Liz Cheney, who was defeated in the Republican Primary for US House in Wyoming on Tuesday night, lost her election well over a year ago.
In the aftermath of the January 6th riots aimed at preventing the ratification of Joe Biden’s election as US President, she was one of only 10 Republican politicians to vote to impeach Donald Trump for his part in the affair. Of those ten, only two will return to Congress next year. Those two, not coincidentally, are the two who did not have to face a Republican primary. In the modern Republican party, the penalty for crossing Donald Trump is political death.
There are many reasons why an American voter might oppose Liz Cheney in good faith. She is, after all, a member of her Father’s Republican party: A believer, like Vice President Dick Cheney, in the muscular use of American military power. A believer in tax cuts, and the death penalty, and that the poor should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In the aftermath of her defeat, these have been amongst many reasons cited by some commentators for her defeat, in an effort to avoid talking about the real reason for her defeat.
After all, there are many Republicans in the American Congress who voted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: Liz Cheney was not amongst them. She only entered office in 2017, well over a decade after both wars took place. Her position on those wars and everything else was not considered disqualifying by Republican voters when they were electing her alongside Donald Trump, or when they were re-electing her, in two subsequent elections: Those positions became relevant only when voters and commentators wanted to find an excuse to ditch her for not professing ultimate loyalty to Donald Trump. Consider by way of contrast Marco Rubio, a Republican with the same views as Liz Cheney on every single issue under the sun aside from whether Donald Trump won the last election, and who is presently cruising to re-nomination in Florida.
So those who claim that Liz Cheney was voted out of office because her views do not align with Republicans on things like war and the economy are, to put it frankly, fibbing: The truth is no more than that Trump tells Republican voters to jump, and they start impersonating excited Kangaroos.
This article will, of course, not be popular with a small section of my regular readers, who have readily and eagerly fallen into the trap of regarding Donald Trump as some kind of saviour of the west. This would doubtless get more likes and shares on social media if it was a pro-Trump piece, praising his poor beleaguered unloved voters: He is hated by the right people, those people tend to think, and therefore must be good. The paradox of this kind of thinking is that over time, it has formed a cult around Trump: Because Trump is “our guy”, the “other guys” must be out to get him. He is incapable of doing wrong, and must always be considered the victim.
Even after all the nonsense. Even after, for example, the boast that he would “appoint the best people”, only to have been, in his telling, systematically betrayed by all the “best people” who he appointed himself. Right up to, this week, Chris Wray – his handpicked director of the FBI who is now, apparently, just another agent of the Deep State. If that is true, then the fact that he is in office is Donald Trump’s fault. But it is not true – it is just something that we must pretend to be true in order to defend the former President.
That is why Trump was ultimately right to boast that he could shoot a person in broad daylight, and still win votes: He would simply claim that he was the victim of a political prosecution by the liberals and the democrat machine, and a depressingly large number of people would go along with that. Witness, by way of evidence, the reaction to the FBI raid on his home. Too many of Trump’s supporters seem to have missed here that they were the butt of his joke: These rubes are so dumb they’d vote for me even if I shot someone dead.
In the aftermath of that FBI raid, Trump and his defenders have claimed both that the documents seized were not classified, and that the documents seized were planted by the FBI, which is an obvious contradiction. Both cannot be true, but true believers are expected to believe both, and are apparently happy to, in order to prove their loyalty. In the ultimate demonstration of loyalty to the leader, a man professing to be very angry indeed at the FBI raid on Trump opened fire on an FBI office in Chicago, and died for his troubles. The reaction to this from the hardcore Trump fan caucus was as depressingly predictable as it was brain-dead: False Flag!!
Trump persists with the absurd and baseless claim that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him – just as he persists, to this day, that the 2016 Iowa caucuses, organised by and counted by loyal republican volunteers, was stolen from him by, of all people, Ted Cruz. That all of this is nonsense should be obvious to anybody whose brain has not been fundamentally corrupted by mindless partisanship. These allegations have been brought to court after court, and rejected, including many times by Judges Trump appointed himself (he only appoints the best people, remember?).
If you continue to believe them, you must, as a matter of logic, believe that Trump himself appointed many people who later conspired against him to steal an election, which, if it were true, should also lead you to believe that Donald Trump is fundamentally incapable of appointing people who will serve the interests of his voters.
That Cheney paid the political price for saying these things is obvious, and beyond dispute.
It is fashionable, in some circles in the right who share my views on this, to now mollify readers at this stage of an article about Trump by laying some of the blame for this at the feet of liberals: They behaved so badly for so long, the media became untrustworthy, they lied so often that Trump was the natural outcome. But this is nonsense: The right has to take responsibility for its own pathologies. You don’t love Trump because the bad liberals made you love Trump. You’re not that incapable of independent and rational thought. That’s just another lie he’s convinced his supporters to tell themselves.
How have we come to this point where a conservative movement which used to pride itself on not running with the herd has transmogrified into an army of lemmings, willing to follow the Caudillo off a cliff? When faced directly with a choice between a politician in Cheney who told the truth, and a politician in her opponent, Harriet Hageman, who persisted in telling Trumps lies, voters on the right deliberately and actively chose the liar.
That Hageman is a liar is not even especially hard to prove: In 2016, when Trump was gaining power, she opposed him almost fanatically. She said he was a threat to democracy itself. She said he was unstable, and unsuited to high office. She warned that he would be a disaster for the country, and for her party. Five years later, here she is, winning an election by denouncing Liz Cheney, of all people, as a disloyal Republican.
In the long run, Cheney will come out of this well, and Trump will not. Perhaps it is for the best now that he is nominated again in 2024, and beaten soundly. He has become a virus, corrupting the minds of previously sensible people, and turning the entirety of the American – and increasingly the western – right into a poor imitation of Anakin Skywalker at his most pathetic: “If you are not with me, then you are my enemy”.
In his name, the American Republican party is eating itself alive. Hageman was right in 2016. But like too many others, she now prefers Trumps lies to the truth of what he is. For my money, I’m just happy to see that there’s one politician in the west willing to lose her seat rather than tell blatant lies to keep it.
Kudos, Ms. Cheney.