Still don't think democracy is under attack? Liz Cheney wants you to believe otherwise
The U.S. is 'sleepwalking into dictatorship,' the Wyoming Republican says
(Adobe Stock Images)
It’s the fate of most prophets — be they political or biblical — to go unheeded in their own time. But Liz Cheney appears determined to go down swinging.
In an interview with CBS News on Sunday, Cheney, a former Republican member of Congress from Wyoming who was chased out of the GOP fold for not being sufficiently fawning to former President Donald Trump, sounded a dire warning.
A Republican congressional majority in 2025, with Trump in the White House, would be a “threat” to a nation already “sleepwalking into dictatorship,” Cheney said, according to The Guardian.
“I believe very strongly in those principles and ideals that have defined the Republican party, but the Republican party of today has made a choice, and they haven’t chosen the constitution,” Cheney said, according to The Guardian, when she was asked whether she was rooting for Democrats in 2024. “And so I do think it presents a threat if the Republicans are in the majority in January 2025.”
Cheney has been sounding alarm bells about Trump and the danger he poses to American democracy since the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Instead of heeding her warnings, Republicans have doubled-down, and Trump is now the prohibitive favorite to win the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
Cheney’s warnings come as Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric about what horrors he might visit on the nation if he were to retake the White House in 2024. That includes punishing political enemies, and taking even more draconian steps against undocumented Americans.
Writing for The Atlantic this week, Jeffrey Goldberg marshaled the arguments against a second Trump presidency, noting that “Trump’s rhetoric has numbed us in its hyperbole and frequency,” and that’s the true threat it poses.
The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, a former Republican-turned-never Trumper, brings home the threat that a second Trump presidency poses.
“For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric,” Nichols recently wrote. “Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ ”
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