Liz Cheney is right: Trump is even worse than most people think
Quin Hillyer
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Former United States Rep. Liz Cheney’s new book, Oath and Honor, is a tour de force. The Wyoming Republican presents a fact-heavy account of former President Donald Trump’s dishonest and dangerous attempt to steal the 2020 election.
In the book, subtitled “A Memoir and a Warning,” Cheney rightly condemns the excuses and lies about Trump and the election that still are peddled by the vast majority of her former House Republican colleagues. Some of those former colleagues, such as former Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California and current Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, come across particularly badly in Cheney’s telling.
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But none of them come close to the maleficence, amply documented, of Trump himself. As Cheney pithily put it, “Today Donald Trump poses a threat that many in Washington simply fail to grasp.” She also writes accurately that “the power to rally a mob must never be underestimated. Nor should the fear that a mob can install in people of reason.”
In prose that is clear, spare, and direct, Cheney shows that Trump didn’t merely inspire a flash mob on January 6 to invade the U.S. Capitol building. Instead, he spent months, even before the election, deliberately inciting a radical distrust in the electoral process that quite obviously included a sense that mob action might be needed to keep him in power. It was, she wrote, “a direct threat to the foundations of our republic.” For any who paid attention, it was easy to see the violence coming and to warn against it.
Indeed, Cheney shows that for weeks Trump was aware of threats and intimidation tactics, including at personal homes, against even Republican elected officials who wouldn’t help Trump throw out the election. Nonetheless, Trump kept stoking the flames and refusing to condemn the threats of violence.
Cheney is right about all of this. And although Cheney’s book covers only the 2020 election-related actions and aftermath, she would have been justified if she had noted that Trump spent not just several months but five full years promoting violence as a political tool. He repeatedly had said things such as that he would “pay the legal bills” for anyone who would “knock the crap” out of people (peacefully) protesting at his rallies, that they should be “carried out on a stretcher” because he personally would “like to punch them in the face.”
That’s what the mob did to numerous, badly injured Capitol Police officers, whose stories Cheney recounts in horrific detail.
On both Trump’s encouragement of violence and his machinations (and those of allies such as McCarthy) to overturn duly certified election results, Cheney lays out the proof with remarkable detail. Citing specific text messages, emails, and recordings, the Wyoming Republican almost always “has the receipts,” as the saying goes. And she presents it in an eminently accessible fashion. It’s more than well worth the read.
This is not, however, a plea to read the book or even a book review at all. What’s most important here isn’t Cheney’s well-documented account of what Trump did; it’s what Trump’s entirely discreditable behavior says about what he would do if ever given authority again. It’s the “warning” part of the book’s subtitle that is more important than the “memoir.”
This man who would again be president has said (or Tweeted) repeatedly that the Constitution should be no barrier, indeed that its provisions should be “terminat[ed]” if they get in the way of his claims to power. He made his claim formal in court when he and his lawyers filed a brief saying that a president is, quite literally, not required to “support the Constitution.”
When he repeatedly vows to use power to exact retribution against all who refused efforts to enable his lies and his misdeeds, and when he says that at least for one day he wants to be a “dictator,” there is every reason to believe him. He has spent the past eight years repeatedly fawning over dictators such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un, and it is entirely reasonable to believe that only the ministrations of strong and honorable aides — aides he now has completely run off — kept Trump in check in his first term.
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A leader who encourages violence and civil unrest, tries to steal a duly certified election, and tries mightily to stop the peaceful transfer of power, even at the risk of his own vice president’s life, is an absolute menace to society.
Cheney rightly calls Trump “the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office.” He must never, ever inhabit it again.