Thanks to Liz Cheney for her courage in standing up to this tedious termagant tortfeasor, DJT, a dangerous insurrectionist billionaire, whose violent threatening rhetoric has been directed against her. From The Washington Post:
Liz Cheney made a few bits of news on Saturday afternoon in a conversation with the journalist David Remnick at the 25th annual New Yorker Festival. She pointedly called on former President George W. Bush to endorse Kamala Harris for president, as Cheney and her father, Dick Cheney, Bush’s vice president, have done. She said she had canceled her subscription to The Washington Post because the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, decided not to endorse Harris for president under the fig leaf of forgoing endorsements.
Liz Cheney said Senator Mitch McConnell’s refusal to vote to convict Donald Trump in 2021 on the articles of impeachment was the reason Trump is the nominee today, arguing other Republicans would have fallen in line to convict if McConnell had the “courage” to do so.
But most interesting of all to me was the reason for her confident prediction that opened the festival conversation: “Kamala Harris is going to be the next president of the United States.”
I wasn’t surprised by the prediction — Cheney is campaigning energetically for Harris to defeat Trump — but I was struck that Cheney, the former vice chair of the Jan. 6 House select committee, did not primarily argue that threats to democracy would lift Harris to victory.
Rather, she said that in her conversations with independent and undecided voters, what is really moving them into Harris’s corner was “what a second Trump term would mean for the women of this country.” She cited the draconian Republican bans and limits on reproductive health care and other medical needs that have led to traumatic and disabling injuries for pregnant women in Texas and other states with bans in place.
To be sure, Cheney argued that many voters would reject Trump because he broke his oath to the Constitution and tried to overturn the 2020 election results and because he has degraded the rule of law. That’s what turned her against Trump after years of supporting him, which she called her “biggest professional regret.”
But she said she thought women would rally against Trump in enormous numbers, seeing him as a fundamentally cruel and depraved person who did not care about their health, rights or well-being.
With that, Cheney put her finger on one of the big known unknowns of this election: Would women and others who support abortion rights turn out for Democrats in such a wave, as they did in 2022 and 2023, that Trump won’t know what hit him?
For the most part, the Manhattan audience was deeply appreciative of Cheney’s reassuring words about Harris and her leadership against Trump; the steady applause for her is another reminder of the bizarro Trump political universe we are in, where a strong conservative like Cheney is warmly welcomed by a predominantly liberal audience.
But it’s also a reminder of how Trump unites everyone from Dick Cheney to Taylor Swift, as Liz Cheney noted.
Asked by Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, if she thought Trump was a fascist, Cheney said, “I think you’d be hard pressed to say he’s not.” And she was withering about The Post and its owner.
“When you have Jeff Bezos apparently afraid to issue an endorsement for the only candidate in the race who’s a stable responsible adult because he fears Donald Trump, that tells you why we have to work so hard to make sure that Donald Trump isn’t elected,” Cheney said.
The electoral college system is the only chance he has. Imagine that. Relying on an outdated and pointless system to win an election as opposed to getting the most votes out of all the people and winning like what happens in more functional democracies.
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