persecute his political opponents if given another White House term.In posts on Sunday on his Truth Social platform, Trump said other members of the congressional committee that investigated the Capitol attack – and concluded he had plotted to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat to Joe Biden – should be imprisoned.Those statements followed Trump’s previous comments that he would act like a “dictator” on the first day of a second presidency if given one by voters.Cheney, who served as vice-chair of the January 6 committee and was one of two Republicans on the panel, lost her seat in the House of Representatives to a Trump-backed challenger, Harriet Hageman, in 2022. She responded later on Sunday, saying her fellow Republican Trump was “afraid of the truth”.Trump has been charged with four felonies in relation to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. The US supreme court is considering Trump’s claim that he has absolute immunity from prosecution in the case because he served as president from 2017 to 2021.Trump is also facing charges of 2020 election interference in Georgia, retention of government secrets after he left the Oval Office and hush-money payments that were illicitly covered up.On Sunday, Trump wrote that Cheney should “go to jail along with the rest” of the select January 6 House committee, which he sought to insult in his post on Truth Social by calling it the “unselect committee”.Trump founded Truth after he was temporarily banned from Twitter – now known as X – in the wake of the January 6 insurrection.In a separate Truth Social post, Trump linked to an article written by Kash Patel, a White House staffer in Trump’s administration. In the article, published on the rightwing website the Federalist, Patel claimed that Cheney and the committee “suppressed evidence” which “completely exonerates Trump” from charges that he had a hand in the January 6 insurrection.Patel, who was chief of staff in the defense department under Trump, said in December that if the former president was re-elected, his administration would “come after the people in the media” who had reported on Trump’s attempts to remain in power.Trump wrote: “She [Cheney] should be prosecuted for what she has done to our country! She illegally destroyed the evidence. Unreal!!!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe suggestions that Cheney and others should be targeted for their role in the January 6 investigation came after House Republicans released a report that they claim contradicts the testimony that Trump tried to grab the wheel of his presidential limousine on January 6 in his excitement to join his supporters attacking the Capitol.Cheney was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over the attack, which has been linked to nine deaths and sought to prevent the congressional certification of Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.After a series of retirements and Trump-backed primary challenges, only two of those Republicans remain in office.Cheney’s father, former US vice-president Dick Cheney, released a video in 2022 urging Republicans to reject Trump.“He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big,” Dick Cheney, who served as George W Bush’s vice-president, said in the video. More

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      Liz Cheney: supreme court delay will deny voters ‘crucial evidence’ on Trump

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      A Republican member of the January 6 committee has said the supreme court’s decision to wade into Donald Trump’s immunity case will deny Americans crucial information about the former president’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.Liz Cheney, a former Wyoming congresswoman who was ousted by primary voters angry at her participation in the hearings that followed the insurrection, also demanded the justices come to a speedy decision.In a message posted to X, formerly Twitter, Cheney, a vocal Trump critic, said voters needed to have a verdict on the presumed Republican presidential nominee before they go to the polls in November.“Delaying the January 6 trial suppresses critical evidence that Americans deserve to hear,” she wrote.“Donald Trump attempted to overturn an election and seize power. Our justice system must be able to bring him to trial before the next election. SCOTUS [supreme court of the US] should decide this case promptly.”Justices on Wednesday set the week of 22 April to hear oral arguments over Trump’s assertion that he cannot be held criminally responsible for actions he took to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden.Trump, who is facing a four-count indictment including conspiracy to defraud the US and conspiracy to obstruct the congressional certification of the election results, has declared the decision a victory, mostly because it puts the trial on hold, possibly until after the election.Some Democrats, meanwhile, are also upbeat about it. The California congressman Ted Lieu, who has previously accused Trump of committing multiple election crimes, said such a delay would work to his party’s advantage at the ballot box.“My view of the SCOTUS action: if the trial is delayed until after November, we will see the largest blue wave in history,” he wrote, also on X.“If November becomes a referendum on whether Trump faces justice, then Democrats will absolutely flip the House, keep the White House and expand the Senate.”Some legal experts are warning the supreme court’s action, along with delays already affecting several of the other legal cases Trump is facing, could have consequences for democracy.While many believe the court will ultimately confirm the rejection by a Washington DC appeals court of Trump’s claim, they say the delay could prove harmful.“This case really is most important in terms of democracy, and the most compelling with the evidence. That makes it very difficult in the sense there would be no verdict on this critical issue that cuts to the heart of democracy,” said Carl Tobias, Williams professor of law at the University of Richmond and a veteran supreme court analyst.“Maybe the supreme court just couldn’t resist, as the highest court in the land, weighing in on this very weighty question of presidential immunity, though most people who are clear-eyed about this don’t believe that there’s much of an argument for immunity in this context.“The court could have been perfectly satisfied with the DC circuit opinion, which was comprehensive and clear, and just seen no reason to take it up. But this is about delay. I don’t think anybody really disputes that. Trump’s theory over his entire life in litigation is that delay is his friend, and here it really is. It’s conceivable none of these cases goes to verdict before the election.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a post on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday, Trump claimed that “legal scholars are extremely thankful for the supreme court’s decision”, and insisted without irony that future presidents would fear “wrongful prosecution and retaliation” after they left office if he loses.Trump himself has spoken openly of seeking “retribution and revenge” over political foes if he is returned to office, and said he would appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Biden and his family.A former lawyer and legal analyst Lisa Rubin said she was “beyond terrified for our country” because the supreme court will delay the trial and potentially affect the election.“I honestly thought there would be enough votes on the court not to take this case, for no other reason than bad facts make bad law,” she told MSNBC News. “And the facts here could not be worse. If there was a context in which you wanted to decide the bounds of presidential immunity it’s not this case.”With oral arguments set for April, a ruling might not be handed down until May at the earliest.Alternatively, in the worst-case scenario for special counsel Jack Smith, the supreme court could wait until the end of its current term in July. That could mean the start of a trial expected to take up to three months might be delayed until no earlier than late September.Trump’s legal strategy has been to stall the various cases against him, ideally until after November’s election, in the hopes that a second term of office will allow him to pardon himself or install a loyal attorney general to drop charges.
      Hugo Lowell contributed reporting More

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      Liz Cheney: potential Trump running mate Elise Stefanik is ‘a total crackpot’

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      Elise Stefanik of New York, a top House Republican and a leading contender to be Donald Trump’s presidential running mate, is “a total crackpot”, the former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney said.Cheney threw the barb on Tuesday, in response to a statement in which Stefanik called the House January 6 committee on which Cheney was vice-chair “illegitimate and unconstitutional” and claimed it “illegally deleted records”.Cheney said: “This is what Elise Stefanik⁩ said, in a rare moment of honesty, about the … attack on our Capitol.”Cheney posted Stefanik’s statement from 6 January 2021, the day Trump supporters stormed Congress after he told them to “fight like hell” to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden, a riot now linked to nine deaths; she added: “One day she will have to explain how and why she morphed into a total crackpot. History, and our children, deserve to know.”In her original January 6 statement, Stefanik lamented “truly a tragic day for America” and “condemn[ed] the dangerous violence and destruction that occurred today”. The perpetrators, she said, “must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”.Stefanik also “prayed” that “colleagues on both sides of the aisle, their staffs, and all Americans … remain safe”, and thanked police, the national guard and Capitol staffers for “protecting the People’s House and the American people”.Trump was impeached for inciting the riot, with the support of 10 House Republicans, but acquitted at trial in the Senate when only seven Republicans voted to convict. He currently faces 91 criminal charges – 17 for election subversion – as well as civil suits and attempts to keep him off the ballot for inciting an insurrection. Regardless, he dominates presidential primary polling.Stefanik is chair of the House Republican conference, the fourth-ranking Republican position.Earlier this month, she declined to commit to certifying the 2024 election and told NBC she had “concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages”, referring to the more than 1,200 people arrested over the riot, of whom hundreds have been convicted.Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who sat with Cheney on the House January 6 committee, put the “hostages” remark down to Stefanik’s ambition.“Does she no longer believe violence is ‘unacceptable’ and ‘must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law’?” Raskin asked. “Does her change of heart have anything to do with wanting to be Trump’s running mate?”Cheney – Stefanik’s predecessor as conference chair – was one of two Republicans who defied party leaders to join the January 6 committee. The other, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, retired. Cheney lost her position and then her Wyoming seat to a Trump-backed rival.Notwithstanding her status as the daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney, membership of the Republican establishment and strongly conservative views, she has not come back to the fold.On Tuesday, Stefanik did not immediately comment on Cheney’s “crackpot” remark. More

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      Elise Stefanik wants to be Trump’s running mate. That’s unfortunate | Margaret Sullivan

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      Elise Stefanik is having a moment. If she were a song on the Billboard chart, she’d have a bullet next to her name to show the speed of her trajectory.In recent weeks, the New York congresswoman has claimed credit for the demise of two major university presidents (those at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania), after she led the bullying about campus antisemitism during a congressional hearing.“Two down,” she gloated on X, formerly Twitter, after Harvard’s Claudine Gay stepped down.Last weekend, Stefanik had a star turn on NBC’s Meet the Press, in which she provided one of those quotes that goes ‘round the world for its sheer outrageousness. She echoed Donald Trump’s sympathetic characterization of those who are being prosecuted for storming the US Capitol, in some cases assaulting police officers.“I have concerns about the treatment of the January 6 hostages,” she told Kristen Welker.And when asked whether she’d like to be Donald Trump’s running mate – and potentially the next vice-president of the United States – Stefanik didn’t exactly turn away in disgust.“I’ve said for a year now I’d be honored to serve in the next Trump administration,” was her less-than-coy response.The conservative Washington Examiner found all of this a winning formula.“Elise Stefanik is running for VP and she’s winning,” read its recent headline. The writer enthused: “She was poised, confident and well-prepared. Most importantly, she didn’t give an inch when defending Trump on any issue.”And that quality is what really wins points with the former president, as with every mob boss: vociferous, unquestioning loyalty. Being willing to do what’s necessary.Compare Stefanik’s situation to that of former Republican congresswoman: Liz Cheney of Wyoming – not long ago a leading figure in the House of Representatives. In fact, she was the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, succeeded by none other than Stefanik.Defeated in her 2022 primary by a Trump-endorsed candidate, Cheney has left politics for now, though she hasn’t ruled out a third-party bid for president this year.For the past few years, Cheney has made it her business to try to hold Trump accountable. As the vice-chair of the House January 6 committee, she told the hard truths about how he tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election and encouraged the Capitol insurrection. In doing so, she alienated most of her party – and earned the eternal hatred of its de facto leader.Whatever one may think of her staunchly conservative positions on important issues, including abortion rights (she celebrated the US supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade), it’s hard not to respect Cheney when it comes to Trump. She’s been brave, dignified and relentless in standing up for American democracy and for the foundational idea of governmental checks and balances.Most recently, Cheney has been clear in public statements that she thinks the former president – whom she says she voted for twice – should be barred from the ballot in November.“There’s no question in my mind that his action clearly constituted an offense that is within the language of the 14th amendment,” she said at a recent event at Dartmouth College.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNo surprise that Cheney’s words and actions have earned Trump’s ire, and brought out the nastiness that’s never far from the surface.“I mean, Liz Cheney’s a sick person,” Trump has said, calling her and former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger “far worse than any Democrat that ever lived”. A Trump spokesman told the New York Times she is “a loser”, interested only in promoting her book, which he said “should be repurposed as toilet paper”.Yes, it sure is a classy gang that Stefanik hopes to help lead. Is she up to the task?It looks that way.“Can anyone name a more noxious politician?” asked Columbia University journalism professor Bill Grueskin, after Stefanik’s all-caps “two down” tweet about the college presidents.There are a couple of contenders for the title, but she may have it nailed.That Stefanik is a rising star – and Liz Cheney a pariah – says it all about Republican politics today.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Republican royalty to liberal heroine: Liz Cheney finds an anti-Trump niche

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      It was a moment that a visitor from the year 2010 might have found impossible to comprehend. As Liz Cheney, arch-conservative and daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, walked on stage in deeply liberal Washington, the audience applauded and cheered for a full 45 seconds.“They’re standing, Liz, wow!” exclaimed moderator Mark Leibovich, a journalist and author. “You could probably be elected to Congress from the District of Columbia if they had representation.”Cheney, 57, who as a Republican congresswoman voted against granting statehood to the District of Columbia, even though her home state of Wyoming has a smaller population, laughed at the comment. Leibovich added wryly: “Don’t answer that.”Wednesday night’s event at the historic synagogue Sixth & I, organised by the local bookshop Politics & Prose, which is run by a Hillary Clinton alumnus and former Washington Post journalist, was the latest stop on Cheney’s book tour. Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning is a scathing account of Donald Trump’s assault on democracy and urgent plea for America to avoid a repeat.The book debuted at No 1 on the New York Times’s bestseller list. It is also shining a light on the Trump era’s habit of scrambling old alliances and creating strange bedfellows.Cheney is unapologetically conservative. She remains close to her father, an architect of the Iraq war, and used to appear regularly on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News network. She voted in line with Trump’s position 93% of the time during his presidency, according to the FiveThirtyEight website.James King, a professor emeritus at the University of Wyoming, said: “Clearly she does not disagree with most of Trump’s policies. It’s just his adequacy to be president she’s made something of a crusade over the last two years.”Cheney was one of only 10 Republicans in the House of Representatives who voted to impeach Trump in the wake of the January 6 insurrection and one of only two who served on the House select committee that investigated the deadly riot. Her decision to put democracy before party has made her an unlikely heroine in the eyes of many liberals.At the Sixth & I event, Cheney acknowledged: “I have a lot more Democratic friends now than I used to have.”She was warmly received by the audience in one of America’s most liberal cities. During a question-and-answer session, one said: “I have to tell you that my family and I disagree with you on 90% of your policy positions but my sister and I are overwhelmed with gratitude and privilege and honour to tell you personally that you are our ‘shero’, you’re an American treasure and we thank you and your wonderful family for your courage, your strength, your integrity.”Cheney was visibly moved but a smiling Leibovich asked mischievously: “All right, show of hands, how many people voted for Dick Cheney for vice-president in 2004?” A couple of hands went up – from people related to Cheney.Dick Cheney was vice-president under George W Bush from 2001 to 2009. He was the mastermind of a neoconservative “war on terror” that spiralled into the torturing of suspects, establishment of a prison at Guantánamo Bay and an illegal war in Iraq over non-existent weapons of mass destruction. He shares his daughter’s view of Trump as a threat to democracy and the constitution.Liz Cheney served in Congress for three terms but her opposition to Trump came with a political price. She was ousted from Republican leadership in the House and last year defeated in a primary election in Wyoming by Harriet Hageman, a conservative lawyer and Trump ally. Cheney subsequently accepted an appointment as a professor of practice with the University of Virginia Center for Politics in Charlottesville.Larry Sabato, the centre’s director, recalled: “When I first announced that appointment, oh my God, you would have thought that I had converted to Satanism. The emails! It was just incredible. ‘How could you do that? This is the most terrible thing. Oh, she did just one good thing. Oh, great, it’s like having Dick Cheney on the faculty.’ Nobody’s admitted it but they were completely wrong.”Sabato has noted some changes in Cheney’s politics during her interactions with students. “We’ve had easily 20-plus classes here so I’ve picked up on nuances where she has shifted her position even on something like abortion. She’s not as conservative as she once was. There have been changes which I think she muted because she was representing Wyoming and they’re coming to the fore.”Cheney has not ruled out a 2024 presidential run as an independent but her main priority is to thwart Trump’s candidacy. Her book has given her a platform to take the message to a wide audience. Since its publication on 5 December, she has done about 30 interviews on networks such as ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and PBS, newspapers including the Chicago Sun-Times, Washington Post and USA Today, and a host of podcasts and radio broadcasts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAmong the most notable was her conversation with Rachel Maddow, the first openly gay host of a US primetime news programme and a media star among progressives. The host offered this memorable introduction: “I disagree with Liz Cheney about everything. My whole adult life on everything in politics, I would not just say that Liz Cheney and I were on different proverbial teams, I would say we are from different proverbial planets. And they are planets that are mostly at war with each other.”Maddow continued: “It’s important because that tells you how serious and big something has to be to put us, to put me and Liz Cheney, together on the same side of something in American life. I’m sure Noah had a hard time convincing the mice that they should get on the same boat with the snakes … but needs must.“Normal combat, normal willingness to chomp on each other or run or defend ourselves from each other, yields to the imperative of the world-destroying flood, where all land animals face the same fate and all the old fears and rules have to be put on hold, because now we’re either all going down or we’re all in the same boat.”Stephen Colbert, a late-night comedian who has savaged Cheney’s father and Trump over the years, interviewed her on his show in the Democratic stronghold of Manhattan, New York. Colbert said: “I didn’t expect to interview you ever, really … What is this moment like, to be embraced by people who vilified you and your family for so long?” She admitted: “I think it’s weird.”It is also a sign of the times. Trump has united small “d” democrats like no one else. Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “What’s interesting about seeing Liz Cheney on programmes like that and in venues that would not have normally been part of her book tour circuit or her media circuit is that it shows you how how much bigger her message is. It transcends party lines.“The threat that Donald Trump and Trumpism poses to our country as a whole has created interesting bedfellows. Seeing Liz Cheney sitting down with Rachel Maddow and being simpatico on an issue as important as our democracy should give everyone hope that it’s not too late to turn this around.”Trump is the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 despite 91 criminal charges in four cases hanging over him. The House speaker, Mike Johnson, and his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, have endorsed the former president, But those who have broken with the party over its cult-like devotion to Trump praise Cheney for issuing a clear warning about the danger he poses.Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, added: “Liz Cheney should be the template for every Republican in the party. Unfortunately, she is an anomaly.“It’s rather remarkable as I watch her evolution from being Republican royalty to an apostate simply because she has spoken the truth about who and what Donald Trump is, what he has done to the Republican party and ultimately what he has done to our country, based off of Republican principles that she thought were unmovable. But apparently they are for many Republicans and she’s exposed that hypocrisy.”Cheney is not the only liberal bete noire to undergo a rehabilitation of sorts in the age of Trump. Two polls in 2017 found that more Democrats view Bush favourably than unfavourably. Republicans such as Jeff Sessions, Robert Mueller, Bill Barr and Mike Pence have earned praise for defying Trump. The recent death of Henry Kissinger at 100 prompted a lengthy tribute from the secretary of state, Antony Blinken.Some on the left are uneasy with such role reversals, warning that shifting the goalposts serves only to mainstream and normalise figures whose actions were beyond the pale. Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, said: “It’s very dangerous to fall into the groove of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.“The fact that she has done one admirable thing in her life politically, and that is stand up against Donald Trump, does not change the fact that she voted with him an overwhelming amount of the time. On virtually every other issue even a mainstream Democrat would find her votes abhorrent. In the House she was one of the most prominent, outspoken militarists eager to go to war. The apple’s not far from the tree in that way.” More

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      Liz Cheney: Speaker Mike Johnson can’t be trusted to defend the constitution

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      US House speaker Mike Johnson and his fellow Republicans who comprise a majority in the chamber cannot be trusted to protect the American constitution, former congresswoman Liz Cheney said Sunday.Cheney made the comments on ABC’s This Week as she continued to warn of the dangers that a second Donald Trump presidency would present following the release of her book Oath and Honor: A Warning and a Memoir. In the book, she is deeply critical of Johnson, who played a key role in Trump’s legal strategy to contest the election and organized an amicus brief signed by 126 US House members urging the supreme court to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden.“I’ve expressed very clearly my view that having Mike Johnson as the speaker, having this Republican majority in charge, you can’t count on them to defend the constitution at this moment,” Cheney said.The former Wyoming congresswoman, who once held the number three position in the House Republican conference, also declined to rule out a presidential bid in 2024. But she acknowledged that there were already third-party candidates who could fracture the vote. “Certainly I’m not gonna do something that has the impact of helping Donald Trump,” she said.She also spoke about the need to take Trump’s blunt and public proclamations about how he would bring authoritarianism if he won a second term after his re-election run failed against Biden.Trump’s allies have publicly said they would go after the media and prosecute political rivals if he returns to power. He has also described opponents as “vermin” in language that echoes Nazi rhetoric.Trump escalated concerns this week when he made the absurd comment that he would only be a dictator for the first day of his presidency, a remark he defended on Saturday evening.“I said I want to be a dictator for one day. You know why I wanted to be a dictator? Because I want a wall, and I want to drill, drill, drill,” he said at a gala in New York City.The remarks referred in part to Trump’s first-term promises to build a wall along the US-Mexico border and to humiliate Mexicans by making them pay for it. They also alluded to his support of the oil and gas industry.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I think we have to take everything that Donald Trump says literally and seriously,” Cheney said on ABC. More

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      Oath and Honor review: Liz Cheney spells out the threat from Trump

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      Donald Trump stands ready to knife US democracy. A year ago, he called for terminating the constitution. He has since announced that if re-elected, he wants to weaponize federal law enforcement against his political enemies. He has suggested that Gen Mark Milley, former chairman of the joint chiefs, be executed for fulfilling his duty.This is a man who reportedly kept a bound copy of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside, very nearly managed to overturn an election, and certainly basked in the mayhem of the January 6 insurrection. He said Mike Pence, his vice-president who ultimately stood against him, “deserved” to be hanged for so doing.This week, Trump said he would be a dictator “on day one” of a second term. All bets are off. Take him literally and seriously.The New York Times and the Atlantic report that Trump aims to make the executive branch his fiefdom, loyalty the primary if not only test. If he returns to power, the independence of the justice department and FBI will be things of the past. He is the “most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office”, Liz Cheney writes in her memoir.“This is the story of when American democracy began to unravel,” the former congresswoman adds. “It is the story of the men and women who fought to save it, and of the enablers and collaborators whose actions ensured the threat would grow and metastasize.”Cheney, formerly the No 3 House Republican, was vice-chair of the House January 6 committee. She has witnessed power wielded – not always wisely. Dick Cheney, her father, was George W Bush’s vice-president and pushed the Iraq war. Before that he was secretary of defense to Bush’s father and, like his daughter, represented Wyoming in the House.Liz Cheney delivers a frightening narrative. Her recollections are first-hand, her prose dry, terse and informed. On January 6, she witnessed Trump’s minions invade the Capitol first-hand.Subtitled “A Memoir and a Warning Oath”, her book is well-timed. The presidential primaries draw near. The Iowa caucus is next month. Trump laps the Republican pack. No one comes close. Ron DeSantis is in retrograde, his campaign encased in a dunghill of its own making. Nikki Haley has momentum of a sort but remains a long way behind.Cheney’s book will discomfit many. Mike Johnson, the new House speaker, is shown as a needy and servile fraud. Kevin McCarthy, his predecessor, is a bottomless pit of self-abasement. Jim Jordan, the hard-right judiciary chair from Ohio, is ham-handed and insincere.Johnson misled colleagues about the authorship of a legal brief filed in support of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, as well as its contents and his own credentials. He played a game of “bait and switch”, Cheney says. Johnson, she writes, was neither the author of the brief nor a “constitutional law expert”, despite advising colleagues that he was.In reality, Johnson was dean of Judge Paul Pressler School of Law, a small Baptist institution that never opened its doors. Constitutional scholar? Nope. Pro-Trump lawyers wrote the pro-Trump brief, not Johnson, Cheney says.At a recent gathering of Christian legislators, Johnson referred to himself as a modern-day Moses.McCarthy, meanwhile, is vividly portrayed in all his gutless glory. First taking a pass on Johnson’s amicus brief, he then predictably caved. Anything to sit at the cool kids’ table. His tenure as speaker, which followed, will be remembered for its brevity and desperation. His trip to see Trump in Florida, shortly after the election, left Cheney incredulous.“Mar-a-Lago? What the hell, Kevin?”“They’re really worried,” McCarthy said. “Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him.”Trump not eating. Let that claim sink in.This year, at his arraignment in Fulton county, Georgia, on charges relating to election subversion there, the former president self-reported as 6ft 3in and 215lb – almost 30lb lighter than at his last White House physical.OK.Turning to Jordan, Cheney recalls his performance on January 6. She rightly feared for her safety and remains unamused.“Jim Jordan approached me,” she recalls.“‘We need to get the ladies off the aisle,’ he said, and put out his hand. ‘Let me help you.’”“I swatted his hand away. ‘Get away from me. You fucking did this.’”Jordan’s spokesperson denies the incident.Cheney writes: “Most Republicans currently in Congress will do what Donald Trump asks, no matter what it is. I am very sad to say that America can no longer count on a body of elected Republicans to protect our republic.”Mitt Romney has announced his retirement as a senator from Utah. Patrick McHenry, the former acting House speaker from North Carolina, has also decided to quit. Both men voted to certify Joe Biden’s win in 2020. In a Trump-centric Republican party, that is a big problem. In plain English, Congress is a hellscape. The cold civil war grows hot.Cheney briefly mentions Kash Patel, a former staffer to Devin Nunes, a congressman now in charge of Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform. In the waning days of the Trump administration, Patel was chief of staff at the Pentagon. In a recent interview with Steve Bannon, Patel made clear that in a second Trump term, bureaucrats and the press will be targets.“We will find the conspirators in government … and the media,” Patel said. “Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media … we are putting you all on notice.”Trump is a would-be Commodus, a debauched emperor, enamored with power, grievance and his own reflection. Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning epic, remains a movie for our times.“As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term,” Cheney writes. “But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our constitution.” Promoting her book, she added that the US is “sleepwalking into dictatorship”.Trump leads Biden in the polls.
      Oath and Honor is published in the US by Hachette More