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Liz Cheney is ready to force a reckoning for those Republicans who have come around to support Donald Trump for what she says are purely political reasons.
Anti-Trump Republicans including Cheney have become increasingly vocal in the past few months as Kamala Harris has ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket; emboldened by the new vigor her party has found in her wake. Trump, now running for the presidency for a third time, is poised to either pull off a massive political comeback or suffer his second defeat in as many presidential election cycles — to say nothing of the defeats his hand-picked candidates suffered in 2022’s midterms.
His enemies on the right, despite his dominating victory in the Republican primary earlier this year, still smell blood in the water and are now looking to Harris to deal an electoral deathblow this November.
Other GOPers in this vein accepted speaking roles at the Democratic convention last month, including Cheney’s former compatriot on the January 6 committee, Adam Kinzinger, and former Trump White House communications director Stephanie Grisham.
But Cheney made the news of the month this weekend with a joint announcement from the former Wyoming congresswoman and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney: the two will both be supporting Kamala Harris’s campaign this fall.
The former VP’s statement was closely followed by another from former President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney’s old running mate, who stated that he would decline to endorse either candidate for the presidency this year.
“Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” she said onstage Friday at the Texas Tribune Festival. “If you think about the moment we’re in, and you think about how serious this moment is, my dad believes — and he said publicly — there has never been an individual in our country who is as grave a threat to our democracy as Donald Trump is.”
And on Sunday, she took it a step further by going on the offensive against Nikki Haley, Trump’s longest-standing competitor for the GOP nomination this year.
Cheney appeared on ABC’s This Week to discuss Haley’s endorsement of Trump onstage at the Republican convention in July, explaining: “I can't understand her position on this in any kind of a principled way.”
“I think that the things that she said, that she made clear when she was running in the primary, those things are true,” Cheney continued. “Those of us who have fidelity to the Constitution, have a responsibility and a duty to recognize [that] this is not about partisan politics.”
As Nikki Haley stands behind Donald Trump despite campaigning against him in the primary, former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney says, ⁰“I can't understand her position on this in any kind of a principled way.”
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) September 8, 2024
“This is not about partisan politics.” https://t.co/dnNCJRQCIm pic.twitter.com/qP1hVNwL8f
While she was not explicit, Cheney referred to Haley’s description of Trump when she was running against him: that Trump was unqualified to be president. Haley made that argument while pointing to Trump’s comments about her husband’s military service; she also argued in separate interviews that she did not have faith that Donald Trump would follow the Constitution as president.
Cheney was much more explicit in her condemnation of Trump himself, describing him in the interview as “a president who will use violence to achieve his own ends”.
Haley would go on to say in her withdrawal from the 2024 race that Trump would need to “earn” the votes of her and her supporters; however, by July she was fully back on board the Trump train.
“Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period,” Haley told a cheering crowd at her party’s convention, a crowd that had booed her entrance moments earlier.
Though the ex-president was hoping to have consolidated the GOP base before heading into the general election season, it appears that fissures remain in the party’s foundation. Cheney, Kinzinger and others like Maryland Senate candidate Larry Hogan continue to vocalize their criticisms of Trump and the Maga wing of the GOP, while polls increasingly show Kamala Harris competitive in every battleground state won by Joe Biden in 2020 as well as others like Florida and North Carolina.
A defeat for Trump in the general election this year would almost certainly kick off another battle for control of the Republican Party, which is eager to recover from a string of defeats on the national stage.
The former president himself remains adamant that unproven claims of fraud are responsible for his defeat in 2020 while denying analyses from pundits, journalists and members of his own party theorizing that his selection of right-wing election deniers for key state races in 2022 contributed to the GOP’s under-performance that cycle.
The two presidential candidates are set to meet for the first time on Tuesday at what is technically the first debate of the general election cycle. A previous debate in late June between Joe Biden and Donald Trump occurred before either man was officially nominated as their party’s candidate, though both had secured enough pledged delegates in their respective party primaries to do so. Following a widely panned performance, Biden would go on to drop out of the race before his party’s nominating convention in August.
