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U.S. Representative Liz Cheney waves at an event in Jackson, Wyoming.
Liz Cheney 2024
Congresswoman Liz Cheney has said that “there has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution” than Donald Trump’s bid to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. And now she has paid the full price for that conviction.
Cheney’s defeat in this week’s Republican primary election for Wyoming’s lone House seat made news for two big reasons. First, it closed the book on the “Donald Trump impeachment revenge tour.” (Of the 10 GOP congressmen who voted to impeach Trump, four were defeated for re-election by Trump-endorsed challengers, four announced their retirement, and just two have survived.) In other words, Trump’s grip on his party remains strong. Second, it opens the next chapter of Liz Cheney’s increasingly interesting political career.
Following Cheney’s 37-point loss to a Trump-endorsed rival, the former president said he had relegated Cheney to “political oblivion.” Cheney has other ideas. Within hours of her landslide loss, she converted her House campaign, called “Liz Cheney for Wyoming," into a leadership committee. Its purpose? “To mobilize a unified effort to oppose any Donald Trump campaign for president,” her spokesman told Politico.
That could mean she’ll run for president. Or maybe she’ll simply spend millions of dollars to attack Trump in the media. The House Committee on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot continues, and Cheney’s starring role on that stage will remain central to the drama.
But this story can’t be reduced to a simple question of whether she’s politically strong enough to oust Donald Trump from the commanding heights of Republican Party politics. Her impact on the 2024 US presidential race will be complicated. It could even inadvertently help Trump win back the White House.
For those not following this American political soap opera, Liz Cheney is the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, the most powerful powerbroker within the last generation of Republican Party politics. Liz Cheney, now finishing her third term in Congress, was once a central figure in the House GOP leadership and a lead contender to one day become Speaker. Then she became one of just two Republicans willing to work on the committee investigating the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. Opposition to Donald Trump ended her House leadership position and has now cost Cheney her seat in Congress.
Cheney’s high profile and the millions she can raise to thwart Trump’s bid to win back the White House now give her three main options.
First, she could run for the Republican Party’s nomination for president. If Trump runs, as expected, Cheney has virtually no chance of beating him. A recent poll showed that just 14 percent of Republicans had a favorable view of her compared with two-thirds with an unfavorable one.
She could win enough early support, however, to claim a place on the debate stage to directly attack the former president with powerful arguments that conservative voters may not have heard from conservative cable and online media. Even if she can’t defeat him, she could weaken Trump enough that other candidates, freed from the burden of attacking Trump themselves, could beat him.
But the few votes she’d likely win would underline the futility of her campaign, and she might end up splitting the anti-Trump vote to Trump’s advantage and making other candidates look weak for not fighting as she has.
Second, she could run for president as an independent. By targeting her message and her money at a few closely contested districts within a few crucial swing states, she could try to cost Trump a close election.
There’s no guarantee, however, that she won’t take more votes from anti-Trump independent voters who might otherwise back President Biden or some other Democrat than from Trump.
Third, she could limit her role to media gadfly. By targeting an anti-Trump message at swing voters in swing states without presenting herself as a candidate, she could undermine Trump without inadvertently stealing votes from his opponent.
The bottom-line: There’s no helpful historical precedent here. There has been no famous, well-financed presidential candidate whose sole stated purpose was to prevent another candidate from winning.
Like so much else from the Trump era of American politics, we won’t know exactly what might happen until it starts to happen. Liz Cheney, the daughter of a political powerbroker father and an historian mother, knows that very well.
US Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) during a Jan. 6 committee hearing.
What We're Watching: The outgoing Liz Cheney, trouble in Kosovo, France out of Mali
Liz Cheney’s next move
Liz Cheney, a three-term Republican US congresswoman from Wyoming, suffered a stinging defeat Tuesday night at the hands of well-funded primary opponent Harriet Hageman, enthusiastically backed by former president Donald Trump. Sarah Palin — the former vice presidential candidate and governor, also supported by Trump — won the Alaska primary to run for Congress. Cheney’s defeat marks a remarkable political fall for a nationally known conservative politician who is the daughter of former VP Dick Cheney, the previous generation of Republicans’ best-known Washington powerbroker. Her political future and her potential impact on American politics will be defined by her central role on the congressional committee investigating the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and Trump’s role in it. Trump, according to Cheney, is “guilty of the most serious dereliction of duty of any president in our nation’s history.” Cheney raised some $13 million for her now-failed House campaign. She can still spend that money on a future race. Next up: speculation that Cheney will run for president in 2024 in a campaign defined by opposition to Trump, who is still the Republican presidential frontrunner.
NATO tries to calm Balkan tensions
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg will meet Wednesday (separately) with Serbia's President Aleksandar Vučić and Kosovo's Prime Minister Albin Kurti for EU talks in Brussels to try to avoid a new conflict in the Balkans. Two weeks ago, mass protests erupted across Kosovo after local ethnic Serbs were told they'd be forced to replace their Serbian-issued IDs and license plates with new documents and tags issued by Pristina, Kosovo’s government. Implementation of the law was then delayed by a month, but the announcement had already kick-started tensions in Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008 following a bloody war in the late 1990s. Tens of thousands of ethnic Serbs who live in Kosovo refuse to recognize the country, which Serbia still claims as its province. With the alliance now preoccupied with Russia’s war in Ukraine, NATO is especially on edge over the risk of new fighting in the Balkans, where the organization’s peacekeepers have been deployed since 1999. Kurti says there’s a connection between the two conflicts. He claims Vladimir Putin is egging on the pro-Moscow Vučić to spread what Putin sees as Russia's war with NATO to other parts of Europe — a charge which Vučić has denied. Vučić and Kurti are expected to hold a rare face-to-face meeting on Thursday.
Au revoir, Mali
The last French troops left Mali on Monday, ending nine years of French military presence in this country in the Sahel region of West Africa. Paris decided to withdraw in February, a year and a half after Mali’s military took over in consecutive coups in 2020 and 2021. Relations with the new government tanked after French President Emmanuel Macron demanded a swift return to democracy. France deployed forces in Mali in 2013 at Bamako's request to help fight jihadists allied with Tuareg rebels, but frustrated locals came to view the French as ineffective and unwanted. In addition, Mali's ruling junta has lately warmed toward Russia, which has deployed mercenaries from the shadowy Wagner Group to help local forces beat back the Islamist insurgency. So far, the main result has been controversy: human rights groups accuse Mali's military and the Russian mercs of carrying out civilian massacres, and French air strikes of targeting civilians. Meanwhile, the 2,500-strong French contingent in the Sahel has shifted its hub to neighboring Niger and will coordinate from there its troops in Chad and Burkina Faso as part of its wider mission to defeat jihadism in one of sub-Saharan Africa's most conflict-ridden regions.
Trump's 2024 outlook: more vulnerable after Jan 6 hearings
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Happy Monday. And a Quick Take for you to get your week started off. Wanted to talk a little bit about a topic I haven't discussed very much and that is the implications of the January 6th commission and where we are heading for US elections.
It's pretty clear to me that Trump is still the most popular in the Republican Party. And if you want to make a bet, you would certainly still say that he gets the nomination. I think it's virtually a hundred percent that he's going to announce his candidacy. Closest people around him certainly believe that in relatively short order. But he is more vulnerable than he was just a few months ago. And some of this is obvious. I mean, he's not president anymore and so he doesn't have the platform that he had when he was president. Of course, he's going to lose a significant amount of attention, impact as a consequence of that. He's been banned from Twitter. He's banned from Facebook. And his new Truth Social is not doing very much to speak of, at least to date. Doesn't seem to have any real management. And a couple times I've taken a look at it, doesn't seem to have a lot going on in terms of the space. He's not attracting the same crowds he used to when he gives speeches.
Now, the January 6th committee, which has been an anti-Trump effort... There's no question that the decision by Kevin McCarthy to pull those that he had appointed to serve on it and make sure that it was basically only Republicans that were strongly anti-Trump, in this case, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, would participate, meant that it was going to be perceived as a more partisan affair than it would have if there had been full participation from across the political spectrum. No question about that. But it has still had impact. And I think one of the reasons it's had impact is because so many of the people that have participated are hardly Democrats. And in fact, many of them are people that were strong pro-Trump characters until January 6th; a bunch of former staffers, the deputy press secretary, Sarah Matthews, the deputy national security advisor, someone I know pretty well, actually, Matt Pottinger, members of Pence's team, others. I mean, these were all people that had been strongly loyal to Trump for the entirety of his first term.
Now, I want to be clear, the rank and file of the Republican party still think that this whole thing is a nothing burger. There's only a small minority of the Republican party that believed on January 6th that he was responsible for it in any way. And that number has basically not moved. It's within a margin of error. But independents have shifted against Trump. And by the way, so has Rupert Murdoch. And I think it's very interesting that over the last few days, you see opinion editorials from the editorial board, from both the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal saying that Trump is unfit to run again for the presidency, shouldn't be president in 2025. These are press outfits that were all in for Trump in 2020 and they're not anymore.
Now, the Wall Street Journal is an elite newspaper. It has a lot of Democrat and establishment Republican readers, few that would be considered ultra-MAGA. That's not true of the New York Post. Though, of course, New York itself is a heavily blue voting urban area, but they're going to lose a lot of subscribers in Staten Island, certainly on the basis of taking that perspective. But even Fox News itself... I mean, you watch Hannity, you watch Tucker Carlson, they're a hundred percent still for Trump. But the daily coverage that you see that has been much more straight up news over the last couple of years has also covered a lot more. They haven't been covering the January 6th commission, but they have not been promoting Trump and they've not been trying in any way to whitewash him or actively cheerlead for him in a way that Newsmax, for example, has consistently no matter what time of the day that you watch it.
So I think at the very least we can now say that we're going to have a lot of alternative candidates for 2024. I think it's increasingly likely that Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, is going to run against Trump. I think there will be a number of others as well. Again, you wouldn't bet against him at this point, but you wouldn't think it's going to be easy. And I think that's important. By the way, that's of course also true of Biden in the sense that Biden is at his most unpopular of his entire presidency right now. He's polling in the mid to high thirties. He's got big problems, particularly with the economy, particularly with inflation. He's vulnerable on COVID issues as well. And he also is looking increasingly slow, and his age is a factor, by the way, as is Trump's. And that fact is something that's going to make a lot of people much more interested in having anyone but Biden run in 2024 in the Democratic side and anyone but Trump run on the Republican side.
But this matters more about Trump because frankly, if you get Biden or if you get someone else, there's not a lot of impact in terms of the ultimate trajectory of US political institutions, the role of democracy, the kind of policies that you get in the way that the United States is perceived globally, where if it's Trump vis-à-vis another more mainstream Republican, it matters a lot, precisely because of Trump's unfitness, his willingness to call elections illegitimate and do everything he can to undermine them, certainly something you'd expect to do again, as well as his indifference to rule of law. So I do believe the fact that both Trump and Biden are increasingly vulnerable to significant challenges is a much greater impact and import when you look at the Republican side. Now, again, if you make me bet right now, I would still say that Trump gets the nomination and that it's close to a conflict for 2024. But again, overall, the likelihood Trump becomes president a second term has gone down significantly.
Now, one danger I'd like to raise. I really think we need to call out those Democrats that are spending money and channeling money in a number of races to try to get pro-Trump stop the steal election deniers to win in Republican primaries, because they believe that those pro-Trump candidates are going to be easier to defeat in a general election. Now, first of all, a lot of Democrats felt that way about Trump himself in 2020 and look what happened as a consequence, but I'll go further than that. This is a very dangerous game they're playing, and they should stop.
One more Marjorie Taylor Greene, in the House is too many. One is too many. It leads to violence. It leads to lunacy. It leads to disinformation. She's a self-avowed Christian nationalist. She's doing everything she can from a weak position to try to undermine the American political system and the values that it's built upon. And if you end up with five or 10 of them in the House, a couple of them in the Senate, a couple of them as governors, you do a lot more to deeply undermine the structural integrity and stability of the American political system. So the Democrats should stop playing that game right away.
Finally, I want to make a shout-out to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, two people on the Republican Party. Kinzinger voted for Trump, was full-throated about it. Cheney votes with Trump over 90% of the time in the House. They have basically given up their political careers. Liz Cheney lost her role in the leadership of the House and is almost certainly going to lose her upcoming race for re-election. Kinzinger has already had to step down. In both cases, these are people that are standing by democracy and rule of law in the country above their narrow political preference. There are not many people in the country that are leading by example right now. And if by doing it, that means you have to lose your job, well, they're showing us what a leader really is and I tip my cap to them. That's it for me. I'll talk to you soon.
For more of Ian Bremmer's weekly analyses, subscribe to his GZERO World newsletter at ianbremmer.bulletin.com
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January 6 committee partisan battle; SCOTUS rules on election reform
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is forming a January 6th committee to investigate the Capitol insurrection. What do you expect to come from it?
Well, the committee is allowed to perform with the input from minority Republicans, but the Republicans are basically refusing to participate. Which means that most committee members, with the exception of probably Liz Cheney, the Trump critical member of Congress from Wyoming and daughter of the former vice president, are going to be Democrats. And the Democrats are going to probably go into this with an earnest desire to look at what happened on January 6th, who instigated the riot, why it happened, why the signs were missed at the Capitol by the Capitol police and others. What's likely going to come out of this is a lot of partisan messaging, trying to link the Republican party to the insurgence that stormed the Capitol on January 6th. That will help to harden views around January 6th and lead to more ongoing partisan battling in the advance of the 2022 midterm elections. So, expect a lot of heat, but not a lot of light to come out of this investigation. It'll probably be dismissed by Republican critics, even if its findings were to be sound.
The Supreme Court this week ruled on several voting rights cases. What are the implications for the future?
The Supreme Court this week ruled in a voting rights case in Arizona that limited the application of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Which, after the Supreme Court's ruling on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act several years ago, undermines some of the protections that are provided by the Act by requiring extremely high standard for plaintiffs to show that an election law is in fact discriminatory. What the court wanted to say was that the discriminatory effects are not enough to show discrimination, and this will make future cases brought under Section 2 unlikely to succeed. This is relevant because the DOJ just last week sued the state of Georgia for the discriminatory impact of their new voting rights law. The burden will be on them now to show a racially discriminatory intent. So, this is good news for Republicans who are trying to pass more laws in states that roll back some of the loosenings of election law that we've seen in recent years, particularly during the pandemic. But it's bad news for election law reformers and Democrats who want to try to make voting as easy and accessible to as many groups as possible as they can. One further implication of this new ruling is that the Democrats in Congress will continue to push on a new voting rights act. You've got at least two holdouts among Democrats who don't want to change the legislative filibuster rules. And no Republicans are expected to embrace those reforms, which means this will continue to be a partisan fight, at least through the midterm elections, and probably beyond. A very big issue in us politics
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What you should know about Elise Stefanik’s rise in the GOP
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
Who is Elise Stefanik and what does she mean for the Republican Party right now?
Elise Stefanik is a young member from Upstate New York. She had originally started her career as a staffer in the George W. Bush administration, but in recent years, has turned into one of the most outspoken defenders of President Donald Trump, particularly during the impeachment trial last year. She's relevant right now because it looks like she'll be replacing Liz Cheney, the Representative from Wyoming and also the daughter of the former Vice President, who has been outspoken in her criticism of President Trump since the January 6th insurrection, and probably more importantly, outspoken in her criticism of the direction of the Republican Party.
The irony here though, is that while Cheney is going down, she's being replaced by somebody who, when she came into office, was expected to be a pretty standard-bearing Bush Republican. And so this is just really indicative of where the Party is, very hard to stay on in Republican leadership if you aren't going to be a supporter of President Trump. Too many of Cheney's colleagues thought she had become a distraction and wanted her gone. Stefanik is probably a placeholder. She says she doesn't want to serve in the position long-term. She eventually wants to take over the chairmanship of a committee, and she has many years ahead of her in Congress. She is very young.
What's the outlook for the Democrats' election bill?
Well, the Democrats in the House and Senate have introduced a bill to rewrite federal election law. Traditionally, election laws have been set by the state. States are allowed to choose how to do their redistricting. They're allowed to choose how people vote. Do they do mail-in votes? Do they have no-excuse mail-in votes? How many days of early voting are they going to allow? And, the Democrats bill would append that entire regime, and create a federal standard that every state would have to meet for number of days of pre-election day, in-person voting, standards around absentee voting, how to draw districts, taking it away from partisan gerrymandering and moving it towards a commission, in most states. And, there's been a lot of opposition to it. So the Democrats argue that this bill is necessary because Republicans are passing what they think are restrictive voting laws across the country. And Republicans are saying the Democrats are trying to take over and federalize elections to increase the chances that they win future elections and hold onto their current majorities in the House and Senate. And there's truth to both claims. The bill is very unlikely to move anywhere. It has 49 Democratic Senators who support it, who are co-sponsors, and one Democratic holdout, Joe Manchin. But even if Manchin never came around and said he supported the bill, it would require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate, or the elimination of the legislative filibuster, so it's very unlikely to pass into law. You know this is a really big deal for the Democrats. They've given it the special designation S.1 in the Senate, H.R.1 in the House, which is a symbolic act suggesting this is their highest priority. But also, in a Rules Committee hearing earlier this week, both Majority Leader, Schumer, and Republican Minority Leader, McConnell, showed up to debate the bill in-person, debate amendments, and there've been multiple showdowns on the Floor. This is a really high-stakes piece of legislation. It would fundamentally tip the balance of power in favor of the Democrats were it to pass, which is, among other reasons, why Republicans are so opposed to seeing it get into law.
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Quick Take: Trump will be acquitted, impeachment is now broken
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and I've got your Quick Take for the week. The second impeachment trial in the Senate of President Trump, now former President Trump, begins. And Lindsey Graham, Republican senator, has said that we all know what's going to happen. He's right. It's going to be close to a party line vote. A couple senators, maybe a handful, will vote to convict, but the large majority will vote to acquit, which says quite something.
The numbers have moved against Trump to be clear. Back in January, 47% of Americans were saying that the Senate should vote to remove Trump from office. In the last couple of days, those numbers, same poll, both ABC are behind it, 56% of Americans now support the Senate removing Trump. But still, close to a party line vote.
Remember, Trump never quite hit 50% in terms of approval ratings, but that didn't stop him from becoming president, didn't stop him from having an incredible hold on the Republican Party, and that is still true. Most Republicans support Trump. Most support Republicans support Trumpism, and most senators believe they will pay a price, a significant price if they vote against Trump in this impeachment hearing, which is a serious problem. It's all about what you're willing to do publicly for power as opposed to what you believe privately. And there's an enormous gap between the two. We saw that play out over the past several days. Some 11 Republicans prepared to vote in the House to ban Marjorie Taylor Green, the QAnon supporting, legitimately crazy, member of the House, newly elected member of the House from Georgia. 145 Republicans in the House, a strong majority, voted secret ballot in favor of keeping Liz Cheney in her leadership role, despite the fact that she had voted to impeach Trump. And in fact, Liz Cheney this weekend on Fox News, a Fox News interview, actually said about her views of that impeachment vote, what we already know constitutes the gravest violation of his oath of office by any president in the history of the country and this is not something we can simply look past or pretend didn't happen or try to move on. We've got to make sure this never happens again.
Well, certainly if the conviction vote was by secret ballot, maybe that would mean something, but it's not. And so to be very clear, Trump is going to be acquitted. He will be able to run again. And perhaps most importantly, the consequences for sedition, the consequences for actively calling for an insurrection and taking every step possible to overturn the legitimate results of a free and fair election do not include impeachment. Impeachment, I mean, if it doesn't apply for that, then it no longer works. And that's what the American political system is putting on display in the coming weeks, is that impeachment is broken as a political mechanism, which undermines the separation of and the balance of powers in the United States, the world's most powerful representative democracy.
I thought it was interesting, the Economist Intelligence Unit came out last week with the fact that the United States is considered in its model to be a flawed democracy. My only question was what took them so long? This isn't new. It's been coming for decades and the erosion has happened slowly but still very real. And the ability of the United States to make the argument that we're back internationally only makes sense if, and we'll gain alignment from all the allies, if they really believe that this can't happen in the US again. There's no reason to believe that. In fact, there's every reason to believe that it can and will happen again, because it's not about Trump. It's about anti-establishment sentiment in the United States growing much greater as the political institutions are seen to be rigged. And that is both true of the electoral process and now it's true of the impeachment process. It's not everything, it's not the military, it's not the judiciary, but very big pieces of the American political franchise increasingly do not work.
You know, some countries are hybrid economies in the sense that they're sort of between free market and state controlled. Increasingly, the United States is kind of a hybrid democracy. Some of it functions and some of it doesn't. And the fact that the US, because it's so incredibly wealthy and therefore stable, can continue to power through this and not deal with those challenges is itself a problem because it means that you don't address them. And as much as Biden as president himself is oriented to trying to address these challenges, it's very hard to imagine he's going to have a lot of success and the reason will be on full display in the Senate over the next couple of weeks.
So, that's it for me. I hope everyone's being safe, and avoiding people, and be good. Talk to you soon.