Liz Cheney Calls Trump ‘a Domestic Threat That We Have Never Faced Before’

Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican and vice chairwoman of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, described former President Donald J. Trump in stark phrases on Wednesday night time as a menace to the republic who had “gone to war with the rule of law.”

“At this moment, we are confronting a domestic threat that we have never faced before — and that is a former president who is attempting to unravel the foundations of our constitutional republic,” Ms. Cheney mentioned in a speech on the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., the place her tackle was met with a sustained standing ovation.

“He is aided by Republican leaders and elected officials who made themselves willing hostages to this dangerous and irrational man,” she mentioned, persevering with, “Even after all we’ve seen, they’re enabling his lies.”

Ms. Cheney spoke at a second when Mr. Trump is probably on the verge of saying a presidential marketing campaign for 2024, in keeping with his advisers, elevating the prospect of a front-running candidate in early polls who can be going through lively civil and felony investigations. Mr. Trump has additionally continued to repeat lies about his 2020 election loss, sustaining that the competition was “stolen” from him.

“As the full picture is coming into view with the Jan. 6 committee, it has become clear that the efforts Donald Trump oversaw and engaged in were even more chilling and more threatening than we could have imagined,” Ms. Cheney mentioned.

Republicans, she mentioned at one other level, “have to choose,” as a result of they “cannot both be loyal to Donald Trump and loyal to the Constitution.”

It was a hanging commentary from the daughter of a Republican former vice chairman, Dick Cheney, in opposition to the present chief of the Republican Party, whilst he’s out of workplace. Ms. Cheney had been a supporter of Mr. Trump’s till shortly after the 2020 election, when she criticized him for his baseless fraud allegations.

In May 2021, she mentioned she regretted voting for him the earlier yr.

Ms. Cheney, who was forced out of her leadership post because the No. 3 Republican within the House final yr as she repeatedly excoriated Mr. Trump for the occasions of Jan. 6, has change into a reasonably remoted presence inside a celebration that continues to be closely in thrall of the previous president.

She is seen as a possible presidential candidate within the 2024 election, wherein she might attempt to plant a flag exhibiting how the get together has morphed from the one her father helped lead into one reshaped by Trumpism.

Ms. Cheney started her speech by speaking about undemocratic international locations all over the world and nations which might be adversaries of the United States, together with Russia and China. From there, she talked about Mr. Trump.

She praised Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final White House chief of workers, for her public testimony in Congress a day earlier.

“Her bravery and patriotism were awesome to behold,” Ms. Cheney mentioned.

Ms. Cheney is going through a Trump-backed major challenger for her Wyoming congressional seat in August, and the race is broadly seen as an uphill battle for her.