Liz Cheney Was Defeated By the Extremist Movement She Helped to Empower

If not for Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the election, she would still be backing him.

liz cheney

Mother Jones illustration; Drew Angerer/Getty

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Liz Cheney issued a dire warning. The future of American democracy, and the nation’s place as a symbol of freedom to the world, was on the ballot. If voters chose poorly, she told Rush Limbaugh, the next president “would be the most corrupt individual ever to sit in the Oval Office.” 

She was referring, of course, to Hillary Clinton. 

At the time Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president, was a candidate for Congress with an incredibly bright future. Her campaign was such a formality that it was (I think) the only article in our post-election issue we didn’t have to rewrite from scratch; a pig might fly or get elected president, but no Cheney was going to lose in Wyoming. The reason for her rising star was straightforward: She was a Bush administration veteran who was willing to go to the mat for President Donald Trump, no matter what the naysayers said. They both had a use for each other. By the start of her second term, she was chair of the House Republican Conference. When Trump ran for re-election she offered her endorsement.

But on Tuesday, Cheney’s career in Congress came to an abrupt end, when she lost her Republican primary to conservative challenger Harriet Hageman. The election itself was mostly a formality. After voting to impeach President Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection and vowing to push back against his “crusade to undermine our democracy,” Cheney was stripped last year of her House leadership position. The Wyoming GOP censured her, and later voted to no longer recognize her as a Republican. Although her father once represented the state in Congress and remains its most famous political export, Republicans in the state had swung hard to the right in the Trump years. On January 6, while Cheney and her colleagues were besieged inside the Capitol, the state GOP chair—whose name was included on a leaked list of Oathkeepers members—was protesting outside.

This is not the first time that Cheney has found herself in the political wilds. When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney left office in 2009, Republicans weren’t clamoring for a return to the glory days. Neither of them have addressed a Republican National Convention since they left office. As the country tried to put the Bush years in its past, Liz Cheney emerged as a mouthpiece for an administration and a political movement in exile. 

But she understood that by couching this Bush-era Lost Cause rhetoric in the anti-Obama language of the conservative base, she could find not just an audience, but a fresh start. She became a regular on Fox News and talk radio in these years, serving as a hype woman for her father’s career, and tearing into the Obama administration with such fervor that some conservatives floated her for president. 

Was she a birther? Not personally, but she indulged the racist lie with the same cowardly coddling that everyone else in the party did. “One of the reasons you see people so concerned about this, I think this issue is, people are uncomfortable with having for the first time ever, I think, a president who seems so reluctant to defend the nation overseas,” she said.

The rest of the administration didn’t get off easy either. As I wrote in a piece for the magazine:

With [Bill] Kristol, a former McCain staffer, and the sister of a man who was killed on 9/11, Cheney formed a dark-money outfit called Keep America Safe, which sought to paint Obama as weak on security. One of the group’s first ads bashed Attorney General Eric Holder for hiring attorneys who had once defended Guantanamo detainees. The spot referred to the lawyers as the “Al Qaeda 7” and asked, “Whose values do they share?” as b-roll of someone who looked like Osama bin Laden played in the background. It was like 2004 all over again.

The role she had then and the role she has now are in many respects the same one, applied to radically different circumstances—she is defending her movement against the pretenders who would sully its work. That she was wrong about Obama then and right about Trump now is obvious, but it was the willingness to play in the mud that made her a rising star and a member of Congress in the first place, just as it was the breakdown of public trust and civic guardrails during the Bush era that made possible Trump’s MAGA ascent. By the time she decided that orange man, in fact, bad, the damage had long since been done. She is left to critique the ruling party in exile; the sort of person who in a different context people like the Cheneys might think to covertly fund and equip.

None of this is to erase the work she’s done as a dogged and justifiably incensed leader on the January 6 Committee. She stands almost alone in her caucus, in her decision to not just quietly retire, or gripe anonymously to the press, but to actually fight back and wield the power she has against the threat she’s so clearly recognized. She’ll be fine, of course, both professionally and financially, but if the stand she took cost nothing, well, a lot more people would have taken it. But perhaps her fate might also be a lesson to the aspiring public servants out there—that the movement you cynically stoke might some day come for you, too.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate