It would be easy to dismiss Liz Cheney’s post-primary crusade against Donald Trump as a quixotic campaign doomed to falter in the face of a Republican Party resigned to follow the former president, come what may.
The task is Sisyphean, without a doubt. But it’s also necessary. For the GOP, and for the country.
Cheney’s loss to Trump loyalist Harriet Hageman hardly came as a surprise. Predictions of a landslide victory were realized as Hageman, an anti-environmentalist lawyer and election denier, won by 35 percentage points. Wyoming is wildly pro-Trump, which makes Cheney a turncoat in the eyes of most of the state’s voters.
But in her concession speech, it was clear Cheney doesn’t see the decisive defeat as an endgame — she sees it as Round One. She has conjured up a name for Round Two, the Great Task, which will also brand a new political action committee she has set up with the mission of keeping Trump from taking back the White House. The committee’s name comes from the Gettysburg Address, when President Abraham Lincoln told Americans that “the great task remaining before us” was to ensure that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
She has dangled the prospect of a run for president in 2024 but hasn’t decided yet. If she runs, undoubtedly it will be an attempt to firewall the country from the possible peril of another four years of Trump in the Oval Office. In the meantime, she continues her work on the House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol until her term ends in January.
The committee has been invaluable in illuminating for Americans in a compelling, comprehensive way the indefensible actions Trump undertook to selfishly — and unconstitutionally — cling to power. Hearings resume in September, and there’s more to come. “Doors have opened, new subpoenas have been issued and the dam has begun to break,” Cheney said at the committee’s last hearing in July.
A swath of the Republican Party views Cheney not as truth-telling but as a traitorous Democrat in disguise. Their fealty to Trump blinds them to the reality that, if returned to power, Trump’s erosion of democracy could inflict lasting, permanent damage on the country and its institutions.
What those Republicans either have forgotten or choose to ignore is that Cheney’s views fall in line with the party’s conservative wing. She’s anti-abortion and backs a robust national defense, strong border control, reined-in taxation and tax cuts for small businesses. Her stances are straight out of the GOP playbook.
Cheney diverges from Republicans on only one issue — Trump, and the danger to democracy that he poses.
Americans don’t have to look very hard to find examples of Trump World’s disdain for the rule of law. The search at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, the attempt to install fake electors following the former president’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election and, of course, Trump’s actions and behavior before and during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol all provide ample evidence that Trump puts his own agenda above the country’s interests and ideals.
Trump loyalists in the GOP also are aiming to amass enough clout through the midterm elections in November to recraft election laws in key states to make voting more restrictive. The goal is to scale back or eliminate measures such as early voting and mail-in voting to make it harder for key segments of the Democratic voting bloc, Black and brown voters, for example, to make a difference at the polls.
What’s admirable about Cheney is that she understands the gravity of the Trump problem, as well as its urgency.
“No citizen of this republic is a bystander,” she said during her concession speech last Tuesday. “We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.”
We’ll see how far Cheney gets with her crusade against Trump. No doubt that the odds are against her. But it would behoove Republicans to realize that she’s fighting the good fight on two fronts: as a digger for the truth about Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection and as a formidable counterpoint to his reentry into presidential campaign politics.
If they’re smart, they’ll get on the right side of that fight.
