(2024-03-20) Opinion Liz Cheney Still Plans To Make A Difference In The Election

Opinion | Liz Cheney still plans to make a difference in the election. Liz Cheney doesn’t mince words about Donald Trump. She calls the former president a “liar,” a “con man” and a potential “tyrant” who, if elected again, would “torch the Constitution” and its guarantees of free speech and rule of law.

Defeating Trump means reelecting President Joe Biden and rejecting third-party candidates, she said forthrightly. Though she disagrees with Biden on many policy issues, she said his victory in November is necessary to save the country from potential dictatorship.

Cheney said she hasn’t decided yet whether it makes sense to formally endorse Biden. But she has pledged to work until Election Day to “educate” Americans about how dangerous Trump is.

What Cheney could do in this campaign, above all, is animate the public’s memory of what happened on Jan. 6. In her new book, “Oath and Honor,” and onstage in Hartford, she offered a visceral, minute-by-minute account of the day when Trump attempted a “coup” to prevent certification of his election defeat. (2021 Storming of the US Capitol)

What difference will Cheney’s passionate opposition make? It’s hard to say, given the way Trump has turned traditional political alignments upside down. But maybe she’s a voice for the many Republicans (not to mention independents) who are resisting the Trump cult. She’s an antiabortion, pro-gun, anti-tax conservative.

Cheney stays focused on what’s at stake in this election. America is “sleepwalking toward dictatorship,” she warned. Trump makes clear in nearly every speech that he will defy Congress, resist the courts and work to break the “checks and balances” that distribute power and safeguard democracy in our system.

That’s why it’s so important that the Supreme Court promptly reject Trump’s immunity claim and allow the Jan. 6 trial to begin before the election — so that the nation can hear testimony from Pence and others in open court. I can’t imagine Trump surviving that public rebuke.