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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and life.

My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of the spectator.

I am delighted to be joined by James Pogue, who writes for Vanity Fair.

And we're going to be talking about Liz Cheney's large defeat in Wyoming last night.

Now, James, it was pretty obvious that Liz Cheney was going to lose.

The poll suggested she'd lose,

although it looks as though she lost to the Trump-backed Harriet Higman by a much larger margin

than even, I think, some of the most pessimistic expectations were around her camp.

Liz Cheney has become, in recent months, the sort of leading voice of the anti-Trump Republican Party.

But of course, a lot of anti-Trump Republicans were keen to stress that she wasn't some lifelong never-trumpers.

She had supported Trump, 93% of the time in votes.

She'd even voted against impeaching him in 2019. But she was the co-chair of the

January 6th hearings and she's become a sort of pin-up for the strange coalition of, let's call

them, Bush-era Republicans and Democrats who want to stop Trump at all costs. And yet she's

been thrashed. You're actually in

Wyoming. Give us a sense of what the mood is like there. It's a big question. What is the mood like

here? I would say she lost by pretty much the margin I thought she was going to lose by. There was a certain conversation going on in Wyoming politics about how many people

would cross over, particularly in this sort of Jackson area, this kind of bubble of Democrats

that exists here.

...