Analysis: Cheney perfectly captured the choice the GOP has to make on Trump
(CNN)On Wednesday night, Liz Cheney made it clear: Republicans can’t have it both ways.
Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the Wyoming Republican, said this:
“The reality that we face today as Republicans — as we think about the choice in front of us — we have to choose. Because Republicans cannot both be loyal to Donald Trump and loyal to the Constitution.”
That appeal will almost certainly fall on deaf ears within Cheney’s Republican conference, which voted her out of party leadership earlier this year because she voted to impeach Trump for his action (and inaction) on January 6, 2021.
But, it’s worth unpacking Cheney’s quote regardless — because there’s some real truth in it.
Start with what it takes to support Trump these days.
The former President has made a belief — contra facts — in his stolen election claims a litmus test for the party. If you are unwilling to pay at least lip service to his conspiracy theories — vote mules! dead people! — you are dismissed as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) who doesn’t care enough about the country to fight for it.
Then consider what we know about Trump’s actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election:
- He aggressively pressured swing-state state election officials to overturn the results or turn up more votes for him. “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a call.
- He knew people gathered at the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally were armed and dangerous before he gave a speech in which he urged them to “fight like hell” or run the risk of losing their country. “They’re not here to hurt me,” Trump told aides about the mob.
- He reportedly knew of — and approved of — the chants of “Hang Mike Pence” from the rioters — believing them to be justified by the vice president’s refusal to overturn the electoral college count which showed Joe Biden winning comfortably.
- He (briefly) named Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer within the Justice Department, as the acting attorney general so that Clark could circulate a letter to the states saying that the Department of Justice had “significant concerns” about the 2020 election. (Trump later recanted after he was told in a meeting that placing Clark in the top job at DOJ would lead to resignations en masse.
Trump did all of these things because he couldn’t accept that he didn’t win. He had no proof — just the vague sense that he should have won and somehow didn’t. “There’s no way Joe Biden got 80 million votes,” Trump is fond of saying, although he provides no evidence for what that can’t be the case — other than he just thinks it. (Worth noting: Biden actually got a little over 81 million votes; Trump got 74 million.)
Against all of that is the Constitution — the country’s founding document — which states that there is no role, aside from a ceremonial one, for the vice president in the counting of the Electoral College votes. It also makes clear that a peaceful transition of power in which the person with more electoral votes becomes president sits at the heart of American democracy.
As Barack Obama said in his farewell speech in January 2017:
“In 10 days, the world will witness a hallmark of our democracy… [Audience boos] No, no, no, no, no — the peaceful transfer of power from one freely elected President to the next. I committed to President-elect Trump that my administration would ensure the smoothest possible transition, just as President Bush did for me. Because it’s up to all of us to make sure our government can help us meet the many challenges we still face.”
The simple fact is that you can’t a) call yourself a constitutional conservative and b) support what Trump has — and is — doing in attempting to undermine not just the 2020 election but the broader democratic experiment.
This is an either/or question. There’s no room for fence-sitters.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/30/politics/liz-cheney-donald-trump-2024/index.html
