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      Republicans' Overthrow of Cheney Creates New Problems for Party

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      As the party ties itself ever tighter to Trumpism, some Republicans worry about the implications for 2022 and far beyond. “I don’t think it’s a healthy moment for the party,” said one congressman.WASHINGTON — As she arrived at the Capitol on Wednesday morning to meet her fate, the soon-to-be deposed No. 3 Republican in the House hinted that she was already eyeing her next role.“The party is going to come back stronger, and I’m going to lead the effort to do it,” Representative Liz Cheney said as she stepped into an elevator and down to her demise.Less than an hour later, accompanied by the acclaimed photographer David Hume Kennerly, a family friend, Ms. Cheney returned to her office for an interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie. A sit-down with Bret Baier of Fox News was to follow.The message was unmistakable: Her colleagues may have stripped Ms. Cheney of her post as chair of the House Republican Conference, but they have effectively handed her a new platform and a new role as the leader of the small band of anti-Trump Republicans.Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader, was trying to address a short-term challenge, and in a narrow sense he was successful. He will no longer have to contend with a member of his leadership team who, much to the consternation of him and his colleagues, continues to condemn former President Donald J. Trump’s attempt to overturn the election.By excommunicating Ms. Cheney from her position, however, Republican lawmakers have created a host of new problems for their party.They have underscored the grip that the increasingly unpopular Mr. Trump retains on their ranks; demoralized Republicans and independents who want to move on from his tenure; and, perhaps most significantly, emboldened a household-name conservative to take her case against Trumpism far beyond a Capitol conference room.House Republicans knew what they had done as soon as they emerged from their meeting.“That’s what it looks like when somebody is running for president,” Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama muttered to colleagues as they quickly walked past Ms. Cheney during her remarks in front of the cameras.Other long-serving members, though, were more sobered by the divisions Mr. Trump is still sowing among Republicans and by the megaphone they had just handed Ms. Cheney.“I don’t think it’s a healthy moment for the party,” said Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, himself a former member of Republican leadership. “I do think it enhanced Liz’s stature and position in a way that furthers her message but to the disadvantage of the broader party.”Later Wednesday, Mr. McCarthy complicated matters, and confounded Republicans, by walking out of his first White House meeting with President Biden and pronouncing, “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election” — a statement starkly at odds with remarks made by numerous G.O.P. House lawmakers.The best Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma could say about the day was that “the election isn’t today” and “if something like this has to happen, you’d rather have it in an off-year.”These are strange times for Republicans.The traditional indicators suggest they have good reason to be optimistic about the midterm elections next year.The party that doesn’t control the White House usually picks up seats in a president’s first midterm elections, redistricting appears to favor Republicans, and a number of House Democrats are voting with their feet by retiring or running for statewide office.And in both chambers, the bar is low: Republicans need only six seats to win the House and a single seat to take back the Senate.The split screen can be agonizing for party stalwarts.“We’ll win the House, but I worry no good lessons are being learned about Jan. 6 and Trump’s ongoing effort to delegitimize the November elections,” said David Kochel, a veteran G.O.P. strategist.Representative Kevin McCarthy, left, the Republican leader, met with President Biden and other congressional leaders at the White House on Wednesday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesLast week, when the question of whether House Republicans should oust Ms. Cheney was crescendoing, Mr. McHenry and a leading redistricting strategist held a private Zoom call for donors and delivered some much-coveted good news.Unveiling an online map with each state’s expected changes in partisan composition, Mr. McHenry and the strategist, Adam Kincaid, predicted that Republicans could reclaim the House majority in 2022 on their gains from the reapportionment process alone.“The difficulty is to get members to see the long-term advantages we have rather than the short-term struggles and nastiness,” Mr. McHenry said.Most of his colleagues concluded that as long as Ms. Cheney was highlighting Mr. Trump’s conspiracy-mongering, and their own timidity, it would prove difficult to fully capitalize on those long-term advantages.Yet it’s Mr. Trump who, well past Mr. Biden’s first-100-day mark, continues to present Republicans with their most vexing problem. At issue: how to accommodate a former president who’s beloved by their core voters, more detested than ever among the broader electorate and consumed with his defeat and campaign of retribution.“Trump is the one who keeps raising it,” said Representative Fred Upton of Michigan, one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump in January.An NBC News poll last month found that Mr. Trump’s favorability rating was down to 32 percent among all voters and 14 percent among independents. Democrats can barely contain their delight over the disarray across the aisle.“Right now should be easiest time for the party out of power to unify in opposition,” Representative Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania said.As Ms. Cheney discovered, Republican leaders will continue to bow to Mr. Trump as long as they’re worried that their rank-and-file voters will punish them for disloyalty.This could prove ominous for Republicans in the most competitive districts and states: They may not be able to survive a primary without him, but they may prove unelectable if they’re linked too closely to him.“There’s not a lot of good options,” said Brendan Buck, a former House Republican leadership aide.Democrats offered a preview of what’s to come, particularly in more blue-leaning terrain, this week in Virginia. Republicans nominated Glenn Youngkin, a former private equity executive who has promoted “election integrity” measures and refused to say Mr. Biden had won the 2020 election fairly, as their standard-bearer for governor. In his statement responding to Mr. Youngkin’s nomination, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the likely Democratic nominee, mentioned Mr. Trump’s name three times in the first three sentences.Given Democrats’ slim control of the House and the newly drawn seats they will have to defend, the long shadow of Trumpism still may not be enough for the party to hold the House in 2022, as even the most hardened Democratic partisans acknowledge. “They have a strong likelihood of taking the House,” Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist, said of Republicans.Yet Mr. Begala argued that the vise Mr. Trump has Republicans in — by which most of them must align with him to win a primary — could brighten Democrats’ chances in the Senate. “Republicans did not cling to Hooverism,” he said. “This is a huge mistake.”In two of the races for the most competitive Democratic-held Senate seats, Arizona and Georgia, as well as a contest for the seat Republicans may have the most difficulty holding, Pennsylvania, Republicans are worried about Mr. Trump’s potential to rally support behind a candidate who can’t win the general election.The fear for some in the party is that 2022 echoes 2010, when Republicans took back the House but fell short in the Senate because they had elevated candidates who could not prevail in November.For many Republicans, though, what’s more alarming about the Cheney-Trump feud are the implications for the party’s long-term health.Whether Ms. Cheney seeks to fight back electorally — perhaps in a symbolic long-shot White House bid in 2024 — she’s plainly comfortable with political martyrdom.In fact, after largely voting with Mr. Trump over the last four years and trying to stay out of his line of fire, she seems to welcome his hatred and the opportunity it offers to change, or at least shame, the party.“If you want leaders who will enable and spread his destructive lies, I’m not your person; you have plenty of others to choose from,” she told her colleagues during the caucus meeting, according to a Republican in the room. “But I promise you this: After today, I will be leading the fight to restore our party and our nation to conservative principles, to defeating socialism, to defending our republic, to making the G.O.P. worthy again of being the party of Lincoln.”Mr. Trump’s most prominent defenders were not exactly worried.“She can run against the president, anyone can try to run against the president, but there’s no way he’s losing,” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio said after the meeting. “He’s going to win the Republican primary and he’s going to be president if he decides to run.”That’s exactly what worries some longtime Republicans, including a few in the House leadership — that Ms. Cheney’s new mission will only prod Mr. Trump to run again in 2024 to prove his hold on the party.For now, however, most rank-and-file congressional Republicans are planning to do what they’ve done since Mr. Trump emerged as a candidate nearly six years ago — very little.“His policy legacy is popular, but his personality obviously continues to be controversial,” said Representative Andy Barr of Kentucky, urging his party to focus on policy over persona before betraying a touch of self-awareness: “I’m not saying it’s easy.” More

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      Republicans Oust Cheney, Confirming Trump's Grasp on the Party

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      The Wyoming Republican gave an unrepentant final speech warning her colleagues that Donald J. Trump was leading them toward “destruction.” They booed and kicked her out.WASHINGTON — In a remarkable display of loyalty to Donald J. Trump, Republicans moved quickly to purge Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from House leadership on Wednesday, voting to oust their No. 3 for repudiating the former president’s election lies and holding him responsible for the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.The action, orchestrated by party leaders, came by voice vote during a raucous closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill that lasted just 15 minutes. With the votes stacked against her, Ms. Cheney made a defiant final speech rather than fight the ouster, warning that Republicans would follow Mr. Trump to their “destruction” by silencing dissent and refusing to reject the myth of a stolen election. She drew boos from her colleagues.After months of infighting that erupted after the violent end to his presidency, Republicans’ unceremonious ouster of Ms. Cheney, the scion of one of the nation’s most powerful conservative families, reflected how far the party has strayed from the policy principles and ideological touchstones that once defined it.The vote — and the manner in which it unfolded — also illustrated how Republican Party orthodoxy has come to be defined more by allegiance to a twice-impeached former president who prizes loyalty over all else than by a political agenda or a vision for governing.It came as more than 100 Republicans, including some prominent former elected officials, said they were considering breaking off and creating a third party if the G.O.P. failed to make major changes to extricate itself from Mr. Trump’s stranglehold and what it called “forces of conspiracy, division and despotism.”In an unrepentant last stand minutes before Republicans voted to strip her of her post, Ms. Cheney urged her colleagues not to “let the former president drag us backward,” according to a person familiar with the private comments. She said that if the party wanted a leader who would “enable and spread his destructive lies,” they should vote to remove her, because they had “plenty of others to choose from.”“I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office,” Ms. Cheney told reporters afterward. “We have seen the danger that he continues to provoke with his language. We have seen his lack of commitment and dedication to the Constitution.”Ms. Cheney’s public comments on Wednesday were an unmistakable jab at Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader.After the deadly assault on the Capitol by Mr. Trump’s supporters, Mr. McCarthy said the former president had been responsible for the violence and should have quickly called off rioters who were threatening the lives of members of Congress and his own vice president. But he quickly walked back the criticism, which had enraged Mr. Trump, and since then he has arguably done more than anyone else in his party to keep the former president in the fold.Most Republicans are aware of the iron grip Mr. Trump still holds on the party’s voters.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesAfter backing her in a previous leadership challenge, based on her vote to impeach Mr. Trump, Mr. McCarthy had come to see Ms. Cheney as a distraction and political liability in his quest to regain the House majority and become speaker.For her part, Ms. Cheney made it clear that she regarded her ouster as a historic mistake, and intended to continue to be vocal in her criticism. She invited David Hume Kennerly, a former official White House photographer under President Gerald R. Ford with deep ties to her family, to record the day behind the scenes, and defended her stance in a lengthy television interview with NBC less than an hour after the vote.It represented a remarkable arc for the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, a stalwart Republican who became a despised figure among the left for advancing the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, a falsehood that drove the nation to war.On Wednesday, though, Democrats lavished praise on Ms. Cheney for her refusal to spread a lie, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling her “a leader of great courage, patriotism and integrity,” and pointing to her removal as a troubling sign for Republicans.“For the sake of our democracy, reasonable Republicans across the country must take back their party,” Ms. Pelosi said.Behind closed doors in the Congressional Auditorium, a blue-carpeted, wood-paneled hall where Republicans sat in theater-style seats, Ms. Cheney took to the stage on Wednesday morning to make her parting plea, drawing jeers as she warned her colleagues about the consequences of their current course. She ended with a prayer quoting from the Book of John — “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” — and asking God to “help us to remember that democratic systems can fray and suddenly unravel.”“When they do,” she added, “they are gone forever.”Republicans made it clear they were not interested in those reminders.“She who thinks she leads, but has no followers, is only taking a walk,” said Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, as she made the motion to recall Ms. Cheney, according to a statement her office released afterward. “Liz, I’m afraid you’re a woman who is only taking a walk right now. You have lost your followers.”Republican leaders, who portrayed Ms. Cheney’s removal as a way to unify the party, declined to allow members to register a position on it.When Representative Tom Reed of New York, a moderate who has announced his retirement from Congress, rose to ask whether a recorded vote was allowed, he was told no. Mr. McCarthy had told his colleagues that a voice vote was important to show “unity,” and that it was time to “move forward” and look toward winning back the House, according to a person familiar with the remarks.When the time came, the ayes loudly drowned out the noes. The ouster was so swift that some Republicans were still trickling in to take their seats when Ms. Cheney strode up the center aisle to make her way to a bank of microphones and reporters waiting outside.Mr. McCarthy left without making a public statement, avoiding reporters altogether.At the White House later in the day, speaking to reporters after meeting with President Biden and other congressional leaders on infrastructure, Mr. McCarthy brushed off a question about comments by Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, whom he has anointed to succeed Ms. Cheney. Ms. Stefanik had echoed some of Mr. Trump’s false claims around widespread voter fraud.“I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election,” he said. “I think that is all over with.”Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, brushed off reporters’ questions about the party’s leadership after a meeting with President Biden at the White House.Doug Mills/The New York TimesRepresentative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who helped lead the charge against Ms. Cheney, said his case boiled down to a simple idea: “Can’t have a conference chair who recites Democrat talking points.”“It’s time to focus on stopping the Democrats and save the country,” he said.Mr. Trump weighed in Wednesday morning with statements attacking Ms. Cheney and cheering her removal, including one calling her “a poor leader, a major Democrat talking point, a warmonger and a person with absolutely no personality or heart.”Republicans who have styled themselves in his image also gloated openly, including the freshman Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, who treated Ms. Cheney to a mocking farewell on Twitter: “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye Liz Cheney.”For all the backbiting and turmoil, the episode has also exposed a party unmoored from its traditional policy prerogatives even as Republicans hope to retake control of the House in 2022. Aware of the iron grip Mr. Trump holds on their voters and donors, Mr. McCarthy and other Republicans have made the calculation that to retake the majority, they need the former president’s support — or at the very least, cannot afford to invoke his wrath.“The notion that 5 percent of the Republican Party is going to eviscerate the influence of President Trump in the party never was plausible,” said Representative Dan Bishop, Republican of North Carolina. “It’s not good for the Republican Party. It’s not good for the country.”But the episode has only called attention to the party’s devotion to Mr. Trump, its tolerance for authoritarian tendencies, and internal divisions between Trump acolytes and more traditional Republicans about how to win back the House in 2022. All those dynamics threaten to alienate independent and suburban voters, undercutting what otherwise appears to be a sterling opportunity for Republicans to reclaim the majority.Representative Ken Buck, a conservative Colorado Republican who did not vote to impeach Mr. Trump and voted against removing Ms. Cheney on Wednesday, warned that the party’s rush to purge dissenting voices was more politically dangerous than Republican leaders seemed to understand.“Liz didn’t agree with President Trump’s narrative, and she was canceled,” Mr. Buck said.“It’s time to focus on stopping the Democrats and save the country,” said Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who helped lead the charge against Ms. Cheney.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times“We have to deal with this narrative at some point,” he continued. “There are major issues — the border, spending. But to suggest that the American people in 2022 won’t consider the fact that we were unwilling to stand up to a narrative that the election was stolen, I think will be taken into consideration with their vote.”Republicans’ choice of replacement for Ms. Cheney has amplified that narrative. While party leaders have cast Ms. Stefanik as a unifying figure who will stick to the party script and stay focused on taking back the majority from Democrats, the New York Republican has resurrected Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and pledged to stand by him and “his focus on election integrity.”Ms. Stefanik’s hasty ascension has also sparked discontent among the hard-right members of the Republican conference, who are suspicious of her recent transformation from a mainstream moderate who was skeptical of Mr. Trump into one of his most vocal defenders. They have taken issue with her voting record, including voting against his signature 2017 tax cuts bill and his efforts to seize funding to build a border wall.“I think she’s a liberal,” Mr. Buck told reporters on Wednesday. But he added that with top Republicans and Mr. Trump uniting to support Ms. Stefanik, he doubted that anybody would want to risk a future chairmanship or leadership role should Republicans win back the House by taking her on. “Which I think is terribly unfortunate,” he added.Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, circulated a broadside on Tuesday accusing Ms. Stefanik of being insufficiently conservative and said top Republicans were making a mistake by rushing to elevate her. On Wednesday, he appeared to entertain running against her.“She should have an opponent,” Mr. Roy said.A vote on whether to elevate Ms. Stefanik to the No. 3 post is expected on Friday. More

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      Kevin McCarthy Claims G.O.P. Does Not Doubt Biden's 2020 Win

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      Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, suggested on Wednesday that members of his party recognized that President Biden had been legitimately elected, four months after he and 146 other Republicans voted to overturn the election results.“I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters after meeting with Mr. Biden and congressional leaders at the White House to discuss infrastructure spending. “I think that is all over with. We’re sitting here with the president today. So from that point of view, I don’t think that’s a problem.”In reality, numerous Republican lawmakers continue to question the legitimacy of the presidential election, in lock step with former President Donald J. Trump. Hours before Mr. McCarthy made his comments, he joined other House Republicans in voting to oust Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from her leadership position for repudiating the former president’s election lies and denouncing the lawmakers who encouraged them.Ms. Cheney’s likely replacement, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, recently claimed that election officials had engaged in “unprecedented, unconstitutional overreach” last year and expressed support for a Republican-led audit of the 2020 election results in Arizona, part of a continued effort to cast doubt on Mr. Biden’s victory there.Other congressional Republicans, including Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, have also endorsed the Arizona audit, and the lie that the election was stolen has fueled a barrage of restrictive voting bills across the country.In January, 147 Republican lawmakers voted against certifying Mr. Biden’s victory. When asked point-blank whether they believed Mr. Biden won the election legitimately, they rarely give a straight answer. And the few who have spoken out against efforts to delegitimize the election, or who have publicly criticized Mr. Trump’s actions related to the election — such as Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio — have been rebuked.Addressing her fellow Republicans before they voted to oust her Wednesday morning, Ms. Cheney said that they should not “let the former president drag us backward,” and that if they wanted a leader who would “enable and spread his destructive lies,” they should vote to remove her.They responded with jeers. More

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      House Republicans Oust a Defiant Liz Cheney for Her Repudiation of Trump’s Election Lies.

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      House Republicans purged Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from their leadership ranks on Wednesday, voting to oust their No. 3 for her refusal to stay quiet about Donald J. Trump’s election lies, in a remarkable takedown of one of their own that reflected the party’s intolerance for dissent and unswerving fealty to the former president.The action came by voice vote during a brief but raucous closed-door meeting in an auditorium on Capitol Hill on Wednesday morning, after Ms. Cheney made a defiant final speech that drew boos from her colleagues.In her parting remarks, Ms. Cheney urged Republicans not to “let the former president drag us backward,” according to a person familiar with the private comments who detailed them on condition of anonymity. Ms. Cheney warned that Republicans were going down a path that would bring their “destruction,” and “possibly the destruction of our country,” the person said, adding that if the party wanted a leader who would “enable and spread his destructive lies,” they should vote to remove her.Republicans did just that, after greeting her speech with boos, according to two people present, speaking on the condition on anonymity to discuss an internal discussion. They ultimately opted not to hold a recorded vote, after Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, said that they should vote by voice to show unity.Emerging from the meeting, Ms. Cheney remained unremorseful, and said she was committed to doing “everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets near the Oval Office.”“We must go forward based on truth,” Ms. Cheney told reporters. “We cannot both embrace the big lie and embrace the Constitution.”The action came the day after Ms. Cheney had delivered a broadside on the House floor against Mr. Trump and the party leaders working to oust her, accusing them of being complicit in undermining the democratic system.Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming said she would not sit quietly as the party abandoned the rule of law.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesIn a scathing speech, Ms. Cheney said that the country was facing a “never seen before” threat of a former president who provoked the Capitol attack on Jan. 6 and who had “resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans that the election was stolen from him.”“Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar,” she said. “I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.”Mr. Trump weighed in on Wednesday morning as lawmakers were gathering to force Ms. Cheney out, saying he was looking forward to the ouster of a woman he called “a poor leader, a major Democrat talking point, a warmonger, and a person with absolutely no personality or heart.”Top Republicans have labored to avoid talking about the Capitol riot and have painted Ms. Cheney’s removal as a forward-looking move that would allow them to move past that day.“Each day spent relitigating the past is one day less we have to seize the future,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, wrote in a letter to party members on Monday.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesInstead, the episode has only called attention to the party’s devotion to Mr. Trump, its tolerance for authoritarianism, and internal divisions between more mainstream and conservative factions about how to win back the House in 2022. All of those dynamics threaten to alienate independent and suburban voters, thus undercutting what otherwise appears to be a sterling opportunity for Republicans to reclaim the majority.As a replacement for Ms. Cheney, Republican leaders have united behind Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a onetime moderate whose loyalty to Mr. Trump and backing for his false claims of election fraud have earned her broad support from the party’s rank and file that Ms. Cheney, a lifelong conservative, no longer commands. If Ms. Stefanik is elected this week to replace Ms. Cheney, as expected, the top three House Republican leadership posts will be held by lawmakers who voted not to certify President Biden’s victory in January. In recent days, however, some hard-right Republicans have attacked Ms. Stefanik as insufficiently conservative and suggested the party should consider someone else. More

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      In Liz Cheney vs. Donald Trump, Guess Who Won

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      Liz Cheney and Donald Trump in happier days.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressI asked a Republican who spent time with Representative Liz Cheney last week what her thinking was in speaking out so forcefully, so unyieldingly, against Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, despite knowing that this might cost the three-term congresswoman her political career.“It’s pretty simple,” this person, who requested anonymity in order to speak openly, told me. “She decided she’s going to stay on the right side of her conscience.”“She wasn’t going to lie to stay in leadership,” he added. “If telling the truth was intolerable, she knew she wasn’t going to keep her leadership position.”Ms. Cheney was certainly right about that. Early on Wednesday, House Republicans ousted her from her position as the chairman of the House Republican conference, the No. 3 leadership slot, one her father held in the late 1980s. The next priority of Mr. Trump and MAGA world? To defeat her in a primary in 2022.The takedown of Representative Cheney was not an “inflection point,” as some have called it. It was the opposite — the latest (but it won’t be the last) confirmation that the Republican Party is diseased and dangerous, increasingly subversive and illiberal, caught in the grip of what Ms. Cheney described in The Washington Post as the “anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”“Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar,” Ms. Cheney, unbroken and unbowed, said in a speech on the House floor Tuesday night. “I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.” Her Republican colleagues, cowardly and classless, cleared the chamber as she began her remarks. But they can’t escape her searing indictment.Declaring fealty to a lie has become the single most important test of loyalty in today’s Republican Party. Everyone recognizes this, but from time to time we need to stop to register its true significance.“It’s a real sickness that is infecting the party at every level,” Barbara Comstock, a Republican who represented Virginia’s 10th Congressional District before Mr. Trump’s unpopularity in the suburbs sunk her chances in the 2018 election, told Lisa Lerer of The Times. “We’re just going to say that black is white now.”This should come as a surprise to exactly no one. For more than five years, the Republican Party and its leading media propagandists embraced and championed Mr. Trump’s mendacities, conspiracy theories and sociopathic tendencies. As a result, their brains became rewired, at least metaphorically speaking; the constant accommodation Republicans made to Mr. Trump caused significant cognitive distortions.As a result, they have detached themselves from reality. The expectation that once Mr. Trump left office the Republican Party would become a normal party again was wishful thinking from the beginning. There is no post-Trump fight for the “soul” of the Republican Party. At least for now, that battle has been decided.Liz Cheney understands that only a decisive break with Mr. Trump will stop the continuing moral ruination of the Republican Party. But her break with the former president, while courageous, came too late to change anything. She is trying to rally an army that doesn’t exist.It doesn’t exist for two reasons. The first is that many grass-roots Republicans, having been fed a steady diet of fabrications and disinformation for the last half-decade, are deluded. They believe Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories, in large measure because they want to believe them, and now they are addicted to them. And addictions are hard to break.The latest CNN/SSRS survey found that 70 percent of Republicans believe the false allegation that Joe Biden did not defeat Mr. Trump; a mere 23 percent said Mr. Biden won, despite the Trump administration’s admission that “the November 3 election was the most secure in American history.”These Republicans believe they are truth-tellers and patriots, sentries at freedom’s gate. They are utterly sincere; they are also quite dangerous. They are taking a sledgehammer to pillars of American democracy: confidence in the legitimacy of our elections, the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power.Most Republican members of Congress, on the other hand, don’t believe President Biden was illegitimately elected. Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham aren’t deceived. They are play acting in ways that are unethical and cynical, but they are not stupid. They’re fully aware that the cancerous lies have metastasized — they each played a crucial role in spreading them, after all — and to refute those lies publicly would put targets on their backs.Many of the most influential figures in Republican politics have decided that breaking with Mr. Trump would so alienate the base of the party that it would make election victories impossible, at least for the foreseeable future. That’s essentially what Senator Graham was saying when he recently went on Fox News and posed this question to his Republican colleagues: “Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no.”This means that the new Republican establishment will accede to pretty much anything Mr. Trump demands in order to keep good relations with him. And we know what the former president’s main demand is — insisting he was cheated out of a second term.So we have reached the point where a member of one of the Republican Party’s leading families, a person of unquestioned conservative credentials, is now less popular with the Republican base and more reviled by the House leadership than the onetime QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene, who just before the Jan. 6 insurrection referred to that day as Republicans’ “1776 moment.”Ms. Cheney was stripped of her leadership post because she committed the unpardonable sin in 2021’s Republican Party: She spoke the truth about the legitimacy of the 2020 election results and refused to back down. Whatever she was before, she is a voice of conscience now, reminding her colleagues of their Faustian bargain with their peculiar Mephistopheles, Donald Trump. It enrages them even as it haunts them.Today the Republican Party is less a political party than a political freak show. It is being sustained by insidious lies. And people who love America, starting with conservatives, should say so. Otherwise, if the Republican Party’s downward spiral isn’t reversed, it will descend even further into a frightening world of illusion.Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      ‘Ignoring the Lie Emboldens the Liar’

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      Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherToday, Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House, is expected to be removed from her leadership position.Her role in the party has increasingly become untenable for many. Ms. Cheney has continued to speak out in the starkest of terms against President Donald Trump’s role in fomenting the Jan. 6 riots and the continued insistence that the 2020 election was stolen.In doing so, she has found herself on a lonely political island.We look at the factors behind her ouster and the new requirements for Republican leadership.On today’s episodeCatie Edmondson, a reporter in The New York Times’s Washington bureau.Representative Liz Cheney’s leadership role is embattled despite her conservative voting record and her status as a member of a Republican dynasty. Erin Schaff/The New York TimesBackground readingIn turning on Ms. Cheney, Republicans have bowed to Mr. Trump’s election lies.The Wyoming congresswoman challenged Republicans to turn away from Trump after Jan. 6. Instead, they turned on her.“History is watching.” Here are five key arguments from Ms. Cheney’s Washington Post opinion essay this month.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.The Daily is made by Theo Balcomb, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Hans Buetow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Bianca Giaever, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Alix Spiegel, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano and Soraya Shockley.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Laura Kim, Erica Futterman and Shreeya Sinha. More

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      In Virginia, a Fight Over the Suburbs in the Governor’s Race

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      Glenn Youngkin, a first-time candidate with vast wealth, will deliver a pro-business message intended to win over suburban voters. Democrats plan to portray him as a Trump devotee.Republican voters’ choice for Virginia governor, a deep-pocketed first-time candidate who plans to run as a business-friendly political outsider, will offer a major test in the post-Trump era of the party’s ability to win back suburban voters who have fled over the past four years.Glenn Youngkin, who won the Republican nomination on Monday night, had walked a line between his party’s Trump-centric base and appeals to business interests in a crowded field, defeating two rivals who more aggressively courted supporters of former President Donald J. Trump.After years of Democratic advances in the state thanks to suburban voters who adamantly rejected anyone linked to the Trump G.O.P., Mr. Youngkin, 54, a former private equity executive, has warned that “we can kiss our business environment away” if Democrats retain power in Richmond.During the nominating fight, he criticized the current governor, Ralph Northam, and his predecessor, Terry McAuliffe, for creating business conditions that cause college-educated residents (read: suburbanites) to move away.But even as Mr. Youngkin tries to focus on kitchen-table issues, Democrats signaled on Tuesday they would aggressively seek to fuse the nominee to Mr. Trump, by reminding voters of hard-line positions he took in fending off six Republican rivals — including on voting rights, Medicaid expansion and culture-war topics like critical race theory.Mr. McAuliffe, the polling leader for the Democratic nomination, said in a statement on Tuesday that Mr. Youngkin “spent his campaign fawning all over Donald Trump,” adding that he would “make it harder to vote” and be “a rubber stamp for the N.R.A.’s dangerous agenda.”Mr. Trump stayed out of the G.O.P. race while the field jockeyed for position, with Mr. Youngkin ultimately emerging as the winner after roughly 30,000 voters cast ranked-choice ballots at 39 locations around the state on Saturday. But the former president jumped in on Tuesday with an endorsement of Mr. Youngkin, although it was primarily an attack on Mr. McAuliffe, a former fund-raiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton, who as a private citizen was in business with Chinese investors.“Virginia doesn’t need the Clintons or the Communist Chinese running the state,” Mr. Trump said, “so say no to Terry McAuliffe, and yes to Patriot Glenn Youngkin!”But Mr. Youngkin might consider such effusions unwelcome in a state Mr. Trump lost by 10 percentage points in November. Mr. Youngkin, 54, was raised in Virginia Beach and has lived in Northern Virginia for 25 years. He defeated two rivals who appealed more directly to the Trump-centric base: Pete Snyder, a technology entrepreneur, and State Senator Amanda Chase, a hard-right supporter of the former president who was censured in a bipartisan vote of the state’s General Assembly for referring to the rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 as “patriots.”Mr. Youngkin’s appeal to Republicans was at least twofold: He is a political blank slate, with no record in elected office for Democrats to attack. And his private wealth — reportedly more than $200 million after he retired as co-chief executive of the Carlyle Group — will allow him to compete financially against Mr. McAuliffe, a prolific fund-raiser.Mr. McAuliffe raised $36 million for his 2013 election campaign and more than $9.9 million during the past two years, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Mr. Youngkin has already spent $5.5 million of his own money since entering the race in late January.Republicans have not won a statewide election since 2009, and Democratic dominance of the once-purple state accelerated under Mr. Trump, with Democrats taking control of both houses of the General Assembly in 2020 for the first time in a generation.They used their dominance of state government to pass sweeping progressive priorities like more restrictive gun laws and a ban on capital punishment.But the trend is not irreversible, as some election analysts see it. In the pre-Trump era, Mr. McAuliffe won his first governor’s race in 2013 by just 2.5 percentage points against a hard-right conservative, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II. Rural regions of southern and southwest Virginia have grown redder even as the populous northern and central suburbs are bluer. There is a theoretical path to statewide Republican victory for a candidate who rouses rural Trump voters, appeals to suburban independents and benefits from lower overall Democratic turnout without Mr. Trump as a motivator.And Mr. Youngkin has signaled that he would run against the very legislation Democrats have passed, accusing his opponents of pushing Virginia far to the left of most voters’ preferences.Mr. McAuliffe may be the clear polling leader for the Democrats, but he is conspicuous as the lone white candidate in a field with three Black contenders, in a party whose base is heavily African-American.In four years in office, Mr. McAuliffe governed as a pro-business Democrat, and he began his campaign for a second term in December on a pro-education note, pledging to raise teacher pay and offer universal pre-K. (Virginia governors cannot serve two consecutive terms.)Though Mr. Youngkin is not as unrelenting a supporter of Mr. Trump as some of his Republican opponents, he declined the chance at a recent candidates’ forum to distance himself from Mr. Trump’s lies about a rigged 2020 election. Asked about “voter integrity,” he launched into a five-point plan to “restore our trust in our election process.”During the nominating race, he also pledged to restore a state voter identification law and to replace the entire state board of education. He also said he would create the “1776 Project,” an apparent reference to a curriculum of patriotic education proposed by a commission established under Mr. Trump that has been derided by mainstream historians.Last month, Mr. Youngkin said it was “a sad thing” that Virginia had expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, though he acknowledged the clock couldn’t be turned back.As Mr. Youngkin likely spends generously on TV ads to forge a more soft-focus identity as a pro-business outsider, Democrats are sure to try to keep his earlier positions in front of voters.“Make no state mistake about it, we are going to point out every step of the way the right-wing extremism of Glenn Youngkin,” Susan Swecker, chair of the Virginia Democrats, said on Tuesday. More