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      January 6 panel’s next hearing will focus on Trump’s ‘state of mind’ during attack

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      January 6 panel’s next hearing will focus on Trump’s ‘state of mind’ during attack House select committee will reconvene Thursday with new video footage showing measures to respond during violence at Capitol The ninth and possibly final hearing of the congressional panel investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol will focus on Donald Trump’s “state of mind” as the insurrection unfolded.The House of Representatives select committee will reconvene in Washington at 1pm on Thursday after a two-and-a-half month break, and is expected to present new video footage showing efforts to respond to the violence as it was unfolding.House January 6 committee postpones public hearing, citing Hurricane IanRead more“There is going to be some discussion of events that took place prior to election day and there’s going to be some looking at events that took place after January 6,” said an aide to the committee, who did not wish to be named. “We’re going to bring a particular focus on the president’s state of mind and his involvement in these events as they unfold.“So what you’re going to see is a synthesis of some evidence we’ve already presented with that new, never-before-seen information to illustrate Donald Trump’s centrality to the scheme from the time prior to the election.”The committee surpassed many observers’ expectations over the summer with a series of televised hearings that put Trump at the heart of an attempted coup – a premeditated assault on American democracy that sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election.On Thursday it will seek to reclaim the spotlight less than a month before congressional midterm elections, in which hundreds of Republicans who back Trump’s false claim of election fraud are running for office.The committee will present documentary evidence that includes information from hundreds of thousands of pages that the Secret Service handed over in response to a subpoena. The records will show how Trump – who encouraged his supporters to “fight like hell” in a speech on the morning of January 6 – was repeatedly alerted to danger yet still tried to stoke the violence, the Washington Post reported.Unlike previous hearings there will be no live witnesses, the aide said, but there will be new witness testimony, including from individuals who have not been heard from before. It is unclear whether that will include Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a conservative activist and wife of the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas. Her interview by the panel last month was transcribed but not videotaped.Thursday’s hearing is expected to last about two and half hours and include statements from the panel’s chair, Bennie Thompson, and vice-chair, Liz Cheney – nearing the end of her tenure in Congress after losing a Republican primary race in Wyoming – as well as all seven other members of the committee, each presenting different elements of the evidence.Whereas past hearings concentrated on a particular topic, earning comparisons with TV crime dramas or podcasts, this one will take “a step back” and examine “the entire plan”. But in a background briefing with reporters, the aide denied it amounted to a closing argument, saying it was difficult to know the select committee’s schedule going forward.“The investigation is ongoing and, of course, at some point there will be a comprehensive report released which will present the committee’s findings in a more complete manner. That work goes on. I would resist any characterisation that makes this seem like the final time you’re going to hear from the committee.”TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsDonald TrumpLiz CheneyUS Capitol attackUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      House January 6 committee postpones public hearing, citing Hurricane Ian

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      House January 6 committee postpones public hearing, citing Hurricane IanStorm bearing down on Florida nixes session that had been expected to feature footage of Trump ally Roger Stone The House January 6 select committee announced that it would postpone what was expected to be its final investigative hearing scheduled for Wednesday over concerns about a hurricane and as it considers how best to present a number of unresolved questions surrounding the US Capitol attack.McConnell endorses bipartisan bill to prevent efforts to overturn US elections Read more“In light of Hurricane Ian bearing down on parts of Florida, we have decided to postpone tomorrow’s proceedings,” the panel’s chairman Bennie Thompson and the vice-chair Liz Cheney said in a joint statement. “We’re praying for the safety of all those in the storm’s path.”The hurricane is forecast to reach category 4 and make landfall on Florida’s gulf coast around the time the hearing is scheduled to begin in Washington, bringing hurricane-force winds and major flooding around the Tampa area, which has not suffered a direct hit from a major storm since 1921.That was not the optimal time to be holding the hearing, sources close to the investigation said: members felt it was insensitive to have a hearing during a potential natural disaster, while television coverage of the findings surrounding Donald Trump would probably be diminished.And at least one of the select committee’s members, Stephanie Murphy, had communicated that she was unable and unwilling to leave her Florida district at a time of a statewide crisis to make a rehearsal the night before the hearing, the sources said.The panel had not disclosed the topics it intended to cover in the hearing – expected to be the final “investigative” hearing, though the select committee could hold another around the time it releases its final report and makes recommendations to prevent future repeats of the 6 January 2021 events.But the select committee was expected to focus at least in part on how Trump political operatives planned to declare victory in the 2020 election regardless of the actual outcome, through court battles and other extrajudicial means to secure Trump a second term, the sources said.The select committee was also expected at the hearing to play several short clips from a documentary by Danish film-makers who captured on camera Trump operative Roger Stone predicting violent clashes over the election results months before it took place.It was not immediately clear what date the hearing, which was originally slated for Wednesday at 1pm, would be rescheduled for, though one of the sources suggested sometime in October. The panel said in the statement: “We will soon announce a date for the postponed proceedings.”The hearing is supposed to mark the winding down of the investigative phase of the select committee’s work, though several pressing issues remain unresolved since the panel last convened in July and made the case that Trump violated the law in refusing to call off the Capitol attack.Among them is whether there existed an indubitable through-line from the former president to operatives such as Stone and Michael Flynn, who were in close contact with the far-right extremist groups – including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers – since indicted for seditious conspiracy over the insurrection.The select committee has found some circumstantial evidence about such ties and previously revealed that Trump directed his then White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to call Stone and Flynn the night before as the extremist groups finalized their plans for the day.Another issue for House investigators is whether Trump’s ouster of former defense secretary Mark Esper was an effort to install a loyalist in his place, one who might have had no objection to using the national guard to seize voting machines or delay their deployment to stop the Capitol attack.Republican ex-congressman suggests colleagues ‘had serious cognitive issues’Read moreThe panel has viewed the plot to seize voting machines – suggested by Flynn during a contentious White House meeting in December 2020, hours before Trump sent a tweet urging his supporters to attend a “wild protest” on 6 January 2021 – as a crucial moment in the timeline.House investigators have also spent time in recent weeks examining Microsoft Teams chats and emails sent between Secret Service agents on security details for Trump and former vice-president Mike Pence that day, as well as discussions about invoking martial law even after the riot.The select committee has also debated in private about how best to highlight other information that it has uncovered, with the members differing on what to present in made-for-television hearings that might reach a broader audience than the contents of a report published later this year.The final stages of its investigation is also playing out against a shifting political situation that could impact how the select committee moves next, including on the question of whether to subpoena Trump himself, as Democrats contemplate potentially losing the House in the midterms in November.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsExtreme weatherLiz CheneyDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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      Liz Cheney and Zoe Lofgren to propose bill to stop another January 6 attack

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      Liz Cheney and Zoe Lofgren to propose bill to stop another January 6 attackBill aims to guarantee that ‘Congress can’t overturn an election result’ Two members of the US congressional committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack have revealed details of a bill proposing to block any other attempt to coerce the House and the Senate “to steal a presidential election”.On Sunday, House members Liz Cheney and Zoe Lofgren wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal outlining reforms to the Electoral Count Act that they said would ensure “Congress can’t overturn an election result”, which is what those who staged the Capitol attack in early 2021 wanted.“It’s past time”, added Cheney – a Republican from Wyoming – and Lofgren, a California Democrat.They cited how a number of people seeking political office in November’s midterm elections, including those who would oversee the electoral process, have embraced lies from former president Donald Trump that fraudsters stole the election from him against Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race. Those lies inspired Trump’s supporters to mount the Capitol attack in a desperate plot to prevent the House and Senate from certifying the former Republican president’s electoral college loss to his Democratic rival.“This raises the prospect of another effort to steal a presidential election, perhaps with another attempt to corrupt Congress’s proceeding to tally electoral college votes,” the piece from Cheney and Lofgren said.One of the changes which the two congresswomen propose to the Electoral Count Act – first passed in 1887 – is to make clear that a vice-president who ceremonially presides over the Senate lacks any “authority or discretion” to reject a race’s result or delay its certification.That measure is a direct response to Trump’s long-held insistence that his vice-president, Mike Pence, could have single-handedly stopped Congress’s certification of his defeat. Pence – who Trump’s supporters wanted to hang on the day of the attack – has correctly noted that he had no constitutional or legal authority to do that.Additionally, Cheney and Lofgren said they wanted to empower presidential candidates to sue any local-level officials who try to hold up sending election results to Congress for certification. And the pair wanted to limit the grounds on which members of Congress can protest against slates of electors, requiring one-third approval from both chambers for any objections to be considered and a majority to be sustained.Cheney and Lofgren said their proposal “intended to preserve the rule of law for all future presidential elections by ensuring that self-interested politicians cannot steal from the people the guarantee that our government derives its power from the consent of the governed”.The duo’s bill, which they expect to formally introduce this week, could be considered in the House in the coming days, according to the chamber’s Democratic majority leader, Steny Hoyer of Maryland.The Senate, for its part, is engaged in government funding negotiations as a 30 September deadline approaches.The bipartisan committee to which Cheney and Lofgren belong held a series of public hearings earlier this year pressing the case that Trump appears to have violated federal law, among other alleged misdeeds, when he ignored pleas to take action that would have halted his supporters’ assault on the Capitol. The Capitol attack investigation panel has also explored the potential roles that Trump and his advisers had in advance of the January 6 assault.Meanwhile, in August, FBI agents searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after the bureau said it found evidence that the defeated former president was improperly retaining government secrets there without authorization.Cheney’s work on the January 6 committee – and her general opposition to Trump’s lies about his defeat to Biden – carried a steep political cost for her. She was denied another term in Congress after losing a Republican primary election in August to Harriet Hageman, who has echoed Trump’s falsehoods about the outcome of the 2020 presidential race.In June, Lofgren won her party primary and is set to face Republican challenger Peter Hernandez during the 8 November midterm elections.TopicsUS newsUS politicsLiz CheneyUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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      Cheney vows to fight other Republicans who embrace Trump’s election lie

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      Cheney vows to fight other Republicans who embrace Trump’s election lieCheney says two Republican US senators – Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley – have both made themselves ‘unfit for future office’ The former top Republican Liz Cheney, who lost her Wyoming seat in Congress last week when she was beaten in a primary by a Donald Trump-endorsed challenger, is threatening to turn her political muscle against other prominent politicians in her party who have embraced the former president’s attack on democracy.In an interview with ABC News aired on Sunday, she said that some of the best known Republican figures are now within her sights. She name-checked Kevin McCarthy, Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley – all of whom have openly supported Trump’s lie that electoral fraudsters stole the 2020 presidential race from him and handed it to his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.In the wake of her Wyoming defeat, Cheney has announced plans to set up a new political organization and has indicated that she is considering a 2024 presidential run designed to stop Trump from re-entering the White House.Her comments on Sunday suggest that her plans to confront election deniers go much wider than Trump himself.“I’m going to be very focused on working to ensure that we can do everything we can [to] not … elect election deniers,” she said. “I’m going to work against those people, I’m going to work to support their opponents.”Cheney said that two Republican US senators – Cruz from Texas and Hawley from Missouri – have both made themselves “unfit for future office”. She said that “both know what the role of Congress is with respect to presidential elections and yet both took steps that fundamentally threatened the constitutional order”.Cruz was seminal in the Senate in devising a plot to block certification of Biden’s 2020 victory in six battleground states. Hawley was the first senator to object to Biden’s victory and famously raised his clenched fist to protesters outside the US Capitol on 6 January shortly before the violence erupted. He was later revealed to have fled the Capitol building running once the insurrection started.Cheney also had tough words in the ABC News interview for DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and McCarthy, the current House minority leader. McCarthy is a leading candidate to become Speaker should the Republicans take back the House of Representatives in November.McCarthy was initially critical of Trump’s role in unleashing the violent storming of the Capitol, privately telling fellow party leaders “I’ve had it with this guy”. But since then he has swung behind Trump’s anti-democratic movement.“My views on Kevin McCarthy are very clear,” Cheney said. “He’s been completely unfaithful to the constitution. … I don’t believe he should be the Speaker of the House.”She also accused DeSantis of campaigning for election deniers. “This is something that people have got to have real pause about,” Cheney said.The Wyoming congresswoman is vice-chairperson of the House committee which has been investigating the January 6 Capitol attack. She was also one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the breach of the Capitol compound – eight of whom will not be returning to Congress in January.The fact that those who stood up against Trump’s attempt to subvert American democracy have been almost universally forced from the party was revealing, she said, adding: “It says people continue to believe the lie, they continue to believe what [Trump] is saying which is very dangerous.”She continued: “It also tells you that large portions of our party, including the leadership of our party both at a state level in Wyoming as well as a national level with the RNC [Republican National Committee], is very sick.”Cheney would not specify whether or not she would run for the presidency in two years’ time. Nor would she say, in that case, whether she would run as a Republican or independent.She did say that if she ran it would be to win.Cheney’s direct threat to Trump and his most senior coterie of Republicans in Congress comes at a time of gathering peril for the former president. The FBI search of his home in Mar-a-Lago in Florida has riled up his supporters but has also heightened risk of prosecution for harboring confidential documents that could endanger national security.Earlier this month Trump invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination in response to questions when he was deposed in a lawsuit brought by the attorney general of New York over his company’s financial statements. Last week Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was called before a special grand jury in Atlanta, Georgia, investigating efforts to overturn the election results in that state.On Sunday Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who was involved in Trump’s pressure campaign on Georgia officials to overturn the state’s election results, was granted a temporary reprieve by an appeals court from having to testify before the same grand jury in Fulton county.TopicsRepublicansLiz CheneyUS politicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More

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      Liz Cheney is the leader of the anti-Trump Republican resistance – where does it go now?

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      Liz Cheney is the leader of the anti-Trump Republican resistance – where does it go now?The January 6 co-chair has been anointed the valiant leader of the Never Trump movement. But does that make her a general without an army? She knew the price of defying Donald Trump but did it anyway. Liz Cheney, crushed in a primary election in Wyoming, was anointed by supporters and commentators as leader of the Republican resistance to the former US president.But that invited a question: what resistance? Admirers of the three-term congresswoman who lost her House seat to a Trump-backed challenger warn that she could now find herself a general without an army.In her concession speech in Jackson, Wyoming, on Tuesday, Cheney pointed out that if she had been willing to parrot Trump’s election lies, she would have remained in Congress. Instead she voted to impeach him and, as vice-chair of the January 6 committee, eviscerated him on primetime TV.Now, having transferred leftover campaign funds into a new entity, The Great Task, and hinted at a presidential run, she seems determined to embrace her status as the face of the Never Trump movement.“She set herself up to be that, to be the force that is going to stand up and fight because very few people have come forward and taken such a powerful stance,” said Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York.“It helps that she lost so she’s able to do that. That’s what she’s hoping to be.”The Great Task, however, may be an understatement of the challenge ahead. Trump’s Republican critics did appear to have the wind at their backs just couple of months ago as his poll ratings sank, he was pummeled by the January 6 committee and candidates he endorsed lost primaries in Georgia and elsewhere.But the 76-year-old managed to turn an FBI search for government secrets at his home in Florida into a public relations triumph with his base. Donations poured in and Republicans rallied. Even potential 2024 rivals such as Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, felt obliged to question the justice department’s motives.Meanwhile, Trump-favoured candidates surged in states such as Arizona, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Of the 10 House Republicans, including Cheney, who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the January 6 insurrection, only two remain up for re-election.McDermott said: “It seemed like he was fading from the public eye and a lot of people, especially Republicans, were glad about that. But his base is being riled up again. The FBI search was one source of that. The primary wins have been another.“He has bounced back. He’s rebounded quite a bit from where he was post-presidency. At this point he is the titular head of the Republican party, whether people want him to be or not.”Frank Luntz, a pollster who has advised many Republican campaigns, agreed that the primary wins are significant. He said: “Trump’s probably stronger with the GOP right now because of the Mar-a-Lago raid than in any time in the last six months.“He’s turned himself into a victim and that unites Republicans around him. So they [the US justice department] better have something, because he has a new life within the GOP.”‘Whatever it takes’Anti-Trump forces remain scattered. Some Republican senators, such as Mitt Romney of Utah, and governors, such as Larry Hogan of Maryland, remain willing to speak out. Disaffected conservatives have set up ventures such as the Lincoln Project, Principles First, the Republican Accountability Project and the Bulwark website.Adam Kinzinger, Cheney’s sole Republican colleague on the January 6 committee, created a group called Country First to recruit and back anti-Trump candidates. But Kinzinger himself is retiring.With her storied name – her father, Dick Cheney, was vice-president under George W Bush – Cheney could emerge as the de facto resistance leader, touring the country and TV studios, prosecuting the case against Trump as an existential threat to democracy. Her work on the January 6 committee will continue until she relinquishes her seat in January. More televised hearings are promised.On Wednesday she told NBC: “I will be doing whatever it takes to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office.”She added that running for president “is something I’m thinking about and I’ll make a decision in the coming months”.It would be tough. Cheney would have almost no chance of winning a primary and could expect the Republican National Committee to look for reasons to keep her off the debate stage. Few know the pitfalls better than Joe Walsh, a former congressman from Illinois who took on Trump in 2020.Walsh said: “There is no anti-Trump movement in the Republican party. I love Liz and she’s a hero for what she did and God bless her but, as I realised two years ago, there’s no room in that party for me. There’s no room in this party for her. She knows that. She’s got a bigger name so she’ll leverage it but she’s got no army to lead.”So where do anti-Trump Republicans go from here?“What Liz Cheney is going to find is this is a difficult road because, if you play this road out all the way, you have to do what I do, which is temporarily be on Team Democrat, which is weird for a Tea Party guy like me.“I know Liz believes the Republican party right now is a threat to our democracy. If you believe that then you have to support people who will defeat Republicans and right now the only people who will defeat Republicans are Democrats. I think Liz is getting close to that point.”Walsh admitted that being on “Team Democrat” is still a strange sensation.“It’s fucking bizarre. Once a week, I pinch myself and think, ‘How the hell did I get here?’ I mean, I’m out there trying to help Tim Ryan win in Ohio but this is where we are because my former party has become what they’ve become.“I don’t know what Liz will do. Again, she’s a different animal because she’s a Cheney and she can stay in that party and raise hell, but to what end? It can’t be changed.”‘A big mistake’If Trump is the Republican nominee, Cheney could stand as an independent in a general election. But that would run the “spoiler” risk of peeling off anti-Trump Republicans from the Democrat, presumably Joe Biden, and inadvertently giving Trump a path to the White House.Luntz predicted: “She actually would take away more Biden votes than Trump votes.”Cheney has won the admiration of Democrats and independents but some observers detect hubris. In her concession speech, she raised eyebrows by drawing parallels with Abraham Lincoln, the president who steered the union through the civil war.Cheney said: “The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and the House before he won the most important election of all. Lincoln ultimately prevailed, he saved our union, and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.”Luntz said: “Some Republicans who admire her tenacity and her convictions became annoyed that she compared herself to Abraham Lincoln. That was a big mistake. Whoever wrote that line really should be fired because instead of it being about Trump it became about her. And that did her irreparable damage.”The Cheneys have been players in Washington for half a century, from the time Dick Cheney first ran for Congress to the arrival of Liz Cheney in 2017. She rose to the same position as her father, No 3 Republican in the House, only to be ousted as punishment for her dissent.Then, on Tuesday, after the highest turnout of any Republican primary in Wyoming’s 132-year history, Cheney lost to the conservative lawyer Harriet Hageman by 36 points. Trump acolytes gloated that it signified the final purge of the Bush-Cheney era, surpassed by his populist brand of “America first” and baseless conspiracy theories. The Never Trumpers were in retreat once more.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Liz Cheney certainly won the hearts of many Democrats and independents but her power in the Republican party doesn’t hold a candle to Donald Trump.“We have to just be honest about that. She’s not a real threat to Donald Trump. She sees herself as kind of saviour but it’s in a party that’s not really looking for a saviour.”TopicsRepublicansLiz CheneyDonald TrumpUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Liz Cheney was purged by the cult of Trumpism. Who is next? | Richard Wolffe

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      Liz Cheney was purged by the cult of Trumpism. Who is next?Richard WolffeThere’s only one purge the country really needs, and that is one that goes all the way to Mar-a-Lago Liz Cheney is both the most coldly calculating and the most principled politician in the land. At least, that’s what Liz Cheney and a whole host of political pundits would have you believe.How else can you explain her suicidal mission to confront the all-powerful, almost-indicted former president who trashes the Espionage Act as easily as the constitution.Of course she stands for democracy, free and fair elections, and all the rest of that ballyhoo. But her resounding defeat in Tuesday’s primary in the near-empty state of Wyoming must mean Something More.So Liz Cheney is obviously, naturally, running for president. Or at least running to stop Trump becoming president. Or at the very, very least, running to become Abraham Lincoln.“The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and the house before he won the most important election of all,” Cheney said in a concession speech that sounded more like the kickoff of a presidential campaign.“Lincoln ultimately prevailed. He saved our union and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.”Stirring stuff. But as campaign strategies go, Cheney’s path to the presidency is even less likely than Lincoln’s. Two years ago she won her Republican primary with 73% of her party, and the general election with 69% of the state. This week she failed to crack the 30% mark.Losing more than 40 points of support among your own voters in your home state does not represent a strong foundation for a national campaign.Yes, it’s true – to echo Ronald Reagan’s quip about the Democrats – that Liz Cheney did not leave the Republican party; the party left her.But the Fateful Tale of Liz Cheney is not about whether the Trumpist fever will ever break on the right wingnut fringe of American politics. It’s not a measure of whether Trump is stronger or weaker, closer to prison or the presidency.This story is about the animating nature of Trumpism: the lifeblood of the cult itself. It may have no principle or purpose, but it sure knows how to keep itself busy.In a traditional cult, public adoration of the iconic leader might be enough to keep the mob together. And yes there are plenty of grotesquely Trumpy memes polluting the internet.But this curiously pigmented icon represents a perpetual test for his loving fans and the elected officials who pander to them. Beyond the hush money to porn stars, there is the cozying up to foreign dictators and the nuclear secrets in his basement. Ideology and consistency are almost entirely absent.If you stand for nothing, what are your followers to stand behind?Trump is the least lawful lover of law and order. He is both pro-choice and anti-abortion, pro-outsourcing to China and anti-trade with China, a hawk against Iran and a dove towards Russia, an American nationalist who somehow marries foreigners and buries them on his golf course.This presents something of a challenge to the lickspittles who follow him. You can wait for the latest pronouncement and endorsement, but it’s hard to show your undying enthusiasm for such an unprincipled, unpredictable and untruthful man.That’s why every good cult of personality needs more than a test of loyalty. It desperately needs a good purge. It lives and breathes with the energy of the eternal hunt for the enemy within.Mussolini purged tens of thousands of Italians from his fascist party in the middle of the war for transgressions that ranged from refusing to join his militias to being only lukewarm in enthusiasm for the little man. Peron embarked on a purge of his own party around the same time in Argentina, before his Peronist successors extended the purge in their dirty war against leftists a few decades later.It’s not enough just to love the great leader. You need to demonstrate that love by finding your secret enemies and expunging them from the cult.That’s how a charlatan like Harriet Hageman can seek redemption in Wyoming. Just six years ago, Hageman was – like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and the rest of those principled, family values conservatives – disgusted by Donald Trump.She fought hard to stop his nomination, well after he had won the primary contests of 2016. The party would be weakened, she argued, by “somebody who is racist and xenophobic”. Now she says he is “the greatest president of my lifetime”.At this rate, there won’t be enough superlatives to shower on the DeSantis administration.It’s no coincidence that the power of the purge was a feature of Trump’s time in office. According to Jared Kushner’s execrable new memoir, Breaking History, he was forced to purge several figures in Trump’s inner circle of hell, including a couple of chiefs of staff, a few political strategists and a secretary of state.This is something of a travesty for the true Trumpists, such as Peter Navarro, a trade adviser whose grasp of rational thought is as shaky as his grasp of international economics. Navarro describes Kushner as the true rat in the kitchen, or as he puts it, a “run-of-the-mill liberal New York Democrat with a worldview totally orthogonal to the president he was supposed to serve”.The great orthogonal irony of the purging of Liz Cheney is that this kind of sack-based ferret fight was perfected by one Dick Cheney during the previous Republican presidency. It was old man Cheney whose cabal of loyalists did so much to undermine the technocratic Republican establishment so that he could happily invade Iraq in a cakewalk. That was before they turned on one another for their sheer incompetence.Party purges are hard to sustain without a Stalinist grip on power. Instead they tend to consume themselves in the shape of a circular firing squad.Say what you like about Trump’s threat to democracy, but right now the purger-in-chief is consumed with uncovering the rat who told the world about his secret stash of nuclear secrets.It could have been the Secret Service. It could have been the domestic help. Or it could be someone even closer to Trump.One thing is clear: the purge that ended Liz Cheney must not stop in Wyoming. For the sake of our democracy, it needs to go all the way to Mar-a-Lago.People say there’s an old New York Democrat down there who doesn’t believe half the things that come out of his own mouth.
      Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionLiz CheneyDonald TrumpDonald Trump JrRepublicanscommentReuse this content More

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      What will it mean for Trump – and Biden – if Liz Cheney runs in 2024?

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      What will it mean for Trump – and Biden – if Liz Cheney runs in 2024?Trump Republican adversary could make a symbolic impact in the ‘moderate’ party lane – but she could also take votes from Biden When Liz Cheney left the podium at a Wyoming ranch on Tuesday night, clapped and cheered by supporters, a Tom Petty song boomed out beneath the Teton mountains: “Well, I won’t back down / No, I won’t back down / You could stand me up at the gates of hell / But I won’t back down.”The woman who has emerged as Donald Trump’s most implacable Republican adversary had suffered a landslide defeat in a primary election to decide Wyoming’s only seat in the US House of Representatives.But unlike the former president, who loves to play victim, Cheney refused to dwell in political martyrdom after her act of self-sacrifice. In a 15-minute speech beside a dozen hay bales, a red vintage Chevrolet truck and four US national flags, she made clear that, while Trump had won the battle, the war for the soul of the party rages on.“This primary election is over,” Cheney acknowledged to a crowd that, with aching symbolism, included her father, former vice-president Dick Cheney. “But now the real work begins.”She invoked Abraham Lincoln, who lost congressional elections before ascending to the presidency and preserving the union. The vice-chair of the congressional January 6 committee warned that Trump and his enablers pose an existential threat to democracy and urged Americans of all stripes to unite.To many in the crowd – who had wined and dined in a hospitality tent with a country and western band for entertainment – it sounded awfully like the launch of a presidential campaign.Heath Mayo, 32, a lawyer, said: “On the question about the future of the party, there are few people making an argument counter to the prevailing Trumpism argument. She’s the only one that can make it. I hope she runs for president in 2024. She needs to be on that stage making that argument again, even if she loses. Keep making the argument.”Carol Adelman, 76, who hired a 22-year-old Cheney for the US Agency for International Development, said that “of course” she would like see Cheney run for the White House in 2024. Alan Reid, 60, who works in finance, agreed: “Who else? Who’s better? I don’t see anybody from any party that shows the leadership that Liz shows.”Cheney’s political future became a little clearer on Wednesday when she launched a leadership political action committee with the name “The Great Task”. Her spokesperson told the Politico website: “In coming weeks, Liz will be launching an organization to educate the American people about the ongoing threat to our Republic.”In a TV interview, Cheney confirmed that she is “thinking about” a run for president in 2024 and will make decision “in the coming months”.As the fall of the Cheney dynasty in Wyoming demonstrated, she would stand almost no chance of winning a Republican primary. But if the field is crowded and divided, for example between Trump, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and former vice-president Mike Pence, she could make a symbolic impact in the “moderate” lane.And as the January 6 hearings have shown, Cheney would relish nothing more than standing on a debate stage with Trump and prosecuting the case against him directly in prime time.Alternatively, the three-time congresswoman could run as an independent candidate in the general election. This could peel crucial moderate votes away from Trump in battleground states, helping his Democratic opponent, presumably President Joe Biden.But there might also be a danger that she would take votes from Biden, in particular those crossover Republicans who supported him in 2020 because of their hostility to Trump. Democrats would be anxious to avoid a repeat of 2000 when the third party “spoiler” Ralph Nader was blamed for costing Al Gore the election.Cheney, who has vowed to do whatever it takes to keep Trump out of the Oval Office, would be equally wary of such a scenario unless, as some critics suspect, ambition and ego are competing with her nobler impulses.Robert Talisse, an expert in contemporary political philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, wrote in an email: “If Cheney seeks the GOP nomination against Trump, she’ll be crushed. If Trump’s not seeking the nomination, he’ll still get to select the nominee.“If she runs as an independent against Trump, she’ll probably siphon off a significant number of conservative voters who won’t be able to bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, but also can’t bring themselves to vote for Trump.”The calculation would take place in the context that reports of Trump’s weakening grip on the Republican party have been greatly exaggerated. She is one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him: eight have lost their primary or retired, while only two stand a chance of surviving to the next Congress.Indeed, as Cheney exits the stage, at least for now, Sarah Palin, who paved the way for Trump, is making a comeback. On Tuesday, with his endorsement, she advanced to the November general election in the race for Alaska’s lone House seat. The journeys of these two fiftysomething women neatly sum up where the Republican party is at.But as Cheney noted in her remarks, pro-Trump election deniers are rising all over the country. It has proved a winning formula in primaries that reward the loudest voices but could yet backfire on the party in the midterm elections, where centrist voters are put off by extremism. Republicans may blow their chances in the Senate with several radical candidates who are heavy on celebrity but light on gravitas.For now, Trump will feel that Tuesday demonstrated that revenge is a dish best served Maga. But Adam Kinzinger, Cheney’s Republican colleague on the January 6 committee, is confident that she will not yield. Echoing Tom Petty, he told the MSNBC network: “She’s very determined, very dogged, and she will chase Donald Trump to the gates of hell.”TopicsLiz CheneyUS politicsRepublicansUS elections 2024US midterm elections 2022analysisReuse this content More