If Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) runs for reelection in 2024 and loses in a primary challenge, I won’t shed any tears for him. He’s been a wobbly moderate Republican, and if we can get a solid conservative in the seat instead (which should be easy in Utah), then I’m all for it. I had hoped that representing Utah would have nudged Mitt further to the right, but sadly that didn’t happen. Instead, according to FiveThirtyEight, Mitt voted with Trump about 75% of the time. That doesn’t sound horrible (and frankly, it’s higher than I expected), but it’s paltry compared to Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who voted with Trump 92.9% of the time.
Somewhere down the line, she decided that Trump was “public enemy number one” and dedicated her career to preventing him from becoming president again. Sure enough, she admitted that is the true purpose of the J6 Committee, upon which she sits, telling Margaret Brennan of CBS’s Face the Nation that “the single most important thing” of the committee “is to ensure that Donald Trump is not the Republican nominee and that he certainly is not anywhere close to the Oval Office ever again.”
So what happened to Liz? Why did she have to become a useful idiot of the Democrats by joining in on their anti-Trump crusade? She didn’t just help the Democrats in their campaign against Trump. She even sought the support of Democrats to save her campaign.
Until now, however, I always believed her to be an anti-Trump conservative — but a conservative nonetheless. Her record shows she’s conservative, and anyone who questioned that is kidding themselves.
But, now… I’m not sure. Her recent attacks have turned more broadly against the Republican Party, not just Trump. According to the New York Times, she can’t commit to supporting a Republican for president in 2024 because she wouldn’t support a Republican who questions the results of the 2020 election. One Republican she expressly refused to commit to supporting in a hypothetical 2024 scenario is Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), who is most certainly the most viable alternative to Trump.
“I think that Ron DeSantis has lined himself up almost entirely with Donald Trump, and I think that’s very dangerous,” Cheney told the New York Times.
In 2016, several conservative pundits spoke out against Donald Trump’s candidacy, arguing that he wasn’t a true conservative, and expressed their disdain for the party for nominating him. I wasn’t exactly “on the Trump train” back then, either. I wasn’t “Never Trump,” but I was, for sure, a Trump skeptic. But he proved he wasn’t the New York liberal many on the right were worried he might be.
Some of these Trump skeptics realized this and admitted they were wrong — myself included. But others remained firmly in the Never Trump camp and, before long, became indistinguishable from liberals. They didn’t just blast Trump; they blasted the Republican Party. Some would go on to endorse Joe Biden, pretending that Biden cared about compromise and being a president for Democrats and Republicans.
DeSantis may be a Trump ally, but he’s also a conservative powerhouse who has shown Republicans how to fight for traditional values and win.
And yet Cheney calls him “dangerous.”
Perhaps the most mindboggling aspect of NeverTrumpism is how conservatives have turned their backs on their values just because they don’t like Trump. For some time now, I’ve given Liz Cheney the benefit of the doubt that she wasn’t one of them. But now, I’m not sure.
