Liz Cheney: Donald Trump Should Go to Jail if Convicted
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 11 December 2023
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Summary
Liz Cheney has been Republican royalty, and a conservative stalwart in Washington—a daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney and culture warrior Lynne Cheney. But after protesting Donald Trump’s election lies, and voting for his impeachment after January 6th, she found herself in exile from the G.O.P. Cheney is contemplating a Presidential campaign on a third-party line. As she promotes her new book, “Oath and Honor,” she is raising the alarm that Americans across the political spectrum have become “numb” to Trump’s overtly dictatorial aspirations. “People really understood that what he had done [on January 6th] was unacceptable, not to mention unconstitutional and illegal,” she tells David Remnick. “That recognition quickly dwindled.” She finds herself frustrated with former allies on the right who have become shameless enablers of Trump; she does not trust Speaker Mike Johnson, a former friend, to perform his constitutional duties during the electoral process. She is also concerned that the left is squandering an opportunity to defeat Donald Trump in 2024 by alienating some of the voters whose support they need on issues such as crime and immigration. Trump “has figured out a way, as dictators have in the past, to make those people think he speaks for them,” she says. Still, Cheney’s faith in the country’s institutions and judiciary has not been totally shaken. Asked if Trump should go to jail if convicted—on any of his ninety-one federal charges—she says yes without hesitation; but we must not presume that “someone else is going to save us from him.”
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| 0:49.2 | This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnick. |
| 1:07.1 | There was a time not very long ago that Liz Cheney was a big deal, a serious contender in Republican politics. |
| 1:09.2 | She obviously came from a Washington power family. She's the daughter |
| 1:12.6 | of Vice President Dick Cheney, and her mother is Lynn Cheney, who chaired the National Endowment for the |
| 1:17.5 | Humanities. Early on, Liz Cheney worked in the State Department before running for office from the |
| 1:23.5 | state of Wyoming. In Congress, she quickly rose to be the number three Republican. In other words, |
| 1:29.7 | Liz Cheney was every bit the conservative Washington insider. She was totally on board when Donald |
| 1:35.3 | Trump came to town and voted with his positions a remarkable 93% of the time. But finally, |
| 1:41.9 | at the end of the Trump administration, she broke with Trump. She balked. She |
| 1:46.3 | wouldn't go along with Republicans who ignored or amplified the stream of dangerous lies |
| 1:51.7 | about the 2020 election. And in the aftermath of January 6th, she voted to impeach Donald Trump, |
| 1:59.8 | something that only 10 Republicans did. |
| 2:03.0 | And that was it. Republicans in Washington and back in Wyoming stripped Liz Cheney of her party positions. |
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