In a last-ditch effort to save her failing campaign for reelection to the House from Wyoming, Rep. Liz Cheney is running ads on Fox News. The ads, featuring her father, Dick Cheney, who served as vice president under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009, drip with vitriol:
In our nation’s 246-year history there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump….
He tried to steal the last election [2020], using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.
He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters.
He lost his election and he lost big.
I know it, he knows it and deep down I think most Republicans know it.
In Wyoming, most Republicans know no such thing. Having voted for Trump by 70 percent in 2020 and having witnessed the continuing inquisition by the January 6 investigative committee co-chaired by Dick Cheney’s daughter, they are not likely to welcome the ad campaign. And Republicans in Wyoming hold a four-to-one advantage over Democrats.
But Cheney Senior continues, saying that he is proud of his daughter for “standing up for the truth, doing what is right, honoring her oath to the Constitution when so many in our party are too scared to do so. Liz is fearless. She never backs down from a fight.”
And then, ominously, he adds:
There is nothing more important she will ever do than lead the effort to make sure Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office.
And she will succeed.
Down in the polls by more than 20 points, just how is Cheney likely to succeed in that effort?
More than once she has given indications of her willingness to sell out to the Democratic Party in order to get to Trump. In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, she said she’d “rather serve with [far-left House Democrats] Mikie Sherrill and Chrissy Houlahan and Elissa Slotkin [Freedom Index (FI) ratings of 8, 6, and 8 respectively] than Marjorie Taylor Greene [FI 95] and Lauren Boebert [FI 90].… They love their country, they do their homework, and they’re people that are trying to do the right things for the country.”
Her campaign includes appealing to the few Wyoming Democrats to “cross over” next Tuesday by registering as Republicans, though at the moment it appears that even that appeal is falling on deaf ears. According to the Wyoming Secretary of State’s office, since January only about 6,000 of the state’s 43,285 registered Democrats have made that move in order to vote for her on Tuesday.
The strongest indication that she has already written off next Tuesday’s results and is ready to move on came during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” on Sunday. When asked about 2024, she responded:
I haven’t really … at this point, I have not made a decision about 2024….
But I do think, as we look towards the next presidential election, as I said, I believe that our nation stands on the edge of an abyss. And I do believe that we all have to really think very seriously about the dangers we face and the threats we face. And we have to elect serious candidates.
And just whom would she pick as a “serious candidate?”
Tapper rightly concluded:
When you hear a politician talking about the country “standing on the edge of an abyss” and the need to elect “serious candidates,” well, it doesn’t take an astrophysicist to figure out what’s going on there.
Cheney has expressed disdain not only for Donald Trump but also for his potential rival in 2024, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: “I think Ron DeSantis has lined himself up almost entirely with Donald Trump, and I think that’s very dangerous.”
CNN’s editor-at-large Chris Cillizza sees just how she could keep Trump out of the White House in 2024: by running as an Independent — a spoiler — who “could skim off enough voters to potentially hamstring the former president’s chances of winning.”
By continuing to run poisonous anti-Trump ads in an election she is going to lose, she is signaling that she is just the one Democrats could use as a foil. In the meantime, she will, with a compliant and complicit mainstream media on her side, keep her lamp burning bright as the “conservative” voice at one of the major left-wing news outlets after she loses next week’s primary election.
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