The New Yorker: Liz Cheney's Kamikaze Campaign
Unlike most of her Republican colleagues, the Wyoming representative is willing to lose her seat to take down Donald Trump.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/liz-cheneys-kamikaze-campaign
One supposed mystery about Cheney: If she is so horrified by Trump’s war on democracy, why did it take her until after the November, 2020, election to notice it? There were signs that Cheney’s loyalty to the President was waning as early as the beginning of that year, when she publicly praised Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, and Alex Vindman, a member of the National Security Council, both of whom had testified against Trump during his first impeachment trial. But she voted against impeachment. Although friends say that Cheney has great respect for Anthony Fauci, because her father had worked with him on bioterrorism policy in the Bush years, and that both Liz and Dick Cheney were disgusted by the Administration’s rejection of pandemic science, she limited her public criticisms of Trump’s covid policy. The record suggests that Cheney ultimately turned on Trump when she lost faith in the Republican Party to manage him. A turning point came on January 28, 2021, when Kevin McCarthy, the Republicans’ House leader, paid a visit to Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Cheney had thought that, in the aftermath of January 6th, the Party would effectively shun the ex-President, but McCarthy’s visit convinced her that wasn’t true. As the House evacuated on January 6th, Jordan offered Cheney his hand, to help her out of the aisle. She slapped it away. “You fucking did this,” she said.
The most important question about Cheney is this: Why did so few of her colleagues join her? Right now, the Republican Party seems trapped in a pattern of nearly terminal risk aversion. For half a decade, most of its elected members have been unable to publicly denounce a President who disgusts and scares many of them privately. How much can a congressional seat be worth to them? “You can do many of the things you do in Congress in other ways,” Comstock told me. A moderate Republican, Comstock represented northern Virginia in the House until 2018, when she lost her seat in the anti-Trump wave. When we spoke, she had just returned from a diplomatic trip to South Korea. “Why are so many congresspeople selling their souls?” she said. “Isn’t there anything else they can do to make a hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars a year?”
Cheney is likely to lose her seat in the midterm elections. The most recent poll of Wyoming’s Republican primary, which is scheduled for August 16th, shows her trailing her well-funded, Trump-backed opponent, Harriet Hageman, by twenty points. Some of the immensely wealthy and conservative Jackson Hole families that have long backed the Cheneys (the Kemmerers, the Friesses) have switched their allegiance to Hageman. When I asked Mary Martin, the chair of the Teton County G.O.P., why Cheney had fallen out of favor, Martin said that the congresswoman had addressed locals’ concerns about election integrity by “implying that they were ignorant or stupid or uninformed.”
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Politicians, being generally cynical, are understood to want nothing so much as to be elected. And yet Cheney has not been doing the sort of things that a politician does when she is trying to win. She has spent a lot of time in Washington, on select-committee business, but even when she is in Wyoming her campaign has, in recent months, only staged private events, owing to security concerns. (The Cheney campaign would not tell me what sorts of threats it has received, but the other Republican on the January 6th committee, Adam Kinzinger, released an audio compilation of the threats left on his office voice mail. “We know where you live,” one caller told him. “Gonna get your wife, gonna get your kids, you little cocksucking bastard.”) CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Cheney: If her work on the select committee ended her political career, would it have been worth it? “There’s no question,” Cheney replied. “I believe my work on this committee is the single most important thing I’ve ever done.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/liz-cheneys-kamikaze-campaign
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