In Defeat Liz Cheney Leads the Anti-Trump Movement

As predicted by polls, Liz Cheney lost her primary election in Wyoming yeterday - making it very clear that's a state I have no desire to visit - to a Trump embracing cultist endorsed by Der Trumpenfuhrer.  Hopefully, her loss will only further fuel Cheney's efforts to do all she can to destroy Donald Trump and perhaps roil the 2024 presidential election by running for president., not necessarily with a chance of winning but instead guaranteeing a Republican loss. The cancer within the GOP must be stopped at whatever cost necessary if American democracy is to survive.  I disagree with Cheney on almost every issue save one: she puts the U.S. Constitution and democracy above personal advantage - a virtually unknown concept to most of today's Republicans who are ready to sell their souls at  the drop of a hat or the wave of Trump's finger.  As a former Republican I remain aghast at the moral bankruptcy that has consumed the GOP.   Personally, I continue to believe the rise of evangelicals - who I view as among the most morally bankrupt in America other than Trump himself - is what spelled the death knell of morality in the GOP.   A piece in the Washington Post looks at Cheney's loss and possible future.  Here are highlights:

 Rep. Liz Cheney had it all two years ago.

She won her 2020 primary with 73 percent of the vote, she was already the No. 3 ranking House GOP leader, and she was well on her way to becoming the first female Republican speaker.

All the Wyoming Republican had to do was keep quiet, like almost all her male GOP colleagues had decided to do.

“I could easily have done the same again, the path was clear, but it would have required that I go along with President Trump’s lie about the 2020 election,” Cheney told a crowd of about 100 supporters gathered in a valley inside the Teton mountain range. “It would have required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic. “That was a path I could not and would not take.”

Cheney used her defiant concession speech Tuesday night, after losing badly in the GOP primary to Trump’s handpicked candidate, to promise a sustained campaign against the ex-president and his allies. She surrendered her rising-star status in Congress in a sacrificial manner toward a higher calling to take on the most powerful figure in her increasingly conspiratorial political party.

Cynics back in Washington discounted this race long ago as lacking importance, given that it was trading one deeply conservative Republican for another. . . . But congressional historians say that’s missing the point: What Cheney has done, in sacrificing her seat and yet fighting to the finish without wavering, is just not common in this era.

“I cannot recall anyone who compares to Liz Cheney’s ‘full force’ confrontation with Trump and company, especially post-World War II,” Donald R. Wolfensberger, a scholar at the Wilson Center, said Tuesday.

Cheney laid out the terms of how she will judge the success of her effort. “We must be very clear-eyed about the threat we face and about what is required to defeat it. I have said since January 6, that I will do whatever it takes to ensure Donald Trump is never again anywhere near the Oval Office. And I mean this,” she said, drawing cheers from a crowd that featured a few newfound admirers among local liberals but was largely made up of old-time hands from Wyoming Republican politics.

It will be more difficult for the younger Cheney to garner the same level of attention next year, when she is out of office, after just six years and at the politically young age of 56. . . . . But she has gained a level of attention that now dwarfs almost every other member of Congress, commanding a platform that all but a handful of other Republicans in the Capitol have attempted.

And she has become a prolific fundraiser, where in the past she would raise the minimum necessary to win in this small-population state where only the GOP primary matters.

Many supporters want her to run for president in 2024, some a bit naive in thinking she would be a top-tier contender. Cheney did little to tamp that down in Tuesday night’s speech.

The speech’s timing had less to do with the results of the primary for the at-large seat — she conceded before she spoke — and more about hitting the precise image of the mountain range behind her as the sun set, creating the perfect golden-hour glow.

Not to mention, taking the stage before 10:30 p.m. Eastern time, Cheney reached a few million viewers back East who watched as cable networks covered the speech live. From the stage, Cheney looked straight up a mountain range that, on the other side, is home to the Spring Creek Ranch, where a longtime family supporter hosted a fundraiser last year for Trump’s truest believers in the House.

Cheney rejected input from advisers and traditional conservative Republicans here. They wanted her to run a campaign about all the work she had done on Wyoming issues, . . . . Instead, after some early positive advertisements that discussed those matters, Cheney focused her final weeks almost singularly on prosecuting the case against Trump and those local Republicans who tout his fallacies about the 2020 election. Right down to running a 60-second ad featuring her father calling Trump a “coward.”

“I have no regrets,” she told a few reporters, expressing pride in the work she has done on Wyoming issues but explaining bigger issues were at play. “There is nothing more important than the defense of our Constitution. And so I’m going to continue to work and ensure that we’re doing that in a way that is nonpartisan.”

Liz Cheney is no longer just her father’s daughter. She has taken a role and an image unto herself, something the former vice president is now appreciative of, as he demonstrated Tuesday when he stood away from the cameras to let Liz be the focus of interviews at the polling place.

Cheney now joins other lawmakers who have demonstrated a political conscience in maintaining their positions even as they know it’s unpopular with voters in their party.

Cheney is now a figure for history, whose final two years in the House will certainly be more fondly recalled than the decades of tenure those other Republicans reach.

Charles Thompson, a retired newspaper reporter from Philadelphia who has been active in Democratic politics here for 20 years, recalled this week how he waited in line to ask her about the choice she made to break so sharply against Trump and other party leaders.

“Was it,” Thompson asked, “a difficult choice?”

“No,” Cheney replied. “It was the only choice. It was the right thing.”