Fox News host Bret Baier had GOP prodigal daughter Liz Cheney on the program and the former Congresswoman pleaded with Fox viewers to change course and vote for someone other than Donald Trump in the primaries and caucuses.
Cheney told Baier that the act of honoring The Constitution is the real heart of the conservative ethos — and that to vote for someone who has publicly vowed to defy the nation’s laws, enfeeble the checks and balances system, and seize power out of proportion with the executive branch’s mandate is to cast a vote against conservatism, not for it.
Cheney, whose conservative roots are deep but who butted heads with the ascendant MAGA wing of the GOP, notably voted in accord with Trump more than 90 percent of her time in Congress during his administration. But MAGA cast her as a “traitor” after she asserted unequivocally that Trump’s alleged attempt to seize power on January 6 was an unforgivable crime against the republic. And in the ensuing election, voters in Wyoming punished Cheney for her refusal to go along with the Republicans who backed Trump — she says for politically expedient reasons.
“I won my [first] primary by 70% of the vote,” Cheney told Baier. “I could have done that again if I was willing to lie about what Donald Trump did. I wasn’t willing to do that.”
Trump-bashing Liz Cheney gets testy when Bret Baier cites WSJ op-ed on ‘projection’
— BPR (@BIZPACReview) December 19, 2023
Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney insisted there is no double standard in her criticism of presidents even as she told Fox News viewers to ditch the GOP frontrunner in the 2024 race.
The so-called… pic.twitter.com/QKEPokqfSA
And what she characterizes as her principled stand wasn’t out of any ineradicable Never Trumper resistance — as she made clear in reminding viewers: “I voted against that impeachment that you’re talking about, the first impeachment. I voted against it.”
But Trump’s January 6 actions were of a different order and magnitude, in Cheney’s view, and that made it “different. When you have a President of the United States who attempts to seize power, that that goes to the heart of of who we are. And that danger is one we can’t ignore.”
Cheney, a former Fox News contributor, has been making the media rounds promoting her book, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning. Her most recent tweet is this:
On Jan 6, Trump thought it would help him to let police officers be violently attacked, so he did. He sat in the WH dining room and watched the attack on television, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave the Capitol. That’s depravity. pic.twitter.com/MReMysC534
— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) December 19, 2023
