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Opinion Liz Cheney’s harsh new attack on Trump is a plea for GOP sanity

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HR King
May 29, 2001
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By Greg Sargent
Columnist |
July 1, 2022 at 12:13 p.m. EDT

As Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) case against Donald Trump grows ever more damning, it has produced a truly bizarre split-screen moment.
Cheney’s indictment of the former president amounts to one of the most consequential and effective public performances in recent U.S. history. Meanwhile, the Wyoming Republican is fighting for her political life against a challenger who epitomizes gutter Trumpism at its absolute worst.
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Cheney amplified her case against Trump at a primary debate on Thursday night. Cheney heaped scorn on her leading challenger, Trump-backed Harriet Hageman, slamming her for fealty to Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and urging GOP voters to leave Trump behind once and for all.
Cheney will likely lose her primary, perhaps by enormous margins. But her performance in the primary — along with her speech this week casting Trump as a “domestic threat” — represent something forward-looking, a plea to the Republican Party to break with Trump’s madness for the sake of the country and its future.
“If we embrace the lies of Donald Trump, if we tell the people of Wyoming something that is not true, we will soon find ourselves without the structure and the basis and the framework of our constitutional republic,” Cheney said in her closing debate statement.


“I will never violate my oath of office, and if you’re looking for somebody who will, then you need to vote for somebody else on this stage,” continued Cheney, who’s also the vice chair of the House select committee on Jan. 6.
For liberals, of course, there’s a lot to disdain about Cheney. Her wing of the GOP is responsible for some of this country’s worst anti-democratic abuses in recent history, such as the “war on terror” abroad and at home. She opposes much of what is required to truly protect voting rights and democracy.
But we need Republicans who are fully committed, and publicly so, to certain baseline principles. Election losses are binding. Voters deserve the truth about democratic outcomes. This is not something to trifle with: It’s a matter of the respect we accord each other as democratic citizens. The insurrectionist spirit afoot in the Trump movement and the GOP more broadly must be fundamentally renounced by any party that claims to be an actor in a liberal democracy.
That gets at the real core of Cheney’s dispute with the rest of the GOP.
At Thursday’s debate, Cheney cast Trump as a threat to the party’s future, warning: “We are embracing a cult of personality.” She challenged Hageman, her lead opponent, to state clearly that Trump lost in 2020, describing GOP devotion to Trump’s lies as a “real tragedy in this country.”
Hageman, by contrast, has relentlessly fed Trumpism’s pathologies, claiming the 2020 outcome is in extreme doubt and dropping hints that the next audit will expose the truth. She unabashedly calls Trump “the leader of the party.”
As conservative William Kristol notes, Cheney’s current moment is akin to a last stand for constitutional conservatism. Indeed, even some better-intentioned Republicans simply do not believe that functioning as an actor in a democracy requires firm public fealty to those aforementioned principles.
Instead, they seem to believe the party’s future rests on a very public refusal to affirm those principles, precisely because doing so properly requires a comprehensive renunciation of Trump.
All this was candidly captured not long ago by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), the wise fool of the GOP. Speaking about Cheney, the senator said: “She’s made a determination that the Republican Party can’t grow with President Trump. I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”
This was Graham’s explanation for why Republicans have excommunicated Cheney for the act of holding Trump accountable for nearly overturning our nation’s political order. In Graham’s admission, doing this would cost Republicans countless voters that Trump brought into the GOP coalition. If the party fully renounces Trump, as Cheney wants, then it won’t “grow.”
The turn away from democracy has become something akin to a social movement. The imperative of keeping that movement energized inside the GOP coalition is plainly driving some even more virulent turns away from democracy, including Republicans pledging fealty to Trump’s lies and installing themselves in positions to overturn future elections.
Many of these Republicans don’t want the party to function as a democratic actor at all. Quite literally, they are campaigning on a willingness to violate their oaths of office, much as Cheney called out in her primary opponent. This is what’s really at stake with the Jan. 6 committee hearings.
The hearings are demonstrating that Trump and his fellow coup-plotters knowingly schemed to hold power illegitimately or illegally; that the plot was multifaceted and premeditated; that it relied on extraordinary corruption, mob violence and extensive complicity from the GOP; and that, at its core, it was about ending American democracy.
Faced with all this, many Republicans still recognize no obligation to ferret out the truth about any of it. Historian Thomas Zimmer has noted that the current struggle over U.S. democracy is akin to a world historical event. Yet from Republicans there is dead air or worse: No discernible move, anywhere, to meaningfully renounce the party’s continued insurrectionist drift.
How far down the path to democratic instability this will take us remains to be seen. Cheney plainly believes — and this view is alarmingly shared by experts in democratic breakdown — that unless Republicans execute a fundamental turnaround, there may not be any route back.

 
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