It’s hard to be a Republican without supporting former President Donald Trump in the United States. The elected Liz Cheney paid the price this Tuesday. The one who pledged to “do everything” so that the former president never again accesses the White House, lost the primary in Wyoming, facing a candidate supported by the real estate magnate.
“I will do whatever it takes to ensure that Donald Trump never approaches the Oval Office again,” hammered the 56-year-old parliamentarian from Wyoming, a very conservative state where she had sat since 2017. The elected official is one of the main pet peeves of the Republican billionaire since she dared to join the parliamentary committee investigating her role in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Influence on the Republican Party
The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney even co-chairs this group of elected officials, for whom Donald Trump “failed in his duty” during the attack led by his supporters to try to prevent the certification of the victory of the Democrat Joe Biden for the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump, who openly flirts with a 2024 presidential candidacy, constantly denounces the work of this commission, which he describes as a “witch hunt”.
He had therefore pledged to beat Liz Cheney, putting all his weight behind his rival Harriet Hageman, a 59-year-old lawyer with whom he went to campaign at the end of May. The Republican nomination in the election for the House of Representatives will therefore go to Donald Trump’s protege, further strengthening the hold of the former White House tenant on the Republican Party, despite the many investigations of which it is the subject. As if, by dint of accumulation, all these affairs no longer had a hold on him.
A “stolen” election according to Trump
The ex-real estate mogul immediately applauded the loss of Liz Cheney: “She should be ashamed of herself, of the way she acted,” he said on his social network, Truth Social. “Now, it can finally fall into the oblivion of politics,” he rejoiced. In Wyoming, a state that voted more than 70% for Donald Trump in the last presidential election, candidate Harriet Hageman notably supports the theory conveyed by the Trump clan that the 2020 election was “stolen” from former president, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
For her part, Liz Cheney, who voted for the dismissal from which Donald Trump finally escaped, has been trying for more than a year to dismantle this thesis to which millions of Trumpists still adhere. “In our country, we do not take an oath to an individual or to a political party”, affirmed the elected official during a parliamentary hearing in mid-June, believing that the “defense of the American Constitution” deserved to jeopardize his political career.
Death threats and ambitions for 2024
Since she is investigating Donald Trump and his entourage, the elected official has been targeted by a series of death threats and no longer travels without a police escort. In her state, the first to grant women the right to vote in 1869, as a large mural in downtown Cheyenne recalls, the elected official had been forced to lead a kind of phantom campaign, without electoral rallies or public events.
This blonde woman with glasses, heiress of a very traditionalist, pro-gun and anti-abortion right, was also excommunicated by the Republican Party of Wyoming, whose leader himself participated in the demonstrations on the day of the assault on the Capitol. How does Liz Cheney now intend to block Donald Trump? Rumors lend him presidential ambitions for the 2024 election. On Tuesday evening, Liz Cheney also wanted to offer an outstretched hand to “Republicans, Democrats and independents”: destroy our republic. »