Rep. Liz Cheney offered a bleak prediction for her Republican colleagues on the first day of the Jan. 6 House select committee hearings in June: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain,” she told them at the start of proceedings widely seen as presenting damning evidence that Trump instigated the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“She knew what the risks were when she came out and opposed the president,” Mike Madrid, a Republican co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told HuffPost. “Whether she thought for a short period of time that she could win a primary back home? I don’t know. But it’s no secret — and it hasn’t been for a long time — that that’s not going to happen.”
Cheney’s fate in Congress may be sealed, but her political future outside of the legislative branch isn’t. After raising $13 million, the three-term scion of a conservative political dynasty hasn’t ruled out running for president, a move that might pit her against her ultimate adversary, Trump, in a primary.
“America cannot remain free if we abandon the truth,” Cheney says in her campaign’s closing ad, over the swelling of orchestral music. “The lie that the 2020 election was stolen is insidious. It preys on those who love their country. It is a door Donald Trump opened to manipulate Americans to abandon their principles, to sacrifice their freedom, to justify violence, to ignore the rulings of our courts and the rule of law.”
“People already had their minds made up,” he told HuffPost. “Her votes on election certification and then impeachment in January of 2021, those were the things that started the opposition rolling. It’s been there for a year and a half now. The visibility of this race has made it so that people are really set.”
“Harriet has and continues to run simply on the basis that she’ll bend her knee further toward Trump than anyone else,” Stubson said. “It’s really been that simple of a campaign — Liz betrayed the Republican Party by crossing Trump, and she’ll remain true to him.”
“No one who understands our nation’s laws, no one with an honest, honorable, genuine commitment to our nation’s laws would say that,” Cheney says in her closing ad about calling the 2020 election stolen and rigged. “It is a cancer that threatens our great republic.”
