Wyoming Republicans are voting to nominate a candidate for the state’s sole seat in the US Congress. Given Wyoming’s strong Republican lean – 70 per cent of its voters backed Donald Trump in 2020, his biggest victory – that can is all but guaranteed to win the general election.
Polls show that Representative Liz Cheney is all but guaranteed to lose after her vote to impeach Mr Trump last year and her repeated criticisms of the GOP and the former president.
Few people outside of Wyoming know much about Harriet Hageman, whom Mr Trump endorsed to replace Ms Cheney. Ms Hageman, for her part, has criticised Ms Cheney’s role as vice chairwoman of the House select committe investigating the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.
“We are fed up with the January 6 commission and those people who think that they can gaslight us,” she said at a rally Mr Trump held for her in May.
The former president is not the only Republican who has supports Ms Hageman, though. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who helped remove Ms Cheney from her role as House Republican Conference chairwoman, has endorsed her, as has Ms Cheney’s replacement in that role, Elise Stefanik. In addition, Bill Stepien, Mr Trump’s former campaign manager, is helping Ms Hageman with her efforts to depose Ms Cheney.
Like Ms Cheney, the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney who held the same congressional seat and ascended as high as House Minority Whip, Ms Hageman also comes from a political family. Her father Jim Hageman, who died in 2006, was a state legislator for 24 years. In 2018, during her failed campaign for governor, Ms Hageman spoke about lessons the elder Hageman bestowed to her.
“Without honesty, there is no worth,” she said. “Optimism wins, pessimism loses. Public service is uplifting, self service is not. Be generous. If it is going to be a long day, pace yourself and your horse.”
Despite this emphasis on honesty, Ms Hageman has repeated spread baseless theories about the 2020 presidential election being stolen.
Ms Hageman has praised the former president for his record.
“President Trump was an excellent president for the United States of America and particularly for the state of Wyoming,” she said at a debate in June. “The threat to our Republic really comes from other sources, including the fact that right now we have two different systems of justice in this country.”
She then went on to spread mistruths about Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton being accountable to a different set of justice compared to Mr Trump.
Ms Hageman bills herself as a fourth-generation Wyomingite. She had previously run for governor in 2018 but placed third. But Ms Hageman was not always a vocal Trump supporter. In 2016, she was part of a cadre of Never Trump conservatives who sought to deny Mr Trump the party’s nomination at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
Politico reported at the time that their goal was to force a vote on the convention’s rules package. That would have opened the door for these rogue conservatives to lobby their colleagues to allow them to vote against giving Mr Trump the nomination.
In 2016, Ms Hageman supported Senator Ted Cruz for the party’s nomination and called Mr Trump the party’s “weakest candidate,” blaming Democrats who voted in Republican primaries and warning that the party would be stuck with “somebody who is racist and xenophobic,” The New York Times reported last year.
But Ms Hageman told The Times that she later changed her mind.
“I heard and believed the lies the Democrats and Liz Cheney’s friends in the media were telling at the time, but that is ancient history as I quickly realized that their allegations against President Trump were untrue,” she said. “He was the greatest president of my lifetime, and I am proud to have been able to renominate him in 2020. And I’m proud to strongly support him today.”
