The former congresswoman Liz Cheney called Donald Trump an “unrecoverable catastrophe” on Sunday and urged fellow Republicans to vote for the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, in November’s election.
“We see it on a daily basis – somebody who was willing to use violence in order to attempt to seize power, to stay in power, someone who represents unrecoverable catastrophe, frankly, in my view, and we have to do everything possible to ensure that he’s not re-elected,” Cheney said in an interview on ABC News This Week, a show on the network that is hosting Tuesday’s debate between Trump and Harris.
Cheney also reaffirmed her endorsement of Harris and urged other prominent Republicans who have stated they plan on writing in a third option rather than vote for Trump to cast their ballots for the Democrat instead.
“At the end of the day, you just have to wrestle with your own conscience when you’re there in the voting booth. And I would expect that you will see far more Republicans and independents, you know, when the time comes, and they’ve got to make that decision, make the right decision,” said Cheney. “Given the closeness of this election, particularly if you’re going to find yourself voting in a swing state, you’ve got to take the extra step if you really do recognize the threat that Donald Trump poses. Then it’s not enough to simply say, ‘I’m not going to vote for him.’”
Asked whether she was still a Republican, Cheney claimed she was still a conservative. She said she hoped to “rebuild” the Republican party after the 5 November presidential election.
A number of other Republicans have stopped short of endorsing Trump, who has been convicted of criminally falsifying business records while also facing other charges in connection with his attempts to reverse his defeat to Joe Biden while running for re-election in the 2020 presidential race.
They include George W Bush, Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence, US senator Mitt Romney and the former Maryland governor Larry Hogan.
On Sunday, Nikki Haley – who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations and later challenged him unsuccessfully in the Republican presidential primary – refused to answer when asked on a CBS Face the Nation interview if Trump was a good candidate.
But unlike Cheney, they have not lent their support to Harris.
Cheney fell out of favor with many in the Republican party after criticizing Trump and serving on the congressional committee which investigated the attack that his supporters aimed at the US Capitol in early January 2021. She lost re-election in Wyoming in 2022 to a Republican primary challenger backed by Trump.
On Friday, her father and Bush vice-president Dick Cheney announced he planned on voting for Harris in November, rebuking his own party. A statement from Dick Cheney cited Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
Harris told reporters covering a campaign stop in Wisconsin on Saturday that she was “honored” to have the Cheneys’ endorsement and credited them for putting “country above party”.
