The cost of Trump’s vengeance: By purging Liz Cheney, the Republican Party chooses fealty over truth
Donald Trump has successfully reasserted his dominance over the Republican Party – but his victory comes at a cost.
COMMENT
What an illuminating week in US politics.
It started, on Monday, with a public pronouncement from former president Donald Trump.
Six months after the 2020 election and nearly four months after leaving office, Mr Trump still hasn’t moved on from his defeat to Joe Biden.
“The fraudulent presidential election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!” he proclaimed, in the first of many similar messages posted on his new blog.
Most of Mr Trump’s colleagues in the Republican Party dealt with this in their usual fashion: by ignoring it completely and hoping they wouldn’t be asked about it.
But Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the third-highest ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, responded to Mr Trump in a tweet.
“The 2020 election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system,” she said.
Ms Cheney was telling the truth about the election, and Mr Trump was lying, as he’s been doing ever since the night of November 3.
Naturally then, Ms Cheney is the one being punished.
RELATED: ‘She’s gone’: The downfall of Trump’s nemesis
At some point next week, the Republican House caucus will hold a vote to eject Ms Cheney from her leadership position. The result is not in doubt; Ms Cheney is so certain to lose that she’s not even bothering to put up a fight.
Her sole indiscretion has been to speak out repeatedly against the former president. That is the only reason her colleagues want to get rid of her.
So here is the unmistakeable conclusion we can draw from Ms Cheney’s downfall: if you want to be a leader in the Republican Party today, you must peddle Mr Trump’s lies, or at the very least tolerate them silently.
Dare to treat your constituents like adults by telling them the truth, and you’re out.
Of course, most Republicans would not put it quite so bluntly. Here is House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, speaking to Fox News this week.
“I have heard from members concerned about her ability to carry out the job as conference chair, to carry out the message,” he said of Ms Cheney.
“We all need to be working as one if we’re able to win the majority.
“I haven’t heard members concerned about her vote on impeachment. It’s more concerned about the job ability, and what’s our best step forward that we can all work together, instead of attacking one another.”
It’s a messaging problem, you see; a matter of party unity. By talking about the 2020 election, Ms Cheney is distracting from the Republicans’ message and detracting from their ability to effectively oppose Mr Biden. Therefore, she is not fit to be in a leadership position.
You could almost see the logic, if not for the laughable double standard. Because Mr Trump – who is still obsessed with the election, and routinely attacks Republican leaders – escapes any criticism at all.
When Mr Trump distracts from the party’s message by ranting about the election, it’s fine. When he sets a murderous mob on his own vice president, no worries. No threat to party unity there, apparently.
There is no talk of replacing Mr Trump as the undisputed head of the party. Other potential presidential candidates are literally promising to stay out of the race in 2024 if he decides to run again.
Meanwhile, Ms Cheney gets the sack for voicing objective facts.
RELATED: Trump endorses replacement for Liz Cheney
You might wonder why Republicans are so wedded to Mr Trump, given his political record.
To remind you, Mr Trump lost the popular vote in both of his elections, by a margin of about three million in 2016, and seven million last year.
Even when he beat Hillary Clinton (a historically unpopular opponent) in the electoral college, he got a lower share of the vote than the candidates who lost in 2000, 2004 and 2012. Since the turn of the century, only John McCain has done worse.
Mr Trump’s opponent last year, whom he labelled “the worst candidate in the history of presidential politics”, got more votes than anyone else in history.
With Mr Trump as its figurehead, the Republican Party lost control of the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate in a single term. No party had managed that since the 1930s, when the incumbents had a little thing called the Great Depression to deal with.
He’s also the first sitting president to get kicked out of office since 1992.
Contrast that record with the insistence from Republicans that they can’t win without him.
“Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no,” Senator Lindsey Graham said on Thursday night.
“I’ve always liked Liz Cheney, but she’s made a determination that the Republican Party can’t grow with President Trump. I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”
Yeah, OK. Cutting through the crap, this isn’t about Republican politicians’ desire to “grow” their party. It’s about their fear of shrinking it.
Mr Graham, Mr McCarthy and all the other elected Republicans who aren’t unhinged enough to actually believe Mr Trump’s claims about the election know the former president could destroy them if he wanted to.
Mr Trump knows it too. Millions of supporters are loyal to him, not the Republicans. If he told them to forsake the party, they would, leading to electoral disaster.
There is no escape from this situation for the Republican leaders. Denounce Trump, and you’ll lose the support of voters who worship him. Enthusiastically support him, and you risk further alienating the voters who despise him. They’re trapped in a no-win scenario.
Their only viable course of action, then, is to let him spout whatever nonsense he wants and hope most Americans won’t notice.
Ms Cheney has been screwing up that plan, and therefore, her stubbornness is more intolerable to Kevin McCarthy than Mr Trump’s lunacy.
On Wednesday, when it was already apparent that her time as conference chair was ending, Ms Cheney wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post, trying to coax her colleagues to join her tiny rebellion against Mr Trump.
“The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution,” she said, among other things.
She might be right about the election, but by all indications, Ms Cheney is wrong about the state of her party. It’s not at a turning point. There is no decision for it to make. The turning point already happened, and her colleagues made their choice long ago. Whatever civil war she thinks she is fighting was already lost.
The Republicans could have rejected Mr Trump in 2016, refusing to accept him as their leader. They didn’t.
Throughout his presidency, they had chance after chance to choose their purported conservative values over unquestioning fealty to him. They didn’t.
The president’s descent into full-blown delusion after the election, culminating in his supporters’ attack on the Capitol, gave them one last chance to break from him.
But no. Forty-three Republican senators voted to acquit Mr Trump in his second impeachment trial, and 197 voted against impeaching him in the first place.
It’s too late now. If attempting to stay in power against the will of the people wasn’t enough to disqualify Mr Trump, nothing ever will be.
All reports indicate Ms Cheney will be replaced as conference chair by the person Mr Trump has publicly endorsed, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik.
Like so many other Republicans, Ms Stefanik spoke out harshly against Mr Trump when he first ran for president, before determining she could better serve her own ambitions by trading principle for sycophancy.
Ms Cheney has a more conservative voting record in Congress than Ms Stefanik, by far. When Mr Trump was president, she was significantly more supportive of his agenda. None of that matters.
The only meaningful difference between them is that Ms Stefanik is more than happy to boost Mr Trump’s lies about the election if it helps her own career, while Ms Cheney is not.
“My vision is to run with support from the president and his coalition of voters, which was the highest number of votes ever won by a Republican in 2020,” Ms Stefanik said this week, during an appearance on the podcast of Mr Trump’s former political adviser Steve Bannon.
“This is also about being one team. And I’m committed to being a voice and sending a clear message that we are one team, and that means working with the president and working with all of our excellent Republican members of Congress.”
To be clear, when Ms Stefanik talks about working “with the president”, she does not mean the actual president, Mr Biden, but the former president, Mr Trump, who still likes to be called the president even though he no longer is the president.
This is now the price of entry for a leadership role in America’s Grand Old Party: sucking up to a man who treats his own supporters like fools, indulging his absurd conspiracy theories, and purging anyone brave enough to tell the truth.
Meanwhile, boring old Joe Biden is quietly implementing the sort of progressive, high-spending agenda the Clintons and Obamas of the world could only dream of.
When the opposition has gone off the deep end, anything sounds reasonable by comparison.
Sam Clench is news.com.au’s US correspondent.
US government’s bombshell Covid website
The White House has launched a shock new website claiming to detail “the true origins of Covid-19”.
$8.5 billion Trump move sees markets sink
An update by the Trump administration has led a high profile US company to announce a $8.5bn revenue hit, leading stock markets to fall.
Trump shuts down plan to strike nation
The US President has reportedly pulled the plug on a potentially devastating strike, just as it was laying the groundwork for a co-ordinated offensive.