Former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney said that her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney would be voting against disgraced former President Donald Trump joining her endorsement of Kamala Harris.
In an interview at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Liz Cheney said that she would campaign in battleground states as she endorsed Rep. Colin Allred, who is running for Senate in Texas against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.
The audience erupted in cheers after Liz Cheney responded to a question by saying, “Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris.”
“Defeating Donald Trump is frankly important but there are numbers of candidates around the country who have embraced election denialism, and I think it’s really important that we defeat them, too,” said Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman who was once ranked third in the House of Representatives Republican leadership. “One of the most important things we need to do as a country as we begin to rebuild our politics is we need to elect serious people.”
“Those of us who believe in the defense of our democracy and the defense of our Constitution and the survival of our Republic have a duty in this election cycle to come together and to put those things above politics,” said Liz Cheney. “I look forward to the days when we will again be having debates about tax policy and national security and everything else, because that will mean we have made it through what is right now a very grave threat to a functioning republic.”
“If you think about the moment that we’re in and you think about how serious this moment is, you know my dad believes and he’s said publicly that there’s never been an individual in our country who is as great of a threat to our democracy as Donald Trump is,” Liz Cheney said. “And that’s the moment that we’re facing.”
A hawkish conservative and the vice president who served eight years under President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney has broken with Trump before and denounced him as a danger to the country through his relentless lies about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
“Well, it’s not a leadership that resembles any of the folks I knew when I was here for 10 years,” Dick Cheney said after the pro forma session of the House on the first anniversary of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, noting the absence of other Republicans in the chamber of which he was a member in the 1980s.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Dick Cheney said. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.
“He is a coward,” said Dick Cheney. “A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big. I know it, he knows it, and deep down, I think most Republicans know it.”
Trump made defeating Liz Cheney a top goal since she joined nine other House Republicans in voting to impeach him for inciting the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol. Republican voters in Wyoming rejected the three-term congresswoman by a landslide in the 2022 GOP primary election when Harriet Hageman garnered over twice as many votes as Cheney.
Hageman called Harris “a DEI hire” because she is a woman of color who is “intellectually, just really kind of the bottom of the barrel”.
“DEI hire” is a disparaging term that refers to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives or targets for hiring racial and ethnic minorities, women, and/or people with disabilities for positions of authority and power. The term implies that only heterosexual, white men are qualified for high leadership positions.
The former vice president lauded his daughter for “standing up for the truth, doing what’s right, honoring her oath to the Constitution when so many in our party are too scared to do so.”
“There is nothing more important she will ever do than lead the effort to make sure that Donald Trump is never again near the Oval Office, and she will succeed,” said Dick Cheney.
The notorious figure of the Republican Party, Dick Cheney adds his name to the growing list of conservatives who are abandoning the Republican Party’s nominee in protest of Trump’s failed coup attempt, his criminal conviction, and the dangerous policies he wants to implement if he returns to the White House.
Trump faces unprecedented criminal and civil jeopardy for a major candidate
Shortly after appearing in court for an appeal of a decision that found him liable for his sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, Trump stepped in front of television cameras and brought up a string of past allegations of other acts of sexual misconduct, reminding voters of incidents that were little-known or forgotten.
Caroll’s lawsuit alleged that, in the mid-1990s, Trump raped her in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan. She said that Trump pushed her against the wall of a dressing room, inserted his fingers into her vagina, and then, she believes, put his penis into her. Years later, Trump defamed her when he called her a liar for disclosing the story, the lawsuit claimed.
Trump suggested women have accused him of sexual wrongdoing because he is famous and repeatedly implied that he would not have assaulted two of his accusers due to their looks.
He said of a woman who has accused him of sexual misconduct on a plane in the 1970s “she would not have been the chosen one,” and of Carroll, “I never touched her. I would have had no interest in meeting her in any way, shape or form.” In a deposition, Trump mistook Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples in a photo.
Carroll first sued Trump in 2019 for defamation after he denied her rape allegation. She filed a second lawsuit against Trump in November under a new law that allowed her to sue for battery even though the statute of limitations on the crime had passed.
US District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the case, wrote that the trial evidence demonstrated Trump “raped” Carroll in the plain sense of the word.
“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,'” Kaplan wrote. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Trump falsely said Friday that a decades-old photo of him with Carroll might have been created using artificial intelligence even though he previously acknowledged that the photo is authentic.
The photo shows a group conversation involving Trump, his then-wife Ivana Trump, Carroll and her then-husband John Johnson.
There is no basis for Trump’s claim that the photo might have been “AI-generated.”
The photo has been publicly circulating since 2019, the year Carroll accused Trump of sexual assault and shared the photo with media outlets, and there is no indication it is a fake. Trump has previously admitted the photo is real.
Trump has separately been convicted on 34 felony counts in a New York state case related to hush money payments allegedly made to a porn actor. The judge in that case postponed sentencing until after Election Day, so voters will cast their ballots without knowing if a candidate for president will be incarcerated for up to four years.
Trump has also been ordered to pay steep civil fines for lying for years about his wealth.
And he’s still contending with cases alleging his mishandling of classified documents, his actions after the 2020 election and his activities during the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — though none are likely to go to trial prior to Election Day.