By Maggie Astor
Former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a vocal anti-Trump Republican who has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, criticized a number of other Republicans earlier this week for being too beholden to former President Donald Trump.
Cheney said in an interview on ABC News that she had never voted for a Democrat before, but would vote for Harris because she believed electing Trump would result in “unrecoverable catastrophe” for the country. She accused Republicans who back Trump — including Nikki Haley, who opposed him during the Republican primaries but now supports him — of betraying both the Constitution and their conservative principles in the service of allegiance to the party.
Cheney’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, also endorsed Harris on Friday. She strongly criticized Trump’s running mate, Se. JD Vance of Ohio, contrasting him unfavorably with former Vice President Mike Pence, who refused to go along with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Vance “has said specifically that he would, in fact, do that, that he would put Donald Trump’s orders and instructions ahead of the Constitution, and it is hard to imagine a much graver danger than a president and a vice president who will put themselves above the Constitution,” she said. (Vance has said that if he had been vice president on Jan. 6, 2021, he would have told swing states Trump lost to send multiple slates of electors to Congress and let Congress decide which to accept.)
Cheney said that her decision to support Harris was based primarily on concern for democratic principles, saying, “Donald Trump presents a challenge and a threat fundamentally to the republic.” But she also argued that Trump’s policies, including his support for tariffs and an isolationist foreign policy, were antithetical to conservatism.
She had particularly harsh words for Haley, who ran against Trump in the Republican primary this year and criticized some of the same elements of his character, policy and actions that Cheney has, but who has since committed to doing whatever she can to help elect him.
“I can’t understand her position on this in any kind of a principled way,” Cheney said. “The things that she said, that she made clear when she was running in the primary, those things are true.”
Haley sat for her own interview on CBS News on Sunday and said that her decision to support Trump was about policy.
“I don’t have to like him or agree with him 100% of the time to know that life for Americans would be better under the policies where we have strong immigration, where we have law and order, where we have an economy where we can look at opportunities, where we’ve got national security that is strong,” she said. “I don’t need to sit there and like someone to decide those policies are better.”
Haley acknowledged that she did not think Trump was a good candidate, saying she wouldn’t have run herself if she had. But she said that for her, the choice between him and Harris was easy, adding, “These are the candidates we have been given.”
The past few days have brought several prominent Republican rejections of Trump, even as a vast majority of Republican voters and elected officials continue to support him. Jimmy McCain, the son of John McCain, who was the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, criticized the Trump campaign last week for getting into a confrontation with an employee at Arlington National Cemetery and said he planned to support Harris.
On Saturday, former President George W. Bush’s office said he would not endorse either candidate. “President Bush retired from presidential politics years ago,” his office said.
No other former Republican president is still alive. The three living former Democratic presidents — Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter — are supporting Harris.
Cheney’s disdain for Trump has been no secret — she was a member of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and she lost her Republican primary as a result of her opposition to Trump. But she had not previously confirmed whether she would vote for Harris or for a third-party or write-in candidate, as some other anti-Trump Republicans, including Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, have indicated they may do.
Trump’s campaign, asked for comment Sunday, referred to a post Trump made on social media saying, “Dick Cheney is an irrelevant RINO, along with his daughter.”
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