Democratic presidential nominee U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris attends a campaign event with former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney in Brookfield, Wis. on Oct. 21.Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
As he watched Donald Trump speak to the sycophantic crowd before him on the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021, a concerned former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney picked up his phone and called his daughter Liz.
He wanted to know if she, too, was watching Mr. Trump address the boisterous crowd that had assembled at the Ellipse, a park just south of the White House.
“You are in danger,” Mr. Cheney told his daughter, relaying how the outgoing president had told his braying supporters that it was time to get rid of the Liz Cheneys of the world.
The moment was captured in Ms. Cheney’s 2023 memoir, Oath and Honor, which chronicled her rise in the Republican Party and the swift downfall that followed her fierce criticism of Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results.
It’s difficult to overstate just how big the Cheney name was at one time in the Republican Party. Mr. Cheney, of course, was president George W. Bush’s wing man in the Oval Office, and a much-despised figure among liberals for his role in precipitating the Iraq war. Daughter Liz rose through Republican ranks in the family’s home state of Wyoming, eventually becoming the third-ranked Republican in Congress. She was seen as a potential future Speaker of the House.
All that changed when Mr. Trump stoked the anger and fury among his supporters that led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol. After that, Ms. Cheney would make a momentous decision: she would never again support Mr. Trump or his ilk.
While doubtlessly brave, it would be incredibly costly.
Mr. Trump, of course, made sure Ms. Cheney paid a steep price for her opposition to him. She lost all her stature inside the Republican Party, eventually losing her seat in Congress. She was censured and kicked out of the Wyoming GOP. Throughout it all, however, she never stopped being true to herself, never stopped prosecuting the case against Mr. Trump wherever she could, including as vice-chair of a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot.
In the four years since the Capitol riot, Ms. Cheney has remained a pariah to some, and a shining paragon of virtue to others. She has distanced herself from many of her Republican colleagues who would regularly denigrate Mr. Trump behind his back, but who ultimately supported the former president when it was clear he owned the party and called the shots.
They didn’t care how much of a threat he was to the Constitution. The bigger concern was their cushy positions in the party and the paycheques that came with them.
When Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for the presidency, Ms. Cheney reached out and made it known that she would be supporting the vice-president, publicly and privately, and offered to help in any way.
The guts it took to do that.
In recent weeks, Ms. Cheney has appeared on stage with Ms. Harris in many battleground ridings as part of moderated discussions about Mr. Trump and the state of American democracy, and the great urgency to protect it. Far from reviled, Ms. Cheney is regularly cheered and saluted by the crowds.
She has also appeared in Harris ads, along with other Republicans who want nothing to do with Mr. Trump. In one, entitled Fit to Lead, Ms. Cheney praises Ms. Harris, saying she is “standing in the breach at a critical moment in our nation’s history …” Five years ago, if you told Republicans that Ms. Cheney would one day be endorsing a Democrat for president they would have laughed.
Today, Ms. Cheney says America can withstand bad policy but can’t survive a “president who is willing to torch the Constitution.” And every time she says something like that, Trump Republicans seethe.
She believes it’s time for a new conservative party to be born, one that has a sense of morals and a policy manifesto based on true principles - ones that can’t be bought or sold or thrown out the window in the name of political expediency.
I can’t think of a better person to lead such an institution than Ms. Cheney herself.
Over its lifetime, the Republican Party has had some real heroes, starting with Abraham Lincoln and including people like Ronald Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain.
Maybe the last true hero of the party will be Ms. Cheney. Because what she is doing now takes uncommon courage. What she is doing now may just help save the Republic she loves so much.