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      Trump Still Has Iron Grip on Republicans

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      The vilification of Liz Cheney and a bizarre vote recount in Arizona showed the damage from his assault on a bedrock of democracy: election integrity.Locked out of Facebook, marooned in Mar-a-Lago and mocked for an amateurish new website, Donald J. Trump remained largely out of public sight this week. Yet the Republican Party’s capitulation to the former president became clearer than ever, as did the damage to American politics he has caused with his lie that the election was stolen from him.In Washington, Republicans moved to strip Representative Liz Cheney of her House leadership position, a punishment for denouncing Mr. Trump’s false claims of voter fraud as a threat to democracy. Lawmakers in Florida and Texas advanced sweeping new measures that would curtail voting, echoing the fictional narrative from Mr. Trump and his allies that the electoral system was rigged against him. And in Arizona, the state Republican Party started a bizarre re-examination of the November election results that involved searching for traces of bamboo in last year’s ballots.The churning dramas cast into sharp relief the extent to which the nation, six months after the election, is still struggling with the consequences of an assault by a losing presidential candidate on a bedrock principle of American democracy: that the nation’s elections are legitimate.They also provided stark evidence that the former president has not only managed to squelch any dissent within his party but has also persuaded most of the G.O.P. to make a gigantic bet: that the surest way to regain power is to embrace his pugilistic style, racial divisiveness and beyond-the-pale conspiracy theories rather than to court the suburban swing voters who cost the party the White House and who might be looking for substantive policies on the pandemic, the economy and other issues. The loyalty to the former president persists despite his role in inciting his supporters ahead of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, with his adherents either ignoring, redefining or in some cases tacitly accepting the deadly attack on Congress.“We’ve just gotten so far afield from any sane construction,” said Barbara Comstock, a longtime party official who was swept out of her suburban Virginia congressional seat in the 2018 midterm backlash to Mr. Trump. “It’s a real sickness that is infecting the party at every level. We’re just going to say that black is white now.”Yet as Republicans wrap themselves in the fantasy of a stolen election, Democrats are anchored in the day-to-day business of governing a nation that is still struggling to emerge from a deadly pandemic.Strategists from both parties say that discordant dynamic — two parties operating in two different realities — is likely to define the country’s politics for years to come.At the same time, President Biden faces a broader challenge: what to do about the large segment of the public that doubts his legitimacy and a Republican Party courting the support of that segment by pushing bills that would restrict voting and perhaps further undermine faith in future elections. A CNN poll released last week found that nearly a third of Americans, including 70 percent of Republicans, said Biden had not legitimately won enough votes to win the presidency.Representative Liz Cheney, the third-ranking Republican in the House, is expected to be removed from her leadership post next week after speaking out against Mr. Trump.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesWhite House aides say Mr. Biden believes that the best way to restore some faith in the democratic process is demonstrating that government can deliver tangible benefits — whether vaccines or economic stimulus checks — to voters.Dan Sena, a Democratic strategist who oversaw the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s strategy to win the House during the last midterm elections, said the Republican focus on cultural issues, like bans on transgender athletes, was a “win-win” for his party. Many Democrats will face only scattershot attacks on their agenda while continuing to run against the polarizing rhetoric of Mr. Trump, which helped the party flip suburban swing districts in 2018 and 2020.“I would much rather have a record of siding with Americans on recovery,” Mr. Sena said. “Which tale do the American public want to listen to — what Democrats have done to get the country moving again or Donald Trump and his culture war?”Mr. Biden predicted during the campaign that Republicans would have an “epiphany” once Mr. Trump was gone and would revert to being the party he knew during his decades in the Senate. When asked about Republicans this week, Mr. Biden lamented that he didn’t understand them anymore and appeared slightly flummoxed about the “mini-revolution” in their ranks.“I think the Republicans are further away from trying to figure out who they are and what they stand for than I thought they would be at this point,” he said.But for much of the past week, Republicans put on vivid display exactly what they now stand for: Trumpism. Many have adopted his approach of courting white grievance with racist statements, and Republican-led legislatures across the country are pushing through restrictions that would curtail voting access in ways that disproportionally impact voters of color. There are also high-stakes electoral considerations. With his deeply polarizing style, Mr. Trump motivated his base and his detractors alike, pushing both parties to record voter turnout in the 2020 election. His total of 74 million votes was the second-highest ever, behind only Mr. Biden’s 81 million, and Mr. Trump has shown an ability to turn his political supporters against any Republican who opposes him.That has left Republicans convinced that they must display unwavering fealty to a departed president to retain the voters he won over. “I would just say to my Republican colleagues: Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no,” Senator Lindsey Graham said in an interview on Fox News this week. “I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”In some ways, the former president is more diminished than ever. Defeated at the polls, he spends his time at his Florida resort playing golf and entertaining visitors. He lacks the bully pulpit of the presidency, has been banished from Twitter and failed this week to have his account restored by Facebook. He left office with his approval rating below 40 percent, the lowest final first-term rating for any president since Jimmy Carter in 1979.Still, his dominance over Republicans is reflected from Congress to statehouses. Local and federal lawmakers who have pushed their party to accept the results of the election, and thus Mr. Trump’s loss, have faced a steady drumbeat of censure and primary challenges. Those threats appear to be having an impact: The small number of Republican officials who have been critical of Mr. Trump in the past, including the 10 who voted for his impeachment in February, remained largely silent this week, refusing interview requests and offering little public support for Ms. Cheney.Her likely replacement, Representative Elise Stefanik, publicly promoted herself for the post and moved to establish her Trump bona fides by lending credence to his baseless voter fraud claims in interviews with hard-right supporters of the former president.The state Republican Party in Arizona undertook a quixotic re-examination of the November election results.Pool photo by Matt YorkThe focus on the election has crowded out nearly any discussion of policy or party orthodoxy. The Heritage Action scorecard, which rates lawmakers on their conservative voting records, awarded Ms. Cheney a lifetime score of 82 percent. Ms. Stefanik, who has a more moderate voting record but is a far more vocal supporter of the former president, scored 52 percent.Ms. Stefanik and many other Republican leaders are betting that the path to keeping the electoral gains of the Trump era lies in stoking their base with the populist politics that are central to the president’s brand, even if they repel swing voters.After months of being fed lies about the election by the conservative news media, much of the party has come to embrace them as true. Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who has been conducting focus groups of Trump voters for years, said that since the election she had found an increased openness to what she calls “QAnon curious,” a willingness to entertain conspiracy theories about stolen elections and a deep state. “A lot of these base voters are living in a post-truth nihilism where you believe in nothing and think that everything might be untrue,” said Ms. Longwell, who opposed Mr. Trump. Some Republican strategists worry that the party is missing opportunities to attack Mr. Biden, who has proposed the most sweeping spending and tax plans in generations.“Republicans need to go back to kitchen-table issues that voters really care about, sprinkle in a little culture here and there but not get carried away,” said Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist who helped crush right-wing populists in past elections. “And some of them are making an industry out of getting carried away.”While clinging to Mr. Trump could help the party increase turnout among its base, Republicans like Ms. Comstock argue that such a strategy will damage the party with crucial demographics, including younger voters, voters of color, women and suburbanites. Already, intraparty fights are emerging in nascent primaries as candidates accuse each other of disloyalty to the former president. Many party leaders fear that could result in hard-right candidates’ emerging victorious and eventually losing general elections in conservative states where Republicans should prevail, like Missouri and Ohio.“To declare Trump the winner of a shrinking minority, that’s not a territory you want to head up,” Ms. Comstock said. “The future of the party is not going to be some 70-year-old man talking in the mirror at Mar-a-Lago and having all these sycophants come down and do the limbo to get his approval.”Yet those who have objected to Mr. Trump — and paid the price — say there’s little political incentive to pushing against the tide. Criticizing Mr. Trump, or even defending those who do, can leave elected officials in a kind of political no man’s land: seen as traitorous to Republican voters but still too conservative on other issues to be accepted by Democrats and independents.“It’s becoming increasingly difficult, it seems, for people to go out on the stump and defend somebody like Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney,” former Senator Jeff Flake, who endorsed Mr. Biden and was censured by the Arizona Republican Party this year, said during a panel appearance at Harvard this week. “About 70 percent of Republicans probably genuinely believe that the election was stolen, and that’s debilitating. It really is.” More

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      Liz Cheney Refuses to Lie, So Elise Stefanik Steps Up

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      Even by the standards of the Republican Party’s descent into Trumpian nihilism, the latest bloodletting within the ranks of its congressional leadership is gripping — the car crash next to the dumpster fire that you can’t look away from.House Republicans are on track next week to oust Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming as conference chairwoman, the third-highest position in the conference. Ms. Cheney is being purged for her stubborn refusal to accept — much less peddle — the dangerous, crackpot lie that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. In today’s G.O.P., fealty to the defeated president’s false allegation of electoral fraud is the ultimate litmus test.Ms. Cheney has not simply failed this test, repeatedly — she brandishes her defiance like a weapon.On Monday, Mr. Trump issued a proclamation: “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!” Ms. Cheney fired back on Twitter (from which the former president is still banned): “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”“The Republican Party is at a turning point,” she warned in a May 5 opinion piece in The Washington Post, “and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”Clearly, such apostasy cannot stand.But with a House leadership dominated by white men, and a party plagued by a longstanding gender gap, Republican lawmakers recognize the potential risk of replacing their top-ranking woman with another white guy. Such bad optics. So it is that Republican House leaders have been whipping votes to install another woman in the job, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York.Unlike Ms. Cheney, Ms. Stefanik is happy — make that eager — to go along with Mr. Trump’s pernicious election-fraud fiction. Just this week, she sat down for interviews with Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s onetime political guru, and Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump aide, to praise the former president and suggest that there are many, many questions that still need to be answered about the outcome. Among other Trumpist talking points, she accused judicial officers in Pennsylvania of “unconstitutional overreach,” and she endorsed the sketchy election audit that Republicans are conducting in Arizona.Ms. Stefanik is assumed to have more than enough votes lined up to replace Ms. Cheney. Her ascension is considered close to a done deal.Here’s where things really get awkward. Aside from her Trump bootlicking, Ms. Stefanik is a terrible pick to help lead House Republicans, with both an ideology and a political style ill-suited to the conservative zeitgeist. At least they were until recently. In aiming to swap out Ms. Cheney with Ms. Stefanik, Republican leaders are revealing — again — just how hollow their party has become and how far it has fallen.With her establishment pedigree and her neocon foreign policy views, Ms. Cheney may not be a perfect fit for today’s Republican Party, but she is a rock-ribbed conservative who has for years fought fiercely in the party trenches. Like her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, she is tough and aggressive, and she delights in lobbing partisan bombs at Democrats. She is pro-torture and anti-abortion. In other words, she has long been the kind of Republican that Democrats love to hate.Ms. Stefanik, on the other hand … Most of America had never heard of the New York lawmaker before her emergence as a passionate Trump defender during his first impeachment. Her toadiness has only grown since, earning ever more love from Mr. Trump. On Wednesday, he endorsed her for conference chairwoman.But before all that, Ms. Stefanik was seen as an exemplar of the kinder, gentler future of the Republican Party. Elected in 2014 at age 30, the polished, media-savvy Harvard alumna was a fresh, friendly, moderate face that many hoped would help the G.O.P. shed its image as a bunch of angry old white guys. Pro-business and uninterested in culture warring, she fit in well with the party’s establishment wing. Her first political job was in the Bush 43 White House. In 2017, she was elected co-chair of the Tuesday Group (since renamed the Republican Governance Group), a caucus of moderate, centrist House Republicans.Ms. Stefanik’s voting record reflects this brand. She has a measly 44 percent lifetime score from the American Conservative Union — compared to Ms. Cheney’s 78 percent — and a 56 percent from the conservative Heritage Action, versus Ms. Cheney’s 82 percent. Ms. Stefanik’s ratings from conservative groups like FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth are even lower (37 percent and 35 percent), and both organizations have come out against her joining leadership. During Mr. Trump’s presidency, Ms. Stefanik voted with him 77.7 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight, but Ms. Cheney did 92.9 percent of the time.One of Ms. Stefanik’s top priorities has been to improve her party’s image with women and, more specifically, to get more Republican women elected. Her PAC is credited with having contributed to the victories of several women in this year’s freshman House class. Her efforts, which can run up against the G.O.P.’s professed disdain for identity politics, have occasionally put off some party brethren.Ms. Stefanik is, in short, the kind of Republican that conservatives generally love to hate.Despite the seal of approval from Mr. Trump and some congressional leaders, not everyone is thrilled by the idea of Ms. Stefanik’s likely promotion. Some of her male colleagues have grumped that they were not even considered for the post because of their gender. The conference vice chair, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, has reportedly been griping about the “coronation.”Trickier still, some hard-core MAGA loyalists suspect Ms. Stefanik of being a pretender — a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” as one far-right site put it — and are raising a stink about her voting record and political background. Lou Dobbs, the deep-MAGA former TV host, declared her a RINO — that is, a Republican in name only. Her more creative critics at the website Revolver coined a fresh term for her: TINO — Trumpist in name only. They also dubbed her “another neocon establishment twit.”So much for Republican unity.To be fair, having sold their soul to Mr. Trump, Republican lawmakers cannot allow Ms. Cheney to remain in leadership. Unlike most of her colleagues, she refuses to let the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol fade from memory, pretend it was no big deal or falsely claim that it was perpetrated by lefty extremists. Every word out of her mouth is an indictment not merely of Mr. Trump but also of her fellow lawmakers’ degeneracy and opportunism.Ms. Stefanik, by contrast, is scrambling to reassure MAGA voters that she is worthy of their support. In addition to doubling down on election-fraud nonsense, she has been test-driving a more populist, own-the-libs persona, whining about “cancel culture” and “Trump derangement syndrome” and the anti-conservative bias of Big Tech.In other words, Ms. Stefanik is forsaking the ideology and the political brand that brought her to Congress as she grovels before the gold-plated altar of Trumpism. All this to impress the followers of a defeated president who would just as soon see the Republican Party burned to ash.In that sense, she may be a perfect leader for her House colleagues after all.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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      Stefanik Moves to Oust Cheney, Resurfacing False Election Claims

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      Republicans say Liz Cheney, their No. 3, is being targeted because she won’t stay quiet about Donald J. Trump’s election lies. Her would-be replacement is campaigning on them.WASHINGTON — As House Republicans have made the case for ousting Representative Liz Cheney, their No. 3, from their leadership ranks, they have insisted that it is not her repudiation of former President Donald J. Trump’s election lies that they find untenable, but her determination to be vocal about it.But on Thursday, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the Republican whom leaders have anointed as Ms. Cheney’s replacement in waiting, loudly resurrected his false narrative, citing “unprecedented, unconstitutional overreach” by election officials in 2020 and endorsing an audit in Arizona that has become the latest avenue for conservatives to try to cast doubt on the results.“It is important to stand up for these constitutional issues, and these are questions that are going to have to be answered before we head into the 2022 midterms,” Ms. Stefanik told Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former strategist, in the first of a pair of interviews on Thursday with hard-right acolytes of the former president.The comments, Ms. Stefanik’s first in public since she announced she was taking on Ms. Cheney, reflected how central the former president’s election lies have become to the Republican Party message, even as its leaders insist they are determined to move beyond them and focus on attacking Democrats as radical, big-spending socialists before the 2022 midterm elections.Far from staying quiet about the false election claims on Thursday, Ms. Stefanik effectively campaigned on them, describing Mr. Trump on Mr. Bannon’s show as the “strongest supporter of any president when it comes to standing up for the Constitution,” and asserting that Republicans would work with him as “one team.”“The job of the conference chair is to represent the majority of the House Republicans, and the vast majority of the House Republicans support President Trump, and they support his focus on election integrity and election security,” Ms. Stefanik later told Sebastian Gorka, a former adviser to Mr. Trump. The job, she said in an unmistakable jab at Ms. Cheney, “is not to attack members of the conference and attack President Trump.”While Ms. Stefanik avoided claiming outright that the election was stolen, she praised the Arizona audit, a Republican-led endeavor that critics in both parties have described as a blow to democratic norms and a political embarrassment, as “incredibly important.” She said recounting votes there and scrutinizing how Pennsylvania and other states administered the 2020 election were “valid, important questions and issues that the American people deserve policy proposals and answers on.”It was a stark contrast from Ms. Cheney, who has relentlessly upbraided the former president for falsely claiming the election was stolen and on Wednesday beseeched Republican lawmakers in a scathing opinion piece to excise him from the party. Ms. Cheney voted against her party’s efforts to invalidate the election results on Jan. 6, while Ms. Stefanik — like most House Republicans — voted to reject Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for President Biden.Some Republicans, including the hard-right lawmakers who led a charge to try to remove Ms. Cheney in February after she voted to impeach Mr. Trump, readily conceded that they were unwilling to tolerate dissent from their party leaders.“All the polling indicates that President Trump is still the titleholder,” Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said on Fox News. Ms. Cheney “can tell what her version of the truth is, but she can’t do it as the leader of the Republican Party in Congress.”For many Republicans, however, the calculation to boot Ms. Cheney, a strict conservative, in favor of Ms. Stefanik, who has a far more moderate voting record but has wholeheartedly embraced Mr. Trump, is more complicated.In interviews with lawmakers and party operatives, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss the internal turmoil, several expressed concern about the optics of purging the only female member of leadership and a daughter of a conservative dynasty for her resolve to call out Mr. Trump’s lies. They worried that the move to oust Ms. Cheney could spook donors who might chafe at sending money to Republicans so closely associated with the Jan. 6 riot, and ultimately voters who might be alienated by the party’s refusal to brook dissent.But they were also wrestling with the political downsides of keeping Ms. Cheney in her post, worried that they would continue to be forced to answer for her unyielding broadsides against the myth of a stolen election that many of their voters believe. Several lawmakers privately lamented her stubbornness and said they wished Ms. Cheney would focus solely on attacking Democrats.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the Republican whom leaders have annointed as Ms. Cheney’s replacement in waiting, has loudly resurrected Mr. Trump’s false election narrative.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesThat has been the approach taken by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, who was initially vocal in his criticism of Mr. Trump and support of Ms. Cheney, but more recently has refused to broach either subject.On Thursday, for the second day in a row, he sidestepped questions about Mr. Trump and Ms. Cheney, saying he was solely focused on challenging Mr. Biden and Democrats, and “looking forward — not backward.”“Members do not want to have to defend themselves against attacks from members of their own leadership team,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist and former House leadership aide. “The primary job of the House Republican Conference chair is to set up and facilitate the weekly press conferences conducted by the House Republican leadership. If you go out of your way to embarrass your leaders at those press conferences, you are not doing your job and you won’t last in that position very long.”Representative Ashley Hinson of Iowa, a rising freshman star who voted against her party’s attempt to invalidate the election results, came out on Thursday in support of Ms. Stefanik, saying she respected Ms. Cheney’s “strong conservative record and service to our country” but wanted relief from the infighting that had plagued the conference.“If Republicans are divided, and not focusing all of our efforts against radical Democrat policies, Speaker Pelosi will remain in power,” Ms. Hinson said in a statement that called Ms. Stefanik “the right person to unify and lead our conference at this time.”Others appeared torn. Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, who had vocally condemned Mr. Trump for his role in encouraging the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 and warned that the Republican Party could not define itself solely around the former president, said she was tired of “having these fights publicly.”“I want to move forward,” Ms. Mace told Fox Business’s Neil Cavuto. “I want to win back the House in a year and a half. We can get the majority back, and we’ve got to stop fighting with each other in public.”Ms. Mace warned that if the party continued “to make our party and our country about one person, and not about hard-working Americans in the this country, we’re going to continue to lose elections.” Asked whether she was referring to Mr. Trump or Ms. Cheney, Ms. Mace replied, “All of the above.”Some arch-conservative Republicans who are eager to oust Ms. Cheney — many of whom have despised her hawkish foreign policy views for years — have been quietly skeptical of Ms. Stefanik despite her endorsement from Mr. Trump, noting the low rankings conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and American Conservative Union have given her. On Wednesday night, the anti-tax Club for Growth opposed her campaign, branding her “a liberal.”“House Republicans should find a conservative to lead messaging and win back the House Majority,” the group wrote in a statement on Twitter.But despite the hand-wringing among the rank-and-file, by Thursday, Ms. Stefanik’s allies, including Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of the founders of the Freedom Caucus, publicly predicted that she would be conference chairwoman as soon as Wednesday, when Republicans plan to meet.“For sure the votes are there,” Mr. Jordan said on Fox News. “You can’t have a Republican conference chair taking a position that 90 percent of the party disagrees with, and you can’t have a Republican Party chair consistently speaking out against the individual who 74 million Americans voted for.”Carl Hulse More

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      The Truth Is About to Set Liz Cheney Free

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      The No. 3 Republican in the House faces a party uprising over her acknowledgment of reality.When Senator Joseph McCarthy was caught on national television pressing a case built on falsehoods against the supposed threat of communism in the U.S. Army, it was his breaking point.Edward R. Murrow gave voice to a frustrated public as it awoke to the bamboozling, and McCarthy’s political career was done.When President Donald Trump perpetrated the false narrative that his re-election had been stolen from him, leading his supporters into what became a fatal attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, he was booted from Twitter and Facebook. But he didn’t lose most of his support.And for the Republican Party’s rank-and-file, whose modern-day Murrow is Tucker Carlson, that falsehood is still the dominant narrative.That fact is hitting home hard on Wednesday for Representative Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House, whose refusal to bow to Trump’s lies has put her on the brink of being purged from G.O.P. leadership. In a tweet on Monday, Cheney called out Trump and anyone promoting his stolen election narrative for “spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”For House Republicans in thrall to a Trump-loyalist base, and who just weeks earlier had voted down an attempt to depose her, Cheney’s challenge to the story line was a bridge too far. The effort to remove her regained momentum, and on Wednesday Representative Steve Scalise, the Republican whip, became the highest-ranking member of his party to publicly support Cheney’s ouster.Cheney has not shied from the fight: Late Wednesday afternoon, she published an op-ed in The Washington Post entreating her fellow Republicans to respect “the rule of law,” and to be mindful of the eyes of history. “The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution,” she wrote.In the process, they will decide on her fate: House Republicans are expected to hold a vote as early as next week on whether to relieve her of her leadership post.“This is not good for the party, certainly not good for a party that has had problems with suburban women, educated women — to go at somebody because they’re speaking what most of them know is the truth,” said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman who represented a district in suburban Virginia until she was swept out by the anti-Trump blue wave in 2018. “Ronald Reagan, who is why I became a Republican, certainly allowed for dissent in his own party, and for people to be critical. I think it’s a very disturbing development.”Representative Elise Stefanik, who hails from an upstate New York district, has emerged as the party’s choice to replace Cheney, and her own history works as a metaphor for what’s going on with the G.O.P. more broadly.Stefanik flipped her district red in 2014, and she had amassed a relatively moderate record until her aggressive questioning of Democratic witnesses during Trump’s first impeachment trial, which earned her direct praise from him. She took his endorsement and ran with it, and in the past year-plus has become a staunch ally to his cause. She disputed the election results in Pennsylvania in a House vote on Jan. 6, and she later voted against impeaching him.Her policies, of course, are another thing entirely. The 36-year-old Stefanik actually voted with Trump less often during his four years as president than Cheney did. Notably, she voted against his signature tax cut bill, which Republicans are now hastening to defend.Pool photo by Caroline BrehmanBut the line that’s being drawn in the Republican sand isn’t about policy. It’s about loyalty to a narrative of Trump’s creation, and in G.O.P. primaries across the country, contravening can be fatal.“The challenge is that members don’t want to be primaried,” said Glen Bolger, a veteran Republican pollster. “These seats are mostly drawn as Democratic or Republican seats, so the way to lose isn’t in November, it’s in a primary.”Still, he added, “the difference between being a majority or a minority is decided in November. But politicians, understandably so, think of themselves first, and what’s good for me is good for the party.”In Texas, a primary election last weekend in a suburban House district set up a confrontation between the two wings of the party. A Trump-backed Republican, Susan Wright, won nearly 20 percent of the vote, while Jake Ellzey, a Republican who has the endorsement of former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, came in second place. The two candidates now advance to a runoff, and here’s the rub: All the district’s voters will be eligible to participate, not just Republicans.In the Senate, most Republican lawmakers have done their best to look away from the 211-car pileup taking place in the House Republican Conference, and have mostly moved on from discussions of the 2020 election. But there’s far less willingness to do so among House Republicans, whose every-two-year election cycle keeps them in closer conversation with the party’s base.And a flamboyant coterie of relatively young Republican lawmakers in the House has begun to emerge, led in part by Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a frequent presence on Fox News and prominent Trump ally, who has helped put Stefanik in position for her ascent.Just a month ago, Cheney seemed to have survived the attempt on her political life; her allies in the Wyoming state legislature beat back an effort to change election rules that would have imperiled her in the 2022 primary. The former Republican speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner committed to helping her fund-raise.Cheney had decided against a run for Senate last year because she saw an auspicious future in the House leadership, possibly even as speaker.But now she finds herself at odds with a party whose leader is silent in the press but still a fan favorite among the party faithful. “A guy who got 47 percent is not the future of our party,” Comstock said, referring to Trump’s total in the 2020 election. “The toxic personality divided our country and is now dividing our party.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Scalise Backs Ouster of Cheney from House G.O.P. Leadership

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      Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, hit back at leaders of her own party on Wednesday, warning her colleagues that “history is watching” as they consider expelling her from their leadership ranks for continuing to reject Donald J. Trump’s election lies.Ms. Cheney’s broadside, published Wednesday afternoon as an opinion essay in The Washington Post, came as the top two House Republicans were working to oust and replace her with a Trump loyalist, and after the former president weighed in demanding Republicans dethrone her. At issue is Ms. Cheney’s insistence on repeatedly rebuking her party for its role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob and for embracing Mr. Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 presidential election.In the column, Ms. Cheney warned that the Republican Party was at a “turning point,” and suggested that some Republicans were playing a dangerous game by continuing to support “the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”“While embracing or ignoring Trump’s statements might seem attractive to some for fund-raising and political purposes, that approach will do profound long-term damage to our party and our country,” Ms. Cheney said. “Trump has never expressed remorse or regret for the attack of Jan. 6 and now suggests that our elections, and our legal and constitutional system, cannot be trusted to do the will of the people. This is immensely harmful.”Ms. Cheney also lashed out at Mr. McCarthy, noting that he initially agreed that Mr. Trump bore responsibility for the riot, only to walk the remarks back.“History is watching. Our children are watching,” Ms. Cheney concluded. “We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that, no matter what the short-term political consequences might be.”Ms. Cheney’s column effectively acted as a rejoinder to Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican in the chamber, who on Wednesday morning became the highest-ranking party figure to openly call for Ms. Cheney’s ouster and the elevation of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York in her place as chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, the third-ranking position. Lawmakers said Mr. McCarthy was also working the phones behind the scenes, urging colleagues to support Ms. Stefanik, a close ally and rising Republican star.“House Republicans need to be solely focused on taking back the House in 2022 and fighting against Speaker Pelosi and President Biden’s radical socialist agenda,” said Lauren Fine, Mr. Scalise’s spokeswoman. “Elise Stefanik is strongly committed to doing that, which is why Whip Scalise has pledged to support her for conference chair.”Mr. Trump, who has seethed over Ms. Cheney’s criticism of him, piled on a short time later, deriding her as a “warmongering fool” and endorsing Ms. Stefanik, whom he called “a far superior choice.”“We want leaders who believe in the Make America Great Again movement, and prioritize the values of America First,” he wrote in a statement. “Elise is a tough and smart communicator!”Ms. Stefanik, who had been quietly building support among colleagues behind the scenes, wasted no time after Mr. Trump’s endorsement in declaring her intentions publicly. In a post on Twitter just minutes after his statement, she thanked him for his support and said Republicans were “unified and focused on FIRING PELOSI & WINNING in 2022!”It was a remarkable show of force by the party’s top leaders to run out a once-popular figure now deemed unacceptable by fellow Republicans because she has rejected Mr. Trump’s lies and refused to absolve him or the party of its role in perpetuating the false claims of a fraudulent election that fueled the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.The fate of Ms. Cheney, who survived a February bid to oust her after she voted to favor of impeaching Mr. Trump for his role in stirring up the riot, has once again become a bellwether for the direction of the Republican Party. It has implications for Republicans’ chances of wresting control of the House in 2022, and has become a test of whether loyalty to Trump and a tolerance for misinformation have overtaken conservatism as the party’s guiding orthodoxy.The turmoil could come to a head as early as next week, when House Republicans are expected to meet and could call a vote to replace Ms. Cheney. More

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      House Republicans Have Had Enough of Liz Cheney’s Truth-Telling

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      G.O.P. House members are plotting a fresh bid to dethrone Ms. Cheney from her leadership post. Her transgression: continued repudiation of Donald J. Trump and his false election claims.WASHINGTON — The first time defenders of Donald J. Trump came for Representative Liz Cheney, for the offense of having voted to impeach him, fellow Republicans closed ranks to save her leadership post, with Representative Kevin McCarthy boasting that their “big tent” party had enough room for both the former president and a stalwart critic.Evidently, not anymore.Just three months after she beat back a no-confidence vote by lopsided margins, Ms. Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, is facing a far more potent challenge that appears increasingly likely to end in her ouster from leadership. This time, Mr. McCarthy, the minority leader, is encouraging the effort to replace her.Her transgression, colleagues say: Ms. Cheney’s continued public criticism of Mr. Trump, her denunciation of his lies about a stolen election and her demands that the G.O.P. tell the truth about how his supporters assaulted democracy during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.The turnabout reflects anew the passion with which Republicans have embraced Mr. Trump and the voters who revere him, and how willing many in the party are to perpetuate — or at least tolerate — falsehoods about the 2020 election that he has continued to spread.What began as a battle over the party’s future after the violent end to the Trump presidency has collapsed into a one-sided pile-on by Team Trump, with critics like Ms. Cheney, the scion of a storied Republican family and the lone woman in her party’s House leadership, ostracized or moving toward the exits.The latest test for Ms. Cheney could come as soon as next week, when a growing group of Republicans is planning a fresh bid to dethrone her, with Mr. McCarthy’s blessing. Many of her colleagues are now so confident that it will succeed that they are openly discussing who will replace Ms. Cheney.The tensions escalated on Tuesday, when Mr. McCarthy went on Mr. Trump’s favorite news program, “Fox & Friends,” to question whether Ms. Cheney could effectively carry out her role as the party’s top messenger. (Beforehand, he told a Fox reporter, “I’ve had it with her,” and “I’ve lost confidence,” according to a leaked recording of the exchange published by Axios.)“I have heard from members concerned about her ability to carry out the job as conference chair, to carry out the message,” Mr. McCarthy said during the portion of the interview that aired. “We all need to be working as one, if we’re able to win the majority.”With onetime allies closing in, Ms. Cheney, known for her steely temperament, has only dug in harder. Minutes after Mr. McCarthy’s TV hit, she sent her barbed reply through a spokesman, effectively suggesting that the minority leader and Republicans moving against her were complicit in Mr. Trump’s dissembling.“This is about whether the Republican Party is going to perpetuate lies about the 2020 election and attempt to whitewash what happened on Jan. 6,” said Jeremy Adler, the spokesman. “Liz will not do that. That is the issue.”One of the few Republican voices willing to rise to Ms. Cheney’s defense was Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who has himself come under attack from his party for his unrepentant criticism of Mr. Trump — even getting booed at the Utah Republican Party convention on Saturday.“Every person of conscience draws a line beyond which they will not go: Liz Cheney refuses to lie,” Mr. Romney wrote on Twitter. “As one of my Republican Senate colleagues said to me following my impeachment vote: ‘I wouldn’t want to be a member of a group that punished someone for following their conscience.’”Many House Republicans insist they have no problem with Ms. Cheney’s vote to impeach Mr. Trump, which she described as a vote of conscience. Nor, they say, are they bothered by her neoconservative policy positions, which skew — like those of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney — toward a hawkishness that is at odds with the “America First” slant of the party that Mr. Trump cemented.But they fear that Ms. Cheney’s refusal to stop criticizing Mr. Trump or condemning the events of Jan. 6 could weaken the party’s message going into the 2022 midterm elections, when they hope to portray Democrats as big-government socialists so villainous they should be voted out of the majority. It has also infuriated Mr. Trump.Many, including Mr. McCarthy, had hoped that after surviving the February vote of no confidence, Ms. Cheney, as an elected leader, would make like the rest of the party and simply move on.Instead, she has doubled down and at times turned her fire on colleagues. The final straw for many came last week in Orlando, where Republicans gathered for their annual policy retreat in hopes of putting on a show of unity.Ms. Cheney told Punchbowl News that she would campaign in Wyoming — where she faces a primary challenge — defending her impeachment vote “every day of the week.” She told reporters that any lawmaker who led the bid to invalidate President Biden’s electoral victory in Congress should be disqualified from running for president. And she broke with leading Republicans when she said a proposed independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 riot should focus on the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, rather than scrutinizing violence by antifa and Black Lives Matter, as Mr. McCarthy and other Republicans have demanded.Representative Kevin McCarthy has questioned whether Ms. Cheney can effectively carry out her role as the party’s top messenger.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesA few days later, she drew attacks from the right for fist-bumping Mr. Biden at his speech before a joint session of Congress, and took to Twitter to defend herself for greeting the president “in a civil, respectful & dignified way.”“We’re not sworn enemies,” she wrote. “We’re Americans.”On Monday, after Mr. Trump issued a statement calling the 2020 election “fraudulent” and “THE BIG LIE,” Ms. Cheney quickly tweeted her rebuttal, writing that anyone who made such claims was “poisoning our democratic system.”Some Republicans privately likened her performance to picking at a scab, and many of Mr. Trump’s allies saw it as an opening to try again to depose her.“Liz has attempted (is FAILING badly) to divide our party,” Representative Lance Gooden, Republican of Texas, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, emulating Mr. Trump’s caustic Twitter style. “Trump is still the LEADER of the GOP, Liz! I look forward to her being removed SOON!”Ms. Cheney’s troubles chart a rapid shift for the Republican Party in the few months since Mr. Trump left Washington. Early on, she was part of a small but influential group of Republicans that included Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, and condemned Mr. Trump’s role in stoking the riot with false claims of a stolen election. But many of those lawmakers have since gone quiet, leaving Ms. Cheney, who once was enthusiastically spoken of as a future speaker or president, isolated.Ms. Cheney declined through a spokesman to comment, and several of her allies in the House would not speak on the record in her defense, underscoring the fraught nature of the vote and the pessimism some of them feel about her chances of surviving another challenge. A spokeswoman for Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, another Republican who voted to impeach Mr. Trump and has been a leading critic of the former president, said in a statement that the congressman “unequivocally supports Liz Cheney for conference chair.”Those who know her best say privately that Ms. Cheney’s predicament reflects both her principles and her personality, including a stubborn streak that sometimes prompts her to act against her self-interest. One ally who has been exasperated by her in recent months described her actions as classic Liz Cheney: She will always do what she thinks is right, the Republican said on Tuesday, but she will just never stop to think she’s wrong.With Ms. Cheney hemorrhaging support, Republicans have already begun cycling through names of possible replacements for a post traditionally seen as a steppingstone to the top party positions. Mindful of the optics of replacing the only woman in leadership with another man, Republicans are eyeing choosing a woman.The leading contender appears to be Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a rising star in her fourth term who has long toiled to increase the number of women in the Republican ranks and has more recently become a fierce defender of Mr. Trump.Ms. Stefanik, 36, has begun reaching out to Republican lawmakers to gauge their support, according to two people familiar with the private conversations, and by Tuesday evening, one of her political aides was retweeting speculation that she would “make an outstanding conference chair.”Representative Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania, a member of the Republican leadership who initially whipped votes for Ms. Cheney, said that he was counting potential votes for Ms. Stefanik and believed the job would be hers if she ran. Republicans have also floated Representative Jackie Walorski of Indiana as a possible alternative. As the top Republican on the Ethics Committee, Ms. Walorski this year successfully balanced the job of condemning Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s past conspiratorial statements while arguing she should not be kicked off her committees. More

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      The Women Who Paved the Way for Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Women Who Paved the Way for Marjorie Taylor GreeneShe’s the latest descendant in a lineage of Republican women who embrace a boffo radicalism.Opinion ColumnistFeb. 7, 2021Credit…Susan Walsh/Associated PressWhen I was coming of age as a journalist, it was an article of faith — and political science — that female Republican politicians subdued their party’s excesses. It was a measurable phenomenon, even: Republican women voted to the left of their male counterparts in Congress.But as the G.O.P. began to radicalize, becoming not just a small-government party but an anti-government party — a government delegitimization party — this taming effect ceased to be. Moderates of both sexes cleared out of the building. A new swarm of firebrands rushed in. Not only did female Republican elected officials become every bit as conservative as their male counterparts; they began, in some cases, to personify the party’s most outlandish tendencies.This is the thought I keep returning to when I think about Marjorie Taylor Greene: That there is something depressingly familiar about her. She’s the latest descendant in a lineage of Republican women who embrace a boffo radicalism, who delight in making trouble and in causing offense.In her own freshman class, Greene has an outrageous comrade in Lauren Boebert, who once said she hoped QAnon was real and tried, post Jan. 6, to walk onto the House floor with her Glock.Before Greene and Boebert, there was Representative Marsha Blackburn, now a senator, who declared a preference for the title “Congressman” and co-sponsored a 2009 bill requiring presidential candidates to provide copies of their original birth certificates. (In 2019, her first year in the Senate, she was deemed its most conservative member by GovTrack.) There was Representative Michele Bachmann, who went on national television and repeated a story about the HPV vaccine supposedly causing “mental retardation”; openly fretted that President Barack Obama wanted to do away with the dollar; and called herself “a foreign correspondent on enemy lines,” reporting on the nefarious doings of the Democrats.There was Sarah Palin, who spellbound the base with her vaudevillian ad-libbing, sassy anti-intellectualism, denunciations of the lamestream media and laffy-taffy stretching of the facts. “She would say things that are simply not true, or things that were picked up from the internet,” Steve Schmidt, a former top adviser to John McCain’s 2008 campaign, told “Frontline.”Even when I was a young reporter covering Congress, the Newt Gingrich revolution ushered in a number of outrageous women who thrilled to their roles as troublemakers and conspiracists. North Carolina’s Sue Myrick wrote the foreword to “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.” Helen Chenoweth, like Blackburn, asked to be called “Congressman”; held an endangered-sockeye-salmon fund-raising bake; and said armed wildlife agents in black helicopters were invading her home state, Idaho.Michele BachmannCredit…Chris O’Meara/Associated PressMarsha BlackburnCredit…Pool photo by Stefani ReynoldsSue MyrickCredit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesElise StefanikCredit…Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockYou could argue that these women were in a better position to embody anti-government, populist sentiment than men. A decade ago, the Republican pollster Linda DiVall told The Atlantic that voters were more inclined to think female politicians “won’t be in the back room dealing with special interests.”Now recall Sarah Palin at the 2008 convention, railing in her Wasilla twang against “the good-old boys” brokering their secret deals. Recall Michele Bachmann in 2011, telling Jake Tapper, “What people see in me is that I’m a real person, I’m authentic.” And think of Marjorie Taylor Greene in these last couple of years, yammering on about the nefarious plots of the deep state, Jewish lasers and false flags. She’s here to tell you what’s going on in that back room — and that she’s going to put an end to it.After the 2018 midterm elections, when 10 Republican congresswomen lost their seats, New York’s Elise Stefanik (once a reasonable human being, now another Harvard Graduate for Sedition) told Republican leaders that the party had to make electing women a priority. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, agreed to help; outside groups and Stefanik’s own PAC did, too. Their efforts worked. Eighteen new Republican women showed up to the House this January.But in order to get elected, those women needed to win their primaries. And to win their primaries, they needed to present themselves as every bit as tough and conservative (socially and otherwise) as their male primary opponents — and to win over a subgroup of the electorate that historically has been less inclined to vote for women in the first place.This, in turn, led to what I think is an interesting paradox: These women are playing simultaneously into male Republican stereotypes of power — loving their guns, defending their country from the migrant hordes — and stereotypes of femininity, to reassure the Republican faithful that they’re still real women. Think of Palin, presenting herself as a mama grizzly with a shotgun. Motherhood was front and center in her self-presentation. Ditto for Lauren Boebert (mother of four, loves her Glock). Ditto for Bachmann (mother of five, partial to AR-15s).Greene loves her guns, too — so much that she was willing to harass a survivor of a school shooting, which may not have qualified as maternal behavior, now that I think of it.Hmm. Maybe we’ve rounded a corner. Maybe any kind of behavior from Republican female politicians now goes.Either way: A number of these politicians, including Palin and Bachmann, crashed and burned. But what if their evanescent political lives paved the way for more powerful male politicians?Corrine McConnaughy, a research scholar in politics at Princeton, stopped me in my tracks by asking whether Sarah Palin’s repeated complaints about the elite media made it easier for Donald Trump to frame himself as a victim of Fake News. Better for a woman to blaze the way on victimhood first, right, lest it be seen as unmanly? (Yes, Nixon also complained that the media were out to get him. But mainly in private.)Sarah PalinCredit…Mark Hirsch/Getty ImagesMcConnaughy didn’t know the answer. Neither do I. But it’s a great question. In hindsight, it certainly seems clear that folksy, populist, prevaricating Palin — a tabloid fixture and reality television star — cleared the way for Trump.Perhaps the media bear a tiny bit of responsibility for the coverage Greene is getting. We’re going through terrible outrage withdrawal. (“Have you seen CNN’s ratings recently?” Dan Senor, once an adviser to Mitt Romney, asked me not long ago.) So here is Greene, offering us a bottomless Mary-Poppins-carpet-bag of old videos that spew hate and derangement. She’s our methadone.Then again, she truly is monstrous.You can also ask whether unconscious gender bias plays a role in the coverage of Greene. Television loves a brassy hot mess. Greene’s despicable words and actions deserved censure and punishment, certainly. But it’s not as if there aren’t a ton of male Republican kooks in this Congress, too: Louie Gohmert, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Mo Brooks … the list is long.Me, I remain fixated on the new breed of Republican female politician that Greene continues to represent. As the political scientists Monica C. Schneider and Angela L. Bos have argued, we don’t yet have, as a culture, a firm idea of how a female elected official looks or acts, though we have stereotypes galore for male politicians (and men and women more generally).Hillary Clinton’s supporters were fond of the adage, “the future is female.” That may one day be true. But we should brace ourselves. That future may be quite different from the one we were expecting. The future often is.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How New York’s Representatives Voted After the Capitol Riot

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