During an appearance on Fox News over the weekend, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) responded to some of the criticism that she has recently faced after voting in favor of the impeachment of then-President Donald Trump after he incited a mob that stormed the Capitol and put members of Congress and others in serious danger. Trump fueled the mob with his months of lies about the 2020 presidential election, which he claimed was stolen and rigged for Joe Biden, despite the total lack of remotely meaningful evidence for this claim.
Apparently, he’s sticking to the idea — in a filing ahead of his imminent impeachment trial, Trump’s lawyers falsely claimed that there’s not enough evidence to prove whether Trump was right or wrong.
Meanwhile, on Fox, Cheney commented as follows:
‘We are the party of Lincoln. We are not the party of QAnon or anti-Semitism or Holocaust deniers or white supremacy or conspiracy theories. That’s not who we are… The single greatest threat to our Republic is a president who would put his own self-interest above the Constitution, above the national interest. We’ve had a situation where President Trump claimed for months that the election was stolen and then apparently set about to do everything he could to steal it himself… Our institutions held, but we all have an obligation to make sure that they continue to do so and don’t look past what happened on January 6.’
Subsequently, Cheney suggested that a tweet that Trump posted amidst the attack in which he characterized then-Vice President Mike Pence as cowardly could have been a “pre-meditated effort to provoke violence.” At the Capitol, a mob of Trump’s supporters who were convinced that Pence hadn’t done enough to help their cause chanted “Hang Mike Pence!”
On Fox, Liz Cheney raises the question about whether Trump's tweet about Pence as the riot was happening "was a premeditated effort to provoke violence." "There are a lot of questions that have to be answered, & there will be many criminal investigations looking at every aspect."
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) February 7, 2021
On a similar note, Cheney also addressed the role of Trump in the Republican Party as it moves forward. Although House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) recently met with Trump in Florida, where the ex-president pledged to campaign on behalf of Republicans ahead of the 2022 elections, Cheney bluntly insisted that Trump “does not have a role” as a legitimate leader of the GOP, commenting as follows:
‘We’re the party of Abraham Lincoln. We’re the party of Ronald Reagan… We have to be in a position where we can say we stand for principles, we stand for ideals. Somebody who has provoked an attack on the United States Capitol… who refused to stand up immediately when he was asked and stop the violence — that is a person who does not have a role as a leader of our party going forward.’
Check out Cheney’s comments below:
