WASHINGTON – Wyoming representative Liz Cheney took a deeper look on Sunday’s Republican identity crisis and on the eve of a Senate impeachment, warned her party about former President Donald J. Trump’s role in triggering a violent attack on the Capitol and the USA fails to “oversee” a culture of conspiracy within its ranks.
In her first television interview since Mr. Trump’s allies fought off an attempt by Trump’s allies to oust her from the House leadership for her vote to indict him, Ms. Cheney said Republican voters were “lied to” by a president who was running an election wanted to steal with unfounded allegations of widespread electoral fraud. She warned that if the party fails to show the majority of Americans that it can be trusted to lead truthfully, the party runs the risk of being excluded from power.
“The idea that the election was stolen or rigged was a lie and people need to understand,” Ms. Cheney said on Fox News Sunday. “We need to make sure that we, as Republicans, are the party of truth and that we are honest about what really happened in 2020 so that we actually have a chance to win in 2022 and win the White House back in 2024.”
She added that Mr. Trump “has no role in the future as the leader of our party”.
The remarks made it clear that Ms. Cheney, a leading Republican voice who tried to push the party back to its traditional political roots, had no intention of expressing her criticism of the former president after two attempts last week to get her for her impeachment vote punish to withdraw. In Washington, her critics forced a vote to try to oust her as chairman of the House Republican conference, but a secret ballot largely failed. And on Saturday, the Wyoming Republican Party reprimanded her and called for her resignation.
To that call, Ms. Cheney replied Sunday that she would not resign and suggested that Republicans in her home state continue to be misinformed about what had happened. It came a few days after she privately denied a request from the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, California Representative Kevin McCarthy, to apologize at her conference for how she had handled the impeachment vote, according to two people who had first exchanges were reported on Sunday by Axios.
“The people in the party are wrong,” she said on Fox News of the January 6 attack that killed five people, including a Capitol police officer, along with nearby protests. Regarding the Black Lives Matter movement, she added, “They believe the BLM and Antifa are behind what happened here at the Capitol. That’s just not the case, it’s not true, and we’re going to have a lot of work to do. “
First-hand reports, videos, criminal records, and a host of other evidence leave no doubt that supporters of Mr. Trump perpetrated the attack and believe that they may prevent Congress from formalizing President Biden’s election victory.
Despite refusing to say whether she would vote in favor of Mr Trump’s conviction if she were a Senator, Ms. Cheney urged Republicans to carefully examine the charges and evidence. She also noted that a tweet sent by Mr. Trump when the violence began to unfold criticized former Vice President Mike Pence for refusing to single-handedly reverse the election result “was a deliberate effort To provoke violence “.
“What we already know represents the most serious violation of his oath of office by a president in the country’s history, and we can’t just stop by or pretend it didn’t happen or we’re trying to move on,” said Dr. Said Cheney. She urged her party to “focus on substance, politics and issues” instead of being loyal to Mr. Trump.
This message is unlikely to go down well with many Republicans. Public opinion polls suggest that Mr. Trump remains by far the most popular national figure in his party, and Republican senators appear to be predominantly lining up to acquit him on the “incitement to rebellion” charges that Ms. Cheney endorsed.
Ms. Cheney also harshly criticized Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene, a newly minted Republican from Georgia, whose earlier acceptance of QAnon and a number of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic conspiracy theories upset the house last week. Ms. Cheney said Ms. Greene’s views “have no place in our public discourse.”
“We are the Lincoln party,” said Ms. Cheney. “We are not the party of QAnon or anti-Semitism or Holocaust deniers or white supremacy or conspiracy theories.”
Some prominent Republican senators backed Ms. Cheney on Sunday, saying they would look carefully at the impeachment case and try to steer the party back towards conservative political arguments rather than personality.
“Our party is on fire, if you will,” said Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana. “We win when we have guidelines that speak to the families at the table.”
Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, said he was “really encouraged” by the House vote to keep Ms. Cheney in her leadership role. “You could have voted how you felt right and you kept your role,” he told State of the Union on CNN. “This is how you start to unite and hold this party together and think about how we are going in the post-Trump era.”
But Ms. Cheney, the daughter of a famous Republican family in Wyoming – her father, Dick Cheney, also represented the state in the House before he became Vice President – still faces the likelihood of a motivated primary challenge for the 2022 election.
