How Liz Cheney Can Defeat Donald Trump (And Why She's Not Going to Like It)

We talked a bit about Rep. Liz Cheney last week, and I honestly wasn't sure if I had more to say after the ouster that was inevitable happened against Cheney, who was until yesterday the highest-ranking Republican woman in Congress.  But Cheney's comments today struck me as unusual.  Cheney, after being ousted, was defiant against former President Donald Trump stating, "I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office," a comment that you wouldn't expect from a conservative congresswoman who in many ways mirrors Trump's belief system (except, of course, when it comes to the sanctity of democracy).  Cheney said this in parallel with a number of prominent Republicans like Govs. Tom Ridge & Christie Todd Whitman, Reps. Barbara Comstock & Charlie Dent, and Transportation Secretary Mary Peters stating that the party must have reforms, and that if it didn't, they would threaten to leave the GOP & form their own third party.

Cheney's comments are intriguing for a variety of factors, but in conjunction with this movement, it's worth asking how serious Cheney is about stopping Trump.  She is not, for the record, aligned with this movement and has made no mention about leaving the Republican Party, but their sentiments are clearly the same.  This is the #NeverTrump wing of the party, though Cheney (it's worth noting) did not endorse impeachment against President Trump the first time he was impeached, only on the second attempt.  Cheney, though, has something these people don't-she's an elected official, and one who probably will still win her primary in Wyoming, where too many candidates are running to replace her (and her current notoriety, in conjunction with her father's connections, will afford her ample campaign funds in a cheap state to run ads in).  Cheney, therefore, has something these people don't-a potential future in elected office, albeit one with a pretty low advancement ceiling.  She has something to lose.

Where these two parties intersect is in their desire to see Trump eradicated from the GOP.  They want him to disappear from the conversation, as well as for Republicans to acknowledge his loss in 2020 & the role his rhetoric played in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th.  But more to the point they want him to not be the nominee in 2024, which is still a plausible option, and with Republicans basically kicking Cheney out of the leadership solely to appease Trump, he likely could have the nomination if he wanted it as they seem too afraid to deny him anything.

There's a problem here for Cheney and these Republicans, though-there isn't enough of a base for them to run to actually win Republican primaries anymore.  Cheney can win in Wyoming because the opposition is splintered, but in most cases that won't be possible-most of the House Republicans who voted for impeachment in January are going to lose their primaries next year.  The party is the party of Trump.  Cheney's crusade, and those of the Republicans wanting reforms, is a just moral high ground, but it's not one with a clear future.  The Republican Party, as long as Trump is viewed as a winning option, is not a place they can reclaim.

So the point here is that they need to make Trump "not a winning option"...the only way to stop the right-wing, antidemocratic forces of the Republican Party is to make sure they lose, and cannot regain their majorities.  This is a challenge for Cheney, still a member of the Republican Party, and the challenge in general for Republicans because they can't really do this through a third party-American politics doesn't have enough room for a third party without Ranked Choice Voting initiatives (which are only in Alaska & Maine on a federal level), and so therefore if they actually want to stop Trump, they need to use their third party movement not to win, but to split the vote with the Republicans...electing more Democrats.

That has been the answer, of course, since Trump won the nomination in 2016.  The Republicans had their shot in 2016-had the party elders decided "enough is enough" and begun plucking establishment Republicans like Jeb Bush, John Kasich, & Marco Rubio out of the primary and focused on one exclusive candidate, it's possible they would've been able to best Trump.  It wouldn't have been easy, and it's likely they would've lost the November election without his impassioned base, but it would have ended the conversation.  The moment they gave him the nomination, though, they were playing with fire, and clearly got burned.  The only way to take the party back from him is to burn him back, by essentially throwing the party's chances away by taking their 3-5% of the vote away from Trump & the GOP, giving 2024 to the Democrats.

This is anathema to the #NeverTrump Republicans, and they have proven time-and-time again that they aren't capable of doing it-they insist they can have their cake & eat it too, assuming that the party will revert back to a Mitt Romney/John McCain mentality, and Trump is a bad dream.  But if they want reality, if they want to face up to the fact that Liz Cheney lost her job yesterday not because of policy, but because she refused to admit that Donald Trump lost an election, and his rhetoric launched a terrorist attack, then they solution is simple, and it's actually borrowing from Trump himself.  The biggest advantage Trump has always had is he doesn't care what happens to the Republican Party.  Trump would gladly have sabotaged Rubio or Bush or Cruz in 2016 just so that he could say "I would've won."  He has happily forced Republicans like Cory Gardner & Dean Heller to show their fealty even if it meant losing Senate seats.  Trump is willing to destroy the party if he can't have it-the Cheney wing of the party can only start competing on the same level as him if they also are willing to lose elections if it means they don't get their way (i.e. Trump no longer being part of the conversation).

America can't function for a long period of time with two parties where only one party believes in democracy-democracy cannot survive if every time there's an election, it's dependent on one side winning to keep that democracy intact...eventually the Democrats will slip up & lose.  But what these Republicans, not moderates but ones who believe in the American ideal of democracy, can do is buy America time.  If they were to ensure that Republicans can't win in any swing states in 2022 & 2024 by peeling a few percentage points off of the 2024 nominee's margin (perhaps Trump, but surely a Trump acolyte), they'd give the election to the Democrats, but force the powers-that-be in the GOP to start reckoning with the fact that they either need to abandon their devotion to Trump & his antidemocratic disciples or they will never win another presidential election.  It might take a few years, but eventually the Republicans would see that Trump's antidemocratic ideals cannot be a winning solution, and they'd abandon this as a party platform, because Trumpism would become too much of an electoral liability.

There's a lot of risk here.  It's possible that there simply aren't enough Republicans who voted for Trump in 2020 who would join such a movement to matter.  It's possible that this could, in fact, hurt the Democratic nominee more than Trump as these people were Biden voters who wish they had an escape route (one of the main reasons that Biden succeeded where Hillary Clinton failed was that Clinton faced more robust third party campaigns, potentially the Jill Stein one costing her a slim electoral college victory).  But the goal of these figures needs to be that they are willing to destroy the Republican Party's electoral chances in order to try to save the GOP.  Because it's now the Trump Party, and every victory that they win is a victory for the Trump Party.  If Cheney is serious about defeating the Trump element, she's not going to do it in a primary election in 2024...she'll have to do it in the general election.