Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney (R-ish) has insisted that President Trump is a unique threat to “our democracy” and that she is attempting to save the GOP from a once-in-a-lifetime dangerous tyrant.
She even trotted out her father to wax on about how Trump is so unique a threat that “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who has posed a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.”
Of course, no one with two brain cells to rub together has really believed that Liz’s war on Trump is about President Trump, per se, let alone that it is principled or about anything other than pushing forward a failed and unpopular agenda.
It’s always been about returning the GOP to the failed progressive big government, big taxing, war-mongering “compassionate conservative” days of the Bush-Cheney administration.
Liz just undermined her own phony posturing against Trump as a unique threat by finding yet another Republican who is the biggest unique threat to “our democracy” than any since the nation’s founding. And stuff.
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., wouldn’t commit to throwing her weight behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis if he were the GOP presidential candidate in 2024 because of his similarities to former President Donald Trump.”I think that Ron DeSantis has lined himself up almost entirely with Donald Trump, and I think that’s very dangerous,” Cheney said during an interview at a house party last week, according to the New York Times.Cheney, who faces an uphill climb to keep her seat in Congress during next week’s Wyoming primary election, said she “would find it very difficult” to support DeSantis in a general election, but also brushed off talk that she would change parties.”I’m a Republican,” she said during the interview, though she argued that the party “may not be” salvageable in the short term because it is “very sick” and “is continuing to drive itself in a ditch and I think it’s going to take several cycles if it can be healed.”
It’s going to take a lot more than that to drag Republican voters back to the big government, big spending, big war GOP past they resoundingly rejected and continue to reject.
In the New York Times interview entitled “Liz Cheney Is Ready to Lose. But She’s Not Ready to Quit” and subheaded “The Republican says her crusade to stop Donald J. Trump will continue — even if she loses her primary next week…”, Cheney appears to be laser-focused on curing a Republican Party to the point that it has no relationship whatsoever to that party’s base (archive link). It’s puzzling and bizarre.
It was just over a month before her primary, but Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming was nowhere near the voters weighing her future.Ms. Cheney was instead huddled with fellow lawmakers and aides in the Capitol complex, bucking up her allies in a cause she believes is more important than her House seat: ridding American politics of former President Donald J. Trump and his influence.“The nine of us have done more to prevent Trump from ever regaining power than any group to date,” she said to fellow members of the panel investigating Mr. Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. “We can’t let up.”. . . . Yet for Ms. Cheney, the race stopped being about political survival months ago. Instead, she has used the Aug. 16 contest as a sort of high-profile stage for her martyrdom — and a proving ground for her new crusade. . . .In a state where Mr. Trump won 70 percent of the vote two years ago, Ms. Cheney might as well be asking ranchers to go vegan.. . . . Ms. Cheney’s relentless focus on Mr. Trump has driven speculation — even among longtime family friends — that she is preparing to run for president. She has done little to dissuade such talk.At a house party Thursday night in Cheyenne, with the former vice president happily looking on under a pair of mounted leather chaps, the host introduced Ms. Cheney by recalling how another Republican woman, Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, confronted Senator Joseph McCarthy when doing so was unpopular — and went on to become the first female candidate for president from a major party.
The trouble here, however, is that there will be no major party of the sort that Liz envisions resurrecting from the trash heap of history. Republican voters rejected that outright over a decade ago and have been quite clear about the direction they want to see the party—and America—go. Running as a long-shot Trump-hating shrew who has alienated the vast majority of the Republican base is . . . well, just bizarre. And completely delusional.
She’s not interested in the Republicans the people have elected and sent to Congress. Instead, she wants to cozy up to Democrats, though she claims she won’t switch parties because she’s intent on “saving” the GOP . . . from its own base. It’s nonsensical.
The New York Times continues:
In a sign that Ms. Cheney’s political awakening goes beyond her contempt for Mr. Trump, she said she prefers the ranks of Democratic women with national security backgrounds to her party’s right flank.“I would much rather serve with Mikie Sherrill and Chrissy Houlahan and Elissa Slotkin than Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, even though on substance certainly I have big disagreements with the Democratic women I just mentioned,” Ms. Cheney said in the interview. “But they love this country, they do their homework and they are people that are trying to do the right thing for the country.”Ms. Cheney is surer of her diagnosis for what ails the G.O.P. than she is of her prescription for reform.She has no post-Congress political organization in waiting and has benefited from Democratic donors, whose affections may be fleeting. To the frustration of some allies, she has not expanded her inner circle beyond family and a handful of close advisers.
It’s all a mess. She’s a mess. But at least she has confirmed what we’ve all long-suspected: her “crusade” is not against President Trump, or even against Governor DeSantis; it’s against the American voters who elected Trump in a resounding rejection of her father’s neocon progressivism.
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