I need a Republican hero. Liz Cheney is one of the GOP’s last few.
As a registered Republican for 44 years, I am more horrified and disgusted each day by what the Republican Party has been transformed into by Trump. I don’t want to completely give up.
I need a hero; I’m holding out for a hero. Today, that would be Liz Cheney.
In a Republican Party now mostly made up of haughty Trump sycophants, pragmatic self-preservationists, or outright cowards, Cheney sets an example of leadership the GOP sorely needs.
The day after Nikki Haley suspended her campaign, leaving Donald Trump as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, Cheney announced the creation of the Great Task PAC, the sole purpose of which is to prevent Trump from being elected president in 2024. “The GOP has chosen,” Cheney wrote on X. “They will nominate a man who attempted to overturn an election and seize power. We have eight months to save our republic & ensure Donald Trump is never anywhere near the Oval Office again.”
Since Jan. 6, 2021, Cheney has spoken out consistently and unwaveringly against Trump and the extreme danger he poses to this country. But she has been met largely with hostile pushback and retaliation from her own party, resulting in significant professional costs to herself.
When she was third in rank in the U.S. House GOP, she was abruptly removed from that leadership position solely over her attempts to hold Trump accountable for Jan. 6. She was replaced by Trump loyalist Rep. Elise Stefanik.
Cheney lost her House seat to another Trump loyalist in the Wyoming primary after being specifically targeted by Trump, who even had Rep. Matt Gaetz fly to Cheyenne to campaign for Cheney’s opponent on the steps of the state Capitol. Cheney was also censured and kicked out of the Wyoming Republican Party — again, solely for being opposed to Trump.
None of that has silenced Cheney, because she fully realizes that the fate of the nation’s fragile democracy is far greater in importance than any party politics or even her own political career. Thankfully, she’s not backing down now; in fact, she’s doubling down on the Great Task of stopping Trump, and calling out fellow Republicans for enabling Trump, when they know he’s lying.
Meanwhile, Trump recently completed his takeover of the Republican National Committee when Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and cochair Drew McKissick formally stepped aside to be replaced by Trump’s own handpicked successors: a fervent promoter of the Big Lie, North Carolina GOP Chair Michael Whatley, and Trump’s own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had already been replaced by a zealously loyal, overtly Christian nationalist Mike Johnson.
Even Republicans who held off from supporting Trump over their disdain for him and what he stands for are shamefully caving in one by one and falling in line behind Trump, now that he is the presumptive nominee.
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who hadn’t spoken to Trump in years, endorsed Trump the day after Haley suspended her campaign, and only a few days after announcing he was stepping down from Senate leadership. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who had endorsed and vocally supported Haley, called Trump “crazy” for suggesting he should be immune from prosecution. Now, Sununu says he will support Trump for president, even if he is convicted of a felony.
America’s two-party democracy is dangerously unsettled because the Republican Party has been irreparably poisoned and taken over by a narcissistic demagogue and his far-right MAGA movement, the ultimate goal of which is the installation of a Christian nationalist autocratic regime.
Cheney warns: “I know the nation can survive bad policy. We can’t survive a president who is willing to torch the Constitution.”
And while many are only just beginning to recognize this danger, it may already be inevitable because, by all measures, the U.S. is already in the middle of a volatile and unstable transition period between democracy and autocracy, which political scientist Barbara F. Walter of the University of California, San Diego refers to as an “anocracy.”
As a registered Republican for 44 years, I am horrified and disgusted each day by what the Republican Party has been transformed into by Trump. I don’t want to completely give up on the party, but as Bonnie Tyler sang: I need a hero; I’m holding out for a hero.
Cheney is one of the Republican Party’s last few heroes, still standing and still fighting the good fight. She is placing the protection of the nation’s democracy before her party and even her own career, against the looming dark clouds of the MAGA threat to our nation. Brava.
Robert S. Nix is a lawyer in Philadelphia. He has taught political science as an adjunct professor, has been a political consultant on Republican Hispanic outreach, and is a past Republican candidate for the Pennsylvania Senate. rnix@myphillylawyer.com