Liz Cheney vociferously opposed the former US President, making many enemies within her party. In Wyoming, she is now failing because of a candidate who is supported by Trump.
The most prominent inner-party critic of former US President Donald Trump, Liz Cheney, will no longer be a member of the House of Representatives from January. According to calculations by the AP news agency and the data provider Edison Research, the Republican lost the primaries in her home state of Wyoming to her internal party opponent Harriet Hageman. This will compete in the congressional elections in November in the constituency for the Republicans. Cheney’s defeat had been expected. Trump had supported Hageman and campaigned to vote Cheney out of office.
Cheney, 56, is a staunch neocon, pro-business Republican but renounces extremes. She represents the current in the Republican Party that has taken up the cause of preventing Trump from returning to the White House. In her view, Trump, who himself regularly fuels speculation about a renewed candidacy in 2024, is a threat to democracy.
Especially after the events surrounding the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Cheney opposed Trump. On that day, after a riotous speech by the then President, his supporters wanted to prevent Congress from officially declaring Democrat Joe Biden the winner of the November 2020 election. After the riots, Cheney became one of only 10 Republicans to vote alongside the Democrats to impeach Trump. However, the necessary majority for a conviction was not achieved in the Senate.
Cheney: Put liberty, constitution and future of the country above the party
With Trump and the party leaders, Cheney fell out of favor with her vote. She was voted out of a leadership position in the Republican faction, but was not deterred by threats against herself and her family. She has been praised by several media outlets in recent weeks for her role as vice chair of the investigative committee into the storming of the Capitol. At hearings, she asked questions in a calm, structured, and concise manner, trying to demonstrate Trump’s behavior in January 2021 to the American public. Cheney recently told CNN that Trump was guilty of “the gravest breach of duty by a president in the history of our country.” To this day, Trump keeps claiming the 2020 election was stolen.
During the Wyoming campaign, Cheney, daughter of former Secretary of Defense and Vice President Dick Cheney, positioned herself as Trump’s toughest opponent in the fight for the party’s future. After voting, Cheney said the US was at a point “where our democracy is really under attack and threatened. And those of us Republicans, Democrats and independents who believe deeply in liberty and who believe in the Constitution and the future of the I believe that what is close to the heart of the country has a duty to put this above the party.”