Liz Cheney

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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
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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

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      Harriet Hageman: who is the Republican who beat Liz Cheney?

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      Harriet Hageman: who is the Republican who beat Liz Cheney?The lawyer appears to be the ideal candidate to carry Trump’s rightwing banner into the midterms – but she hasn’t always been aboard his train A conservative lawyer with a passion for thwarting environmentalists, Harriet Hageman would appear to be an ideal candidate to carry Donald Trump’s rightwing banner into November’s midterm elections.On Tuesday night she beat the incumbent and member of Wyoming’s political royalty, Liz Cheney, for the thinly populated western state’s solitary seat in the US House of Representatives.Liz Cheney considers run for president after Republican primary defeatRead moreAfter trouncing Cheney, Trump’s most vocal critic within the Republican party, Hageman, 59, has a clear run at election success. In an overwhelmingly red state, Cheney defeated her Democratic challenger in 2020 by a margin of almost three votes to one.Hageman, however, has not always been such an enthusiastic passenger aboard the Trump train.Her stance has shifted from calling him “the weakest candidate” in the 2016 primaries, when she attempted to help maneuver the Texas senator Ted Cruz into the Republican presidential nomination, to “the greatest president of my lifetime” when she eagerly embraced Trump’s endorsement as his chosen candidate to topple Cheney, his latest bete noire.Neither is this her first foray into politics. She was a losing candidate in Wyoming’s 2018 contest for state governor, finishing a distant third to the eventual winner, Mark Gordon, and one other in the Republican primary, with barely 20% of the vote.Hageman’s political positions are rooted in the minutiae of her career as a trial lawyer representing Wyoming’s ranchers, and advocating for energy industries against federal protections for water, land and the endangered gray wolf.A 1989 graduate of the University of Wyoming’s college of law, her most successful case, according to the New York Times, was persuading a judge in 2003 to block regulations from Bill Clinton’s presidency protecting millions of acres of national forests from road-building, mining and other development.She is a vocal supporter of the fossil fuel industry, telling supporters at a campaign event earlier this month that coal was an “affordable, clean, acceptable resource that we all should be using”.She has previously also angered activist groups including Defenders of the Wild for her positions on endangered species.In 2017, as an attorney for the ultra-conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation, she praised a US appeals court for cutting through “emotional arguments” and upholding the delisting of gray wolves.The following year, the Sierra Club accused Wyoming of “waging a war” on wolves through hunting and allowing a “scorched earth” policy that threatened the species’ recovery from near-oblivion.Hageman was late in her campaign in converting to Trump’s false assertion that his 2020 election defeat by Joe Biden was fraudulent.In her victory speech on Tuesday night, she said: “Wyoming has spoken on behalf of everyone who is concerned that the game is becoming more and more rigged against them.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022WyomingUS politicsRepublicansDonald TrumpLiz CheneyfeaturesReuse this content More