CHEYENNE, Wyo. – It was just over a month before her primary election, but Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney was nowhere near the voters weighing her future.
Instead, Ms. Cheney huddled with fellow lawmakers and aides in the Capitol complex, supporting her allies in a cause she believes is more important than her seat in the House: ridding American politics of former President Donald Trump and his influence.
“The nine of us have done more to prevent Trump from regaining power than any group has ever done,” she told colleagues on the panel investigating Mr. Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “We can’t give up.”
The most watched 2022 primary has not turned into a race at all. Polls show Ms. Cheney losing badly to her rival, Harriet Hageman, Mr. Trump’s vendetta, and the congresswoman nearly driven out of the Trump-loving state, in part because of death threats, her office said.
Yet for Ms. Cheney, the race stopped being about political survival months ago. Instead, she used the Aug. 16 race as something of a high-profile stage for her martyrdom — and a proving ground for her new crusade. She used the only debate to tell voters to “vote someone else” if they wanted a politician who would break their oath. Last week, she enlisted her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, to cut an ad calling Mr. Trump a “coward” who poses the greatest threat to America in the history of the republic.
In a state where Mr. Trump won 70 percent of the vote two years ago, Ms. Cheney might as well be asking ranchers to go vegan.
“If the price of standing up for the Constitution is losing a seat in the House of Representatives, then that’s a price I’m willing to pay,” she said in an interview this week in a Cheyenne bank conference room.
The 56-year-old daughter of a politician who once had visions of rising to the top of the House leadership — but instead landed as vice president — has become perhaps the most significant rank-and-file member of Congress in modern times. Few others have used the levers of office so aggressively to try to redirect the course of American politics — but in doing so, she has effectively sacrificed her own future at the institution she grew to worship.
Ms. Cheney’s unrelenting focus on Mr. Trump has fueled speculation — even among longtime family friends — that she is preparing to run for president. She did little to dissuade such talk.
At a house party Thursday night in Cheyenne, where former Vice President Dick Cheney looked happily beneath a pair of leather-clad men, the host introduced Mrs. Cheney by recalling how another Republican woman, Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, stood up to Sen. Joseph McCarthy , when it was unpopular—and became the first female presidential candidate from a major party.
The audience applauded the parallel as Ms Cheney smiled.
In the interview, she said she was focusing on her basic studies and her work on the committee. But it’s far from clear whether she could be a viable candidate in the current GOP, or whether she has an interest in the donor class’ schemes to run for a third party, in part because she knows it might just siphon votes from a Democrat who opposes d Mr. Trump.
Ms. Cheney said she had no interest in switching parties: “I’m a Republican.” But when asked if the Republican Party she grew up in could even be saved in the short term, she said: “Maybe not.” and called his party “very sick”.
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As Trump’s wing of the GOP flexed its muscles, voters in deep-red Kansas delivered a strong warning to the GOP on abortion rights.
The party, she said, “continues to move in the ditch and I think it will take several cycles if it can be healed.”
Ms. Cheney suggested she was as excited about Trumpism as Mr. Trump himself. She may support a Republican for president in 2024, she said, but her red line is a refusal to state clearly that Mr. Trump lost a legitimate election in 2020.
Asked if the banned candidates included Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom many Republicans have latched onto as an alternative to Trump, she said it would be “very difficult” for her to support Mr. DeSantis in a general election.
“I think Ron DeSantis has aligned himself almost entirely with Donald Trump, and I think that’s very dangerous,” Ms. Cheney said.
In Mrs. Cheney’s rhetoric, it’s easy to hear another tone of the White House bid.
In Cheyenne, she channeled the concerns of “mothers” and what she described as their hunger for “someone who is competent.” Once largely disdainful of identity politics — Ms. Cheney was the only female lawmaker who wouldn’t pose for a photo of women in Congress after 2018 — she now freely discusses gender and her perspective as a mother.
“These days, for the most part, men run the world, and it’s really not going so well,” she said in June when she spoke at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.
In a sign that Ms. Cheney’s political awakening goes beyond her disdain for Mr. Trump, she said she prefers the ranks of female Democrats with national security experience to the right wing of her party.
“I’d rather serve with Mickey Sherrill, Chrissy Hoolahan and Elisa Slotkin than Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Bobert, even though I certainly have major disagreements with the women in the Democratic Party that I just mentioned,” Ms. Cheney said in the interview. “But they love this country, they do their homework and they’re people who are trying to do the right thing for the country.”
Ms. Cheney is more certain in her diagnosis of what ails the Republican Party than in her prescription for reform.
She has no political organization pending after Congress and has benefited from Democratic donors whose affections may be fleeting. To the dismay of some allies, she has not expanded her inner circle beyond family and a handful of close advisers. Never much of a nutcase, she said she longs for what she remembers as her father’s era of policy-driven politics.
“What the country needs are serious people who are willing to engage in policy debates,” Ms Cheney said.
It’s a far cry from the Liz Cheney of a decade ago, who had a contract to appear regularly on Fox News and would use her spot as a guest host on Sean Hannity to present her staunch conservative views and brutal former President Barack Obama and the Democrats .
Today, Ms. Cheney admits no specific regrets for helping to create the atmosphere that led to Mr. Trump’s takeover of her party. However, she acknowledged a “reflexive bias that I am guilty of” and noted that January 6 “demonstrates how dangerous this is.”
Few lawmakers today face these dangers as regularly as Ms. Cheney, who for nearly a year has worked full-time on the Capitol Police because of threats against her – protection assigned to several rank-and-file lawmakers. She no longer gives advance notice of her Wyoming trip and, not welcome at most county and state Republican events, has turned her campaign into a series of invite-only house parties.
What is more puzzling than her schedule is why Ms. Cheney, who has raised more than $13 million, did not pour more money into the race, especially early on when she had an opportunity to determine Ms. Hageman. Ms. Cheney had spent roughly half of her campaign funds as of early July, prompting speculation that she was saving money for future efforts against Mr. Trump.
Mrs. Cheney long ago stopped attending House Republican meetings. When she’s at the Capitol, she spends much of her time with Democrats on the Jan. 6 panel and often heads to the Lindy Boggs Room, the lobby for women lawmakers, instead of the House floor with the male-dominated GOP conference. Some members of the Jan. 6 group were struck by how often her Zoom backdrop was her suburban home in Virginia.
In Washington, even some Republicans, who are also eager to get away from Mr. Trump, are questioning Ms. Cheney’s decision to wage open war against her own party. It limits its future influence, they argue.
“It depends on whether you want to go out in a blaze of glory and be ineffective, or whether you want to try to be effective,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who has future leadership aspirations of his own. “I respect her, but I wouldn’t make the same choice.
Ms. Cheney points out that the Jan. 6 inquiry, with its prime-time hearings, is seen by critics as an opportunity to garner attention. She turned down some opportunities that could have benefited her ambitions, most notably those offered by documentary filmmakers.
Still, for her skeptics at home, Ms. Cheney’s attacks on Mr. Trump have revived dormant questions about her ties to the state and raised fears that she has gone to Washington and connected with the opposition, rejecting the political views of voters who are whether she and her father started in electoral politics.
At a parade in Casper last month, held while Mrs. Cheney was in Washington preparing for a hearing, Mrs. Hageman received frequent cheers from voters who said the incumbent had gone wrong.
“Her vote is not bad,” Casper resident Julie Heath said. “But so much of her focus is on Jan. 6.”
“She’s so in bed with the Democrats, with Pelosi and all these people,” interjected Bruce Heath, Mrs. Heath’s husband.
Notably, not a single voter interviewed at the parade raised Mrs. Cheney’s support for the gun control bill the House had passed just weeks earlier — the kind of apostasy that would have infuriated Wyoming Republicans in an era dominated more by politics than by the personality of one man.
“Her vote on the gun bill received almost no publicity,” Mike Sullivan, former Democrat…
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