Former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney recently decried a “tectonic shift” that is happening within her own party, blasting the GOP’s fervent loyalty to Donald Trump despite his anti-democratic views.
Cheney made the remarks during a speaking engagement at Drake University on Wednesday. The former representative from Wyoming, who served as one of just two Republicans on the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, warned that Trump’s brand of politics will harm the country if he’s allowed to be president again.
“What’s happening in the Republican party is dangerous. We now have one of our two major political parties that has abandoned the constitution,” Cheney said.
Looking at the possibility of Trump becoming president once more, Cheney predicted that, at the expiration of another Trump presidential term, he would have “no incentive to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power and to leave office” as is required by the 22nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Trump indeed toyed with the idea of serving three terms in office in comments he made as president in 2019, saying he might be compelled to do so if his supporters demanded it. Trump showed further disdain for the Constitution in December 2022, when he called for the “termination” of the document in order to illegally put him back in office.
Continuing in her speech, Cheney encouraged her audience to reconsider voting for Trump, even if they didn’t like President Joe Biden’s policies.
“As frustrated as I know people get sometimes with policy disagreements you might have — and I certainly have policy disagreements with the Biden administration — I know the nation can survive bad policy. We can’t survive a president who is willing to torch the Constitution,” Cheney said.
She also chastised Republicans for their continued fealty to Trump, saying:
Republican elected officials excuse the behavior — enabled the behavior — and by doing that, it created a situation where voters thought, ‘Well, you know, it must not be that he’s that dangerous, because if he were, then you would have more people saying so.’
Earlier this month, Trump called for Cheney and other January 6 committee members to be imprisoned, though he failed to cite any crime or statute they had violated, seemingly calling for the action because the committee itself was an affront to him.
“She should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee,” Trump said on his Truth Social website.
Republicans also censured Cheney earlier this year over her role in the committee.
Although Cheney has been commended in recent years for calling out Trump’s anti-democratic and authoritarian ideals, she herself played a role in laying the groundwork for Trump to ascend within Republican politics.
“The more complex (and depressing) truth is that the Republican Party’s slide into neofascism, white supremacy and racial authoritarianism has been a long process, one that occurred gradually over the course of several decades,” Salon senior politics writer Chauncey DeVega wrote in spring 2021. “Trumpism is not some aberrant outlier, separate and apart from the Republican Party’s agenda and orthodoxy.”
“To elevate Cheney as a defender of American democracy is to fundamentally misinterpret Trumpism and the Republican embrace of neofascism and white supremacy, reducing it to a discrete moment in American political history,” DeVega added.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.