Of all the living Republicans who have run for president, only two are publicly supportive of Donald Trump: Sarah Palin, the 2008 vice presidential candidate, and JD Vance, Trump's current running mate.
Everyone else is going a different way.
Mike Pence, Trump's two-time running mate and vice president, refuses to support the man who still defends the mobs who wanted to hang him for following the Constitution.
George W. Bush, the twice-elected Republican president, has said that I will not support anyoneFormer Vice President Dan Quayle has remained silent, and his silence speaks for itself. Mitt RomneyTrump's immediate predecessor as the Republican Party's presidential nominee, and his running mate, the former House speaker. Paul Ryanhave said they will not vote for Trump.
AND Dick CheneyThe former two-term vice president, White House chief of staff, defense secretary and congressman said last week that he will vote for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
She joined her daughter, Liz Cheney, a former rising star among House Republicans, in endorsing Harris.
I have nothing but respect for all these decisions (I will never vote for Trump), but you could say that Liz Cheney's path has been the most heroic, because she was the one who risked the most and lost the most.
Had the former congresswoman chosen to stand by Trump — or simply back off her condemnations of him after a “respectable” period of time, as former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and so many others did — she might be the House speaker today. But she stood firm in her convictions and demanded that Trump be held accountable for his disqualifying behavior on and around January 6, 2021. And thus, her political career is over — or at least it will be as long as the Republican Party remains in Trump’s thrall.
That could change one day, but even if the Republican Party were to wake up from the spell of Trumpism, it would take many twists and turns for her profile in bravery to end with her being plucked from the wilderness to lead the party like a Churchill or a De Gaulle.
But I don’t think her approach is strategically ideal. And strategy is, according to Cheney herself, what matters here. She has repeatedly said she would “do everything I could” to ensure Trump does not return to the White House.
Again, I have no objection in principle to that agenda, but I do have concerns about its approach, particularly its claims that Harris is essentially a centrist whom conservatives should readily support.
“I think she [Harris] has changed in several very important ways on issues that matter,” Cheney told ABC News on “This Week” Sunday. “And I would… encourage independents to look at where she stands on these policy issues today.”
I think Cheney should embrace the discomfort that comes with endorsing Harris. The universe of persuadable, undecided voters in key states is small. Those who have been swayed by Cheney’s well-known arguments about Trump’s unfitness for office have probably already been swayed. How many voters might still be persuaded by her formal endorsement of Harris? Dozens? Hundreds? Maybe.
Meanwhile, as stupid as the argument seems to me, many Republicans and conservatives have been convinced that Liz and Dick Cheney are “RINOs,” a childish acronym for closet liberals who are “Republicans in name only.” Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a staunch Trump supporter, said on “This Week” that Liz Cheney is “a nonfactor. I’m not trying to be rude, but you can’t call yourself a conservative or a Republican when you support the most radical candidate the Democrats have ever put forward.”
Whatever you think of that argument — or Sanders’s authority to decide who is or isn’t a conservative — it works for a lot of people in part because there’s some truth to it. Harris’s record, particularly before the last six weeks, has been irrefutably left-wing.
Why not acknowledge it? If Cheney and other anti-Trump conservatives are going to face the charge that they are born-again leftists, why don’t they criticize Harris’s progressive politics and say they’re going to vote for her anyway because supporting Trump is not an option?
Asking conservatives who don't like Trump (and there are millions of them) to simultaneously defend their party's candidate, their party, and their principles is too much. What they are looking for is permission to make the best of a bad situation while still being able to identify as conservatives and Republicans.
Cheney recently endorsed Texas Democratic Rep. Colin Allred in his bid to defeat Sen. Ted Cruz. She has her reasons, including Cruz’s defense of Trump’s plan to steal the 2020 election. But giving conservatives and Republicans another reason to think she’s no longer one of them undermines her efforts to persuade them that the former president is such a unique threat that they should vote for a liberal Democrat for president.
Anyone who is willing to vote for Harris is unlikely to be moved to vote for Trump because Liz Cheney says Harris is discouragingly left-wing, but she is still the lesser evil. But many conservatives might be persuaded by the honesty of the argument that saving the Republican Party, conservatism, and the country justifies voting for a Democrat and then focusing on rebuilding the Republican Party and the conservative movement after Election Day.
@jonahdispatch
