America is moving on, but Trumpism has nothing to do with it.
Liz Cheney’s struggle to restore the pre-2016 GOP of her youth has gone down in flames. The Republican Establishment is now watching as its surviving strongholds melt away.
Every week there is a new shiny brass button that the corporate media focuses on with laser-like concentration in order to show where its collective agenda lies. Last week it was a valiant collective effort to defend the name and reputation of one of the most thought provoking and courageous politicians of our time. Wait, scratch that, they defended the reputation of a politician who embodies the opposite of those things. On May 12 her time as chair of the House Republican Conference was ended after over two years in which she stood on the dais next to fellow GOP leaders Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise (Minority Whip) after a well publicized revolt by members of her own caucus. Liz Cheney reacted by vowing to do her best to prevent former president Donald Trump from reaching the White House again. The maneuver is a major defeat for those Republicans representing the #NeverTrump or “enough Trump” faction of the party. The saga was more heavily covered than those of the current Israel-Gaza offensive or the Colonial Pipeline hack.
Truth be told, the institutions of the GOP had to be dragged kicking and screaming in order to make this move, and the timing could not be more indicative of how hard it was to choose a side. In February Cheney survived a previous attempt to topple her from the position thanks to the backing of McCarthy. The minority leader’s caution at making a change was likely due to high tensions from the recent election controversy and Capitol Hill riot. Rather than pick between the pro-Trump wing as represented by Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene or the anti-Trump wing as represented by Cheney, he decided to play peace maker and hope that eventually the two sides could be held at bay.
On May 1 that hope was dashed in northern Texas. Michael Wood, a candidate for the vacant 6th congressional district had run on the total Cheney platform of denouncing “Trumpism” and labeling the former president’s followers as QAnon extremists. Media outlets and like-minded GOPers like Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger flocked to the Fort Worth area to offer praise and campaign for him since a robust showing would validate the perception of a widening wedge among Republicans between Trump loyalists and critics that leaders like McCarthy would have to balance. The result of the primary election was anything but encouraging for the #NeverTrump caucus. Not only did Wood fail to advance to the runoff as one of the top two entrants, he was a lowly ninth in the overall tally, and fifth among the Republicans. Among those outpolling him was Tammy Allison, a black Democrat and proud NRA member who campaigned on restoring 2nd Amendment rights to non-violent offenders. Two other Republicans won the top two slots to advance to the runoff, with Susan Wright winning the top spot thanks to an important Trump endorsement. This amounted to not only a collective shrug of disinterest in #NeverTrump politics, but a statement that it was less popular than almost any other ideological competitor on the left and right.
Why the base’s message is ignored
Following the primary vote, MSNBC had Michael Wood on for a post-mortem interview. It’s not exactly customary that national TV networks interview also-ran candidates that polled only 3% in the primary for a congressional special election. But it is understandable given that the interviewer was Nicole Wallace who made her bones as an aide to the George Bush and John McCain campaigns and even admitted that she did not vote in 2008 for her own ticket because of VP nominee Sarah Palin. The segment amounted to a heart-to-heart between two self-absorbed exes of the same spouse griping about how the house would fall apart without them.
It is a window into the same subculture of eternal experts covered by Julie Kelly in her 2020 book Disloyal Opposition about the broader #NeverTrump movement. The nucleus of this group is primarily the remnant of the class of consultants, lobbyists, and operatives that like Wallace were close to the trough of benefits during the Bush presidency. In the 2000s, these officials were viewed as gargoyles and warmongers by members of the mainstream press, often taking turns being labeled the “Worst Person in the World” nightly by MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann. But once Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 took the party by storm, many of these figures were rehabilitated by the media. Bill Kristol, one of the ideological propagandists of the Iraq War became a regular guest on all liberal panels, despite having all of his predictions about the 2016 election and the subsequent Russian collusion investigation come up empty. The Boston Globe, which acted as the PR firm for Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and her dog before the same tactic was used for President Biden, is now featuring an ongoing series called “The Battle for the GOP”. It depicts a manichaean battle where the forces of light are centered around Cheney, the “member of a Wyoming family that helped to shape the GOP for decades”.
Second-degree Courage
The anti-Trump Republican is a role that at this point should be retired as a cliche. There are those who earned the former president’s scorn for unjustified reasons, such as members of the House Freedom Caucus that were blamed for torpedoing his reforms of Obamacare. Rand Paul openly blasted Trump in 2016 for including John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani in his list of possible Secretary of State appointees, and ultimately voted against both of his eventual nominees Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo. Rep. Justin Amash regularly voted against most of Trump’s agenda including the USMCA trade deal, and eventually left the GOP to become a Libertarian. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, swayed by pressure from Dianne Feinstein in 2018, voted against the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. All of those decisions can be reviewed through a prism of policies diverging from those of the president. There has never been wall-to-wall Republican support for any of the Trump agenda, but there is a major difference between dissent on policy and open hostility. Cheney now falls into the latter category as embodied by previous obsessed enemies like John McCain who helped to circulate the now infamous hoax of the Steele Dossier, or Ohio Gov. John Kasich who refused to attend the 2016 Republican convention after being obliterated in his own bid for the nomination.
One of the reasons that the media finds it so easy to forgive these one-time punching bags is because they present such a benign challenge devoid of any conviction, but once they present themselves as a potential Trump enemy an immediate redemption arc is created. This is how such faceless mediocrities as Fiona Hill, Alex Vindman, and Miles Taylor were able to game the media into viewing them as righteous traitors to a wicked master even though most Americans quickly forgot them.
Liz Cheney herself is now being championed as the paragon of respectable conservatism, while her full track record is omitted. Her father Dick had been Defense Secretary for George HW Bush when she was hired to work for USAID in various embassy level capacities. She would then work for the law firm of Dick Armitage, who had been Bush’s Deputy Secretary of State and a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal. In those years, Democrats were eager to portray the GOP defense policy as reckless adventurism in support of right-wing tyrants and counterrevolutionary extremists. When her father returned as VP under George W. Bush, Liz Cheney was once again hired into the State Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. The press shrieked that the position had been created specially for her. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post wrote that it was a Bush policy that “leaves no family behind” in mockery of the No Child Left Behind Act. Now Milbank writes that it is “cancel-culture Republicans” that toppled Cheney.
But didn’t they cancel her first? Let’s remember that in her position at the State Department, Cheney was part of a team that put together the case for going to war in Iraq. In 2016 the DCLeaks website published emails from her former boss Sec. of State Colin Powell, and never denied by him, where he called both father and daughter Cheney idiots for writing a book together. At the time she and her father had not yet broken with candidate Trump, and media outlets like BuzzFeed were eager to sip the spilled blood of Republican division. In 2018 the critically acclaimed film Vice tore into the personality and character of the entire Cheney family and in particular her father. No one was calling at the time for a more balanced approach to them.
And what of Cheney’s public positions on the wedge issues throughout her career? In most cases they seemed to conform to what was convenient at the time. It is ironic that the media is defending Cheney from being dumped as conference chair and being primaried in Wyoming, when in 2013 she launched a primary challenge against Republican Senator Mike Enzi. When she publicly came out on the “Against” side of gay marriage, MSNBC chuckled that it would be an “awkward Thanksgiving” with her sister Mary and her wife Margaret Poe. This was in the wake of the Hollingsworth v. Perry SCOTUS case in which the couple had filed a brief seeking to overturn California’s Proposition 8 that banned gay marriage. Mary Cheney responded by saying her sister’s position was “dead wrong”. At the time it was an easy target for the media to attack the Cheney family for how their political power was used to suppress one of their members’ lifestyle. Until 2016 the consensus within the GOP was that same-sex marriage even after the Obergefell v. Hodges decision should be opposed through a federal constitutional amendment, and Liz Cheney was no different. Dick Cheney had in 2004 sided with Democrats in supporting gay relationships thereby risking evangelical support, and in 2016 Trump became the first Republican presidential nominee to publicly support gay marriage as the law of the land. In this respect, Liz Cheney was less “progressive” in her thinking than two of the Republicans most despised by the very media now defending her.
As usual the Pavlovian media are relying on the short public memory to forget where they stood in the past. It is more crucial for them to pick a side than to stick with a principle. A generation of millennials grew up with the Iraq War, the 2007 financial meltdown and Hurricane Katrina being associated with the Bush presidency where Dick Cheney was considered the most powerful VP in American history. Many of the flaws seen in Liz Cheney and her father back in the 2000s by media critics were completely valid. In a nation as large as the United States with so many qualified people, it is a sign of detachment from the public when politicians put their relatives in important positions of influence. Such was the case when John F. Kennedy appointed his raw younger lawyer brother Bobby as attorney general without so much as arguing a case as a lawyer, with Bill Clinton when he charged Hillary with developing a new government healthcare plan, and with Donald Trump for entrusting so much of White House criminal justice and digital media policy to daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
After January 2021 a biased and conflicted media wanted to use the tumultuous end of the Trump presidency to transition to a new consensus reality. Liz Cheney was only happy to assist in her own way as a stooge of corrupt leadership by wagging her finger at the former president’s voters. Cheney went so far as to organize during the post-election period a group of all former secretaries of defense including her father to oppose any attempt by Trump to use the military to stay in power as many #QAnon weirdos thought would happen. This is despite the fact that the former president never attempted such a move. For being a party to indulging some of the most absurd and unsubstantiated rumours, Liz Cheney is now being paraded around until she outlives her usefulness like Joan of Arc. She has only herself to blame for how the Republican base and now its congressional delegation have returned the favour.