Former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney may have been a Republican her whole life, but has little affinity left for the leaders of the Grand Old Party after its voters kicked her out of the U.S. House in Wyoming and her colleagues on Capitol Hill turned on her in favor of former President Donald Trump.
Cheney’s new book “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning” paints a scathing portrait of the Republican Party and her former colleagues, who she called cowards and “enablers and collaborators” for continuing to support Trump after the 2020 election, according to CNN, which obtained the book ahead of its Dec. 5 release.
The book provides new, intimate details of Cheney’s shifting perspective in the days and weeks following the 2020 presidential election in response to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results. She also warns about the constitutional ramifications if Trump is reelected in 2024.
“We cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution,” Cheney writes.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told CNN that Cheney’s book belongs “in the fiction section of the bookstore” and that “these are nothing more than completely fabricated stories.”
Although she represented Wyoming in the U.S. House, Cheney’s views are not shared by most Wyoming Republicans. She was voted out of office in 2022 by a landslide to current U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, a Trump-endorsee.
Cheney relies on texts, emails, calls and her memory of personal conversations to call out former colleagues who she said criticized Trump privately but then supported him in public, drawn by an urge to improve their political stock with his support, she said.
“So strong is the lure of power that men and women who had once seemed reasonable and responsible were suddenly willing to violate their oath to the Constitution,” she writes.
‘Orange Jesus’
On the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, Republican members of Congress were encouraged to sign their names to electoral vote objection sheets. While signing his name to one of the sheets, Cheney claims Tennessee congressman Mark Green remarked about Trump to no one in particular, “The things we do for the ‘Orange Jesus.’”
Also that morning, Cheney said her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, called her after Trump said in his speech during a rally on the Ellipse that the crowd should get rid of “the Liz Cheneys of the world.”
“You are in danger,” he told her, cautioning her about speaking on the House floor that day.
Cheney also reveals for the first time that former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-California, told her two days after Election Day that he had talked to Trump and said the president acknowledged he lost the 2020 election.
“He knows it’s over,” McCarthy said, according to the book. “He needs to go through all the stages of grief.”
Cheney writes that she thought to herself that those stages of grief “seemed to involve tweeting in all caps.”
But then McCarthy went on Fox News the same day and continued to claim that Trump won the election.
Cheney said Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, a staunch Trump supporter, told her the “only thing that matters is winning” when it came to Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results.
A spokesman for Jordan told CNN, “Chairman Jordan was always concerned about the legal process for the 2020 election and how states unconstitutionally changed their laws unilaterally.”
Trump Not Eating?
Cheney also claims that McCarthy told her he was summoned to Trump’s compound in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, about three weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, upon claims from the former president’s staff that Trump was depressed and not eating.
Cheney believes this was a lie and that McCarthy was more concerned with not being able to effectively fundraise into the future.
In response to CNN’s request for comment, a spokesperson for McCarthy said, “For Cheney, first it was Trump Derangement Syndrome, and now apparently it’s also McCarthy Derangement Syndrome.”
Jan. 6
As she has brought up before, Cheney mentioned her brief interaction with Jordan at the start of the riot when he attempted to put out a hand to help her and she swatted it away. Jordan’s spokesman denied the incident happened.
One week later, Cheney was one of 10 Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment. She said former President George W. Bush sent her a private message of support for taking this action.
“Liz, Courage is in short supply these days. Thank you for yours. You showed strong leadership and I’m not surprised. Lead on. 43,” he wrote.
About one year later, Cheney and her father were the only Republicans to attend a ceremony commemorating the one-year anniversary of Jan. 6.
“It’s one thing to hear about what’s happening in our party, but to see it, like this, in such stark terms …” Cheney writes that her father said, his voice trailing off and shaking his head.
After Trump was impeached in the House and President Joe Biden took office, Cheney continued to denounce Trump publicly, which prompted McCarthy to tell her, “You’re killing me, Liz,” according to the book. When Cheney asked how former President Ronald Reagan or Bush would have reacted to Jan. 6, McCarthy responded that, “This isn’t their party anymore.”
Cheney claims that Republicans in Congress will do whatever Trump asks and that no order is too outrageous to follow.
She also targets new House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, who she said pressured Republican members to throw out the election results from four states that Trump lost. When Cheney asked Johnson about this approach, she said Johnson conceded and replied, ‘We just need to do this one last thing for Trump.’”
Cheney ends “Oath and Honor” with a call for Americans of all political stripes to reject their party preferences in favor of preventing Trump from taking office again, calling keeping him from being reelected as president “the cause of our time.”
Trump leads Republican 2024 primary polls for president by a large margin and is expected by many to be the eventual nominee of the party. He also is beating Biden in a number of polls.
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
