The former top Republican Liz Cheney, who lost her Wyoming seat in Congress last week when she was beaten in a primary by a Donald Trump-endorsed challenger, is threatening to turn her political muscle against other prominent politicians in her party who have embraced the former president’s attack on democracy.
In an interview with ABC News aired on Sunday, she said that some of the best-known Republican figures are now within her sights. She name-checked Kevin McCarthy, Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley – all of whom have openly supported Trump’s lie that electoral fraudsters stole the 2020 presidential race from him and handed it to his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.
In the wake of her Wyoming defeat, Cheney has announced plans to set up a new political organization and has indicated that she is considering a 2024 presidential run designed to stop Trump from re-entering the White House.
Her comments on Sunday suggest that her plans to confront election deniers go much wider than Trump himself.
“I’m going to be very focused on working to ensure that we can do everything we can [to] not … elect election deniers,” she said. “I’m going to work against those people, I’m going to work to support their opponents.”
Cheney said that two Republican US senators – Cruz from Texas and Hawley from Missouri – have both made themselves “unfit for future office”. She said that “both know what the role of Congress is with respect to presidential elections and yet both took steps that fundamentally threatened the constitutional order”.
Cruz was seminal in the Senate in devising a plot to block certification of Biden’s 2020 victory in six battleground states. Hawley was the first senator to object to Biden’s victory and memorably raised his clenched fist to protesters outside the US Capitol on 6 January shortly before the violence erupted. He was later revealed to have fled the Capitol building running once the insurrection started.
Cheney also had tough words in the ABC News interview for DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and McCarthy, the current House minority leader. McCarthy is a leading candidate to become speaker should the Republicans take back the House of Representatives in November.
McCarthy was initially critical of Trump’s role in unleashing the violent storming of the Capitol, privately telling fellow party leaders “I’ve had it with this guy”. But since then he has swung behind Trump’s anti-democratic movement.
“My views on Kevin McCarthy are very clear,” Cheney said. “He’s been completely unfaithful to the constitution. … I don’t believe he should be the speaker of the House.”
She also accused DeSantis of campaigning for election deniers. “This is something that people have got to have real pause about,” Cheney said.
The Wyoming congresswoman is vice-chairperson of the House committee which has been investigating the January 6 Capitol attack. She was also one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the breach of the Capitol compound – eight of whom will not be returning to Congress in January.
The fact that those who stood up against Trump’s attempt to subvert American democracy have been almost universally forced from the party was revealing, she said, adding: “It says people continue to believe the lie, they continue to believe what [Trump] is saying, which is very dangerous.”
She continued: “It also tells you that large portions of our party, including the leadership of our party both at a state level in Wyoming as well as a national level with the RNC [Republican National Committee], is very sick.”
Cheney would not specify whether or not she would run for the presidency in two years’ time. Nor would she say, in that case, whether she would run as a Republican or independent.
She did say that if she ran it would be to win.
Cheney’s direct threat to Trump and his most senior coterie of Republicans in Congress comes at a time of gathering peril for the former president. The FBI search of his home in Mar-a-Lago in Florida has riled up his supporters but has also heightened risk of prosecution for harboring confidential documents that could endanger national security.
Earlier this month Trump invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination in response to questions when he was deposed in a lawsuit brought by the attorney general of New York over his company’s financial statements. Last week Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was called before a special grand jury in Atlanta, Georgia, investigating efforts to overturn the election results in that state.
On Sunday Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina who was involved in Trump’s pressure campaign on Georgia officials to overturn the state’s election results, was granted a temporary reprieve by an appeals court from having to testify before the same grand jury in Fulton county.
