Liz Cheney has launched her latest effort to end Donald Trump's political career through her book tour, loads of major interviews, and howls of warnings that his reelection will end up in a fearful dictatorship.
A self-styled conservative — she brags she voted for the former president 93% of the time — the former Wyoming congresswoman has decided that the only certain path to head off this disaster is to make sure the Democrats control the House. (But it seems she would be quite content if the Democrats keep control of the White House and the Senate as well.)
Her rationale? The "plague of cowardice," she told The Washington Post, has infected the House and Senate Republicans. They all "knew about what Trump had done," Cheney said, but did nothing to prevent it. The Post then recited her most passionate wish: "Defeating her former House GOP colleagues and electing a new Democratic majority." (This is nothing new, by the way, as she has been campaigning for Democrats against conservative Republican office holders since 2022.)
Let's indulge Cheney's terrifying fear of a Trump dictatorship for a moment. What's the likelihood? Close to zero.
President Joe Biden was inaugurated peacefully. He's been serving in the White House with no call from the former president to have him forcefully ejected from office. His appointees are not being subjected to violence from his devoted followers. Trump, in fact, has never been indicted for or convicted of any violent crime, Cheney's myth-making to the contrary.
Mocking Cheney's dire warnings of a coup, Trump told FOX's major conservative host, Sean Hannity: "On Day 1, we're closing the border. And we're drilling, drilling, drilling." After those frightful actions, at least as Cheney would view anything Trump did, he assured Hannity, he would no longer be a dictator.
Cheney insists she holds virtually the same conservative views she has in the past. Then why isn't she more fearful of the Democratic agenda than Trump's? And a Democratic Party that appears to be galloping toward socialism?
Most conservative Republicans, even those who dislike Trump, acknowledge his accomplishments as president: a dazzling economy, booming 401(k)s, and the lowest unemployment rate for Black and Hispanic people in recent history.
By unleashing the oil and natural gas industry, he made the nation energy independent, no longer having to depend on foreign nations for this critical wartime commodity.
He helped win over Black people with prison reform; long-term funding of Black colleges; and opportunity zones, whose Kempian purpose is to lift poor communities out of poverty through free market principles. (Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., who is Black and a former Republican presidential candidate, helped move opportunity zones into law and can wax on at length about how important they are.)
And what about Trump's teaming up with Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the then-majority leader, to fill the federal courts with hundreds of jurists steeped in Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's conservative legal philosophy? Even liberal historians are impressed.
When the Supreme Court upheld the president's effort to expand religious freedoms for every faith, saving the Little Sisters of the Poor in the process, constitutionalists rejoiced. One reason: The president's two new appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanagh, had joined the court's decision written by the venerable conservative, Justice Clarence Thomas.
Does Cheney prefer Biden's border policy to Trump's? How can she call herself conservative at any level and tolerate the massive invasion that's taking place under Biden and the Democrats? How can anyone?
In case Cheney has forgotten, our 45th president dramatically reduced the influx of illegal immigrants by forcing them to stay in Mexico until we allowed them to cross the border. Under Biden and the Democrats, millions upon millions are pouring into our country with no check at all as to who they are. Many, as Border Patrol agents keep telling us, are terrorists controlled by criminal cartels. And the enormous number that are entering illegally have reached historic highs.
This is far from all Trump has accomplished, but Cheney is willing to let those major conservative policy victories go down the drain because she holds a view not shared by the majority of legal scholars: that Trump had no right to challenge Biden's election.
In her zeal to strike back at Republicans for ignoring her advice, Cheney is raising potfuls of money to vote Republicans out of office. But this tactic is hardly new. In August 2022, she issued fatwas against Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri and Florida Gov. Ron Desantis.
Her outburst against DeSantis was especially puzzling. Asked if she could support the governor for president, she immediately nixed the idea. Had the governor joined Trump in insisting the election had been stolen? No. Had he challenged presidential delegates who had been awarded to Biden? No. His unforgivable sin? She assailed DeSantis for campaigning for GOP candidates whom she accused of being "election deniers."
According to her broad definition, that meant every Republican who may not share her view that Trump should go to jail for what occurred on Jan. 6, 2021.
When Cheney was picked by then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to serve as vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, the former Wyoming lawmaker launched one of her biggest lies. She said she took the job to help conduct a "nonpartisan, professional, and thorough investigation" of the riots.
But she came to the committee with the mindset of a hanging judge. Two liberal publications, The Washington Post and The New York Times, institutions that loathe the former president, did their own, in-depth news stories of what happened.
The Post piece interviewed distinguished prosecutors, defense lawyers, law professors, and judges on whether America's former chief executive would be criminally charged for any of his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, or even on days leading up to that date. Did Trump prompt the crowd marching to the Capitol to engage in violence, as so many Americans believe? "There is no evidence," the Post stressed, "that he knew they planned to storm the building." (Repeat: "no evidence.")
Indeed, the record distinctly reveals that Trump repeatedly told the portion of the crowd that was marching to the Capitol to go peacefully. Credible legal authorities told the Times and the Post that if he genuinely believed he had won the election legally, it would be hard to charge him with a crime for contesting the outcome.
His chief legal adviser on the elections was John Eastman, a highly respected conservative lawyer who told him that Vice President Mike Pence could deny Biden the election. Pence, of course, famously refused to take either Trump's or Eastman's view of what his constitutional duties were.
"The key to pretty much all these crimes he's been accused of," former federal prosecutor Randall Ellison told the Post, "would be proving corrupt intent." But that would be hard to prove if his legal team was advising Trump that his actions were perfectly proper.
Other constitutional experts interviewed by the Times, another powerful anti-Trump publication, drew similar conclusions. Daniel L. Zelenko, a defense lawyer and former prosecutor, sided with Ellison. What is critical, he told the Times, "is having contemporaneous evidence that Trump knew the election was not stolen but tried to stay in power anyway."
Samuel W. Buell, a Duke University law professor, made the same argument. "You need to show," he also told the Times, "that he knew what he was doing was wrongful and had no legal basis."
No such evidence has materialized, though that hasn't deterred Cheney from obsessing with ways to put Trump in an orange jumpsuit.
The Wall Street Journal, which has relentlessly trashed Trump's "stolen election" theory, took Cheney to task for attempting to make the former president a target for the prosecution when she accused him of "seditious conspiracy" for directly communicating with the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, who have a reputation for advocating tough measures against groups on the far left.
The Journal said the "seditious conspiracy" theory was in no way persuasive and that Cheney "offered no evidence (repeat: "no evidence") that Trump communicated directly with either group." (She now uses the word gobbled up by the left and means the same thing: insurrection.)
Cheney views herself as a force for moral government and conservative values. It's one thing for a conservative to want the Republicans to choose a presidential nominee other than Trump to run in 2024. But Cheney is no longer a conservative, no matter how many times she shouts it from the rooftops.
The Democrats control the Senate and the White House. The Republicans have a small beachhead in the House. And what does Cheney, posing as a conservative, want to do? Surrender that beachhead to the party that hates conservatives. Go figure.
Mr. Ryskind, a frequent contributor to Newsmax, is a former editor and co-owner of Human Events, Ronald Reagan's favorite political publication.His latest book, "Hollywood Traitors," printed by Regnery, reveals how Communists nearly captured the movie industry.