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.
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