Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) pledged to renounce the GOP and leave the party altogether if former President Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for president in 2024.
Cheney made the comments while speaking to Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith as part of an event at the paper’s annual festival on Saturday after being asked if she would remain a Republican regardless of what happens in the 2024 presidential election. The Wyoming lawmaker, a lifelong conservative, was ousted by a double-digit margin last month by a Trump-backed challenger in her House GOP primary. Her loss came after Republican voters and operatives soured on her anti-Trump stance, which arose over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and escalated into a bitter GOP feud.
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“I’m going to make sure Donald Trump — I’m going to do everything I can to make sure he’s not the nominee,” Cheney told Smith. “And if he is the nominee, I won’t be a Republican.”
.@Liz_Cheney says if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024, she will not be a Republican. #TribFest22 pic.twitter.com/3PXuOTBTDy
— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) September 25, 2022
Asked by Smith if she would consider running for president to prevent a second Trump term, the outgoing lawmaker reiterated her commitment to preventing the former president from ever returning to the Oval Office but declined to give a straight answer to the question.
“I certainly will do whatever it takes to make sure Donald Trump isn’t anywhere close to the Oval Office,” Cheney replied coyly.
Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, was the No. 3 House Republican and was a staunch ally of the 45th president. She broke with Trump after he began denying the outcome of the 2020 election and fully denounced him after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Trump’s most loyal congressional allies initially tried to oust Cheney from her leadership position in February 2021, but the vote to remove her as House GOP Conference chair was unsuccessful. Her standing with GOP colleagues weakened in the months that followed, as members grew frustrated with her continued comments regarding the former president and her support for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) Jan. 6 commission.
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Members eventually voted Cheney out of her position in May of that year, and the Wyoming Republican joined Pelosi’s House select committee despite warnings from GOP leadership not to do so. Those warnings came after Pelosi rejected House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) picks for the committee, a move Cheney supported despite it being unprecedented.
As her prominence grew as an anti-Trump activist, especially with the wide-ranging coverage of the Jan. 6 select committee hearings, the former president and his allies went to work campaigning for her primary opponent: conservative attorney Harriet Hageman.
