The push to oust Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from her position as the number three in House GOP leadership has created a narrative that has proved irresistible to the liberal-dominated press and some of its former conservative fellow travelers in the Never-Trump camp. Cheney, a stalwart conservative and member in good standing of the pre-Trump Republican establishment, has been magically transformed into a newly minted heroine of the liberal establishment. While some on the Left will never forgive her long-standing conservatism and others are conflicted about it, there seems to be a consensus that she is a lonely truth teller defying the lies being slavishly adopted by almost every other Republican about Trump and the 2020 election.
That’s how Cheney sees herself too, as her op-ed published last week in The Washington Post indicated. The op-ed not only doubled down on Cheney’s contempt for the former president and his claims about a stolen election, but also expressed support for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s idea for a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and the Department of Justice’s efforts to treat that disgraceful event as an “insurrection.”
Yet neither Cheney nor her new admirers seem to understand why so many Republicans, including many who disagree with Trump about the last election, are so angry with her. Trump’s influence remains pervasive, and that may be problematic—as Republicans learned when the then-president helped depress the vote in January’s Georgia runoff election and handed the Senate to the Democrats. But the reason for the opposition to Cheney is not that Republicans gave up their conservative principles in order to join a personality cult. It’s that they know American politics has become a tribal culture war in which the Left is determined to destroy the GOP, and they believe anyone in the party who sides with their opponents is a greater threat to their beliefs than Trump.
Some of the same people who are now determined to remove Cheney from party leadership, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, were as angry as she was about the appalling spectacle that ensued as some of those who had attended Trump’s rally broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6.
But since Jan. 6, most Republicans have been just as appalled at the way the Left has inflated that day’s events into the moral equivalent of firing on Fort Sumter. The incessant talk about “insurrection” from the same people who turned a blind eye to hundreds of far more violent and destructive Black Lives Matter riots—which also targeted police and government institutions—is intolerable to many in the GOP. So are the demands for a 9/11-style commission from those who decline to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. These hypocrisies have convinced the vast majority of Republicans that there are more important things to do than worrying about what Trump is saying about the last election.
The bifurcation of our political culture is a dangerous development, but placing all the blame for it on Republicans ignores reality.
You don’t have to believe the election was stolen to understand that bias in the mainstream media and powerful tech companies skewed coverage of the 2020 campaign. They protected Biden from unflattering stories (like those on the corrupt dealings of his family) after spending three years promoting the Russia collusion hoax to delegitimize Trump’s 2016 victory. As one Time magazine feature reported, they acted in concert with Democrats, left-wing activists and union leaders to craft unprecedented changes in voting rules enabled by the pandemic.
None of that was illegal, but it was enormously consequential in helping to defeat Trump—and Republicans know it. That explains why Trump’s dubious claims are indulged. More importantly, it explains the across-the-board GOP support for laws being promulgated in Florida, Texas and Georgia that will restore voting safeguards.
All the talk of conservatives discarding their beliefs to bend the knee to Trump has it backwards. Trump’s victory in the 2016 GOP primaries and his record levels of Republican support throughout his presidency was rooted in his transformation from liberal New York billionaire to a pro-life Republican. Evangelicals and other grassroots Republican voters embraced him because he embraced their stands on social issues, on the need to appoint strict constructionist conservatives to the courts and on the state of Israel. It was he who had to change to win GOP support, not the other way around.
Trump also understood some things that Liz Cheney and many Never-Trump Republicans did not. Namely, most Republican voters didn’t want leaders who hadn’t learned from the mistakes of the George W. Bush presidency. That was true with respect to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the way Bush’s soft approach to immigration and indifference to outsourcing jobs abroad hurt American workers.
So even if you believe that Trump was not cheated out of reelection, Cheney’s embrace of false Democratic narratives about insurrection grates on Republican nerves.
Democrats are attempting to ram through radical legislation that would fundamentally transform the country’s economy, its voting system and its immigration system. Conservatives also see the Biden administration’s adoption of toxic woke ideas as a rejection of American values about equality and history. They want their leaders to focus on fighting these threats, not embroiled in an effort to demonize Trump and his voters.
Cheney’s defenders say it’s not her fault that Trump keeps trolling her. But it ill-behooves those who faulted Trump for his inability to resist “counter-punching” against any critic, no matter how inconsequential, to think it’s right for Cheney to do the same. Even after voting for a superfluous second impeachment, she didn’t have to spend the next three months crusading against Trump. But she did, much to the delight of Democrats who want nothing more than for Republicans to turn on each other.
Republicans think Cheney is re-litigating Jan. 6 not to crusade for the truth but to win back their party for a Bush-era establishment they despise.
Though Cheney might have a more conservative record than her would-be replacement, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), conservatives not unreasonably believe they are locked into a culture war in which there is no middle ground. They don’t think of Cheney as fighting Trump, but as betraying them, which Cheney’s decision to fist bump Biden at his address to Congress seemed to confirm.
The moral here is not that Republicans have become Trump zombies. It’s that the GOP is engaged in a two-way gutter fight in which conservatives have no intention of playing nice or surrendering to ruthless opponents. It is that fighting quality they loved in Trump, for all his flaws. The days of their tolerating GOP leaders who won’t do the same is over.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org, a senior contributor to The Federalist and a columnist for the New York Post. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
