Reasonable minds can disagree on Liz Cheney’s role in the GOP, but the choice of Elise Stefanik to replace her bodes poorly for more important battles ahead.
Reasonable minds can disagree on Liz Cheney’s role in the GOP, but the choice of Elise Stefanik to replace her bodes poorly for more important battles ahead.
I am much less concerned about who holds the No. 3 position in Republican House leadership than I am about who bats third for the Mets. And it’s not that I don’t care about politics. I do, a lot . . . particularly about Republicans getting it in gear to mount an effective challenge to the Biden-era Democrats (whether we think of our feckless president as leading the hard Left’s charge or being rolled over by it).
I also like Liz Cheney a lot. I don’t agree with her about everything, but I don’t even agree with myself about everything. That said, I didn’t care that she was the chair of the House Republican Conference. Weeks ago, I was nudged into caring, but only because Republicans were making the molehill of No. 3 status into a mountain, over whether Cheney deserved to be ousted for saying true things about the 2020 presidential election.
In the event, she comfortably prevailed, so I thought I could go back to not caring. But Cheney’s Trump-enthralled opposition bided its time to take a second swipe at her. In a manner that this Cheney fan found irritating, to be blunt about it, the congresswoman made it easy for her foes by seeming less interested in doing the job — which, at least nominally, involves smoothing over intramural squabbles rather than exacerbating them — than they were in removing her from it.
Cheney is right: It is patently obvious that President Trump lost the election. By historical standards, it really wasn’t that close — certainly not as close as Trump’s squeaker win in 2016 (which, true to form, he constantly referred to as a “landslide” victory). Psychologically, it is very bad for Trump fans to cling to the delusion that he beat Biden. Strategically, it is equally bad for so many Republicans to remain beholden to a man who doesn’t have a prayer of being elected president again. His continuing prominence in GOP politics, and the fact that he could conceivably win the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, could cost the party crucial, winnable elections, even beyond the damage he has already done by singlehandedly losing the two Georgia Senate seats for the Republicans, and hence their Senate majority — thus turbocharging the woke progressive agenda he says he opposes.
What Cheney says about all this is correct. In that sense, she is doing what a leader is supposed to do when the party is acting against its interests. She knows that the longer it takes for Republicans to move on from Trump, the more likely it is that Democrats will win elections they should lose in 2022 and 2024.
Then again, there is more than one way to go about this. Cheney has been headstrong: The party must go cold turkey rather than being weaned off of Trump. She’s wrong about that. She’s also being impractical. It is simply a fact that a significant plurality of the GOP base remains infatuated with the former president. This is going to take time. There is no upside in bringing up the former president and the 2020 election brouhaha at every turn.
If you ask me how the Mets did Wednesday, my answer is, “They beat the Orioles.” My answer is not, “They beat the Orioles, just like Biden beat Trump in an election that absolutely, positively was not stolen.”
To be sure, Trump remains enough of a presence, though a sharply diminished one, to make it occasionally necessary to comment on something he says or someone he discusses (positively or negatively). It doesn’t make sense, though, to force the issue by talking and writing about it incessantly, and agitating over it as if Trump were still president, with all the day-in-day-out commotion and social-media hijinks that entailed.
Cheney is right that, for the GOP going forward, Trump is a no-win proposition. But former Trump supporters who already know that don’t need to be told. Trump diehards who haven’t yet figured it out are not ready to hear it — and they are not going to be hectored into acceptance by someone who has made herself into the anti-Trump. It plainly is not helping Cheney that Trump has conveyed to his fans that her contempt for him is really contempt for them — even if the reality is that Cheney is the one trying to protect those people from the Democrats’ agenda while the former president, however inadvertently, has enabled that agenda by his self-absorbed recklessness.
Many prudent Republicans, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell prominent among them, perceive that the best way to move on from Trump is to stop talking about him — even when he can’t stop talking about them. Be honest about the election when the situation requires talking about it, but don’t talk about it unless it’s necessary — avoid gratuitously reminding Trump’s base that he, and they, are delusional on this subject. Ignore Trump’s email rants from Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster, much as most of us learned to tune out the tweets from the White House. Focus instead on the mess that Biden and the woke Left are making of the country. Bang away at the issues on which Democratic positions are intensely unpopular or will soon come to be — rising crime, obsession with race (critical race theory and the “equity” crusade against the American ideal of equality), the failure to reopen schools and the teachers’ union malevolence, persistent coronavirus mandates and confused messaging, already evident inflation and coming economic turmoil, paying people not to work, appeasement of China, empowerment of Iran, the return of violence in the Middle East (and, not coincidentally, the coddling of Islamists), climate mania (treating a problem that should be, and is being, managed long-term by technological progress as if it were an existential crisis over which we must destroy the economy), and so on.
The way to evolve beyond former leaders is to spotlight current events and the new leaders who inevitably emerge to deal with them. Recognize, moreover, that the lapsing of Trump’s relevance does not mean the future belongs to anti-Trump, or to the insular Washington establishment that made Trump’s rise possible. Trump is never again going to attract the majority of Republicans and conservatives, but no anti-Trumper is going to attract Trump’s hard-core base, a significant GOP plurality. Republicans need both blocs to win. Antagonizing one to court the other is the road map to defeat.
Out of power, Trump is not in a position to affect policy. While he retains the grip on his base (and the continued rapt attention of some incurably Trump-deranged critics), new issues and the people who are dealing with them will take center stage in the coming months. It is already happening. The future belongs to principled conservative candidates who are responsive to Trump supporters; to leaders who, without being either attached at his hip or openly hostile to him, acknowledge and build on the good that Trump’s administration did — which was significant, and includes outreach to constituencies that have been skeptical about Republicans.
Cheney was unwilling to play this long game. Her removal from leadership this week ineluctably followed.
Cheney’s insistence on taking the fight to Trump rather than picking her spots annealed her opposition’s determination to expel her from leadership and caused her support, so strong in round one, to collapse in round two. That’s because Republican politicians are intimidated by Trump supporters. I’m not talking about whether that’s good or bad; the stubborn fact is, it’s true. Trump Republicans are less numerous than the former president suggests, but they are active, zealous, and influential — particularly in conservative media and in state-party organizations (including in Cheney’s own state of Wyoming). They get results in today’s GOP, even if they rankle the rest of the country.
So Cheney is out. Does that mean I can go back to not caring who is No. 3 in leadership? Apparently not.
I should explain that I don’t care about GOP leadership slots because, in the context of the House, the term “leadership” is a misnomer. This is not so much a steering committee as a lagging indicator of where the Republican establishment surmises its voters are. It would be more apt to call it a “followership.” That’s why, when someone like Cheney undertakes to actually lead, in a direction that is salutary but sure to cause near-term tension, things can get ugly.
On Friday morning, the House elevated Representative Elise Stefanik of New York to the leadership position from which it ousted Cheney. (See our John McCormack’s invaluable profile, here.) Stefanik is very smart and media savvy. I like her . . . as a New York Republican. But, alas, she is not a conservative (as Representative Chip Roy of Texas, who is a conservative, makes plain by summarizing her voting record). Stefanik is a Trump favorite not based on any substantive matters but for the least worthy of reasons: the monomaniacally personal quality of his politics.
To the extent that Trump championed conservative policies, Stefanik opposed many of them — tax cuts, border security, energy production, pushing back against climate alarmism, resisting trans activism, etc. She attracted the president’s favorable attention, however, by exposing Russiagate abuses. In particular, as I recount in Ball of Collusion, because she does her homework, Stefanik realized that the FBI had not notified the congressional Gang of Eight about its investigation of the Trump campaign. At a hearing, she flustered the Bureau’s usually unflappable then-director, Jim Comey, by pressing him on the subject, eliciting the nonsensical explanation that the FBI judged the matter too sensitive for disclosure. (The Gang of Eight process exists precisely so that there can be congressional oversight of sensitive executive activities that require secrecy.)
Russiagate, with its FISA abuses and investigative excesses, consumed the attention of cable news and of Trump’s congressional allies. It also taught Stefanik, whose centrist upstate district is pro-Trump (after having gone for Obama twice), that the quickest route to national prominence and the fundraising boost it portends was to defend Trump against partisan critics — even though that, inevitably, entailed defending him against meritorious criticisms that happened to be posited by partisan opponents. Despite their substantive differences, which were no doubt of less moment to the transactional president than to the Harvard-educated moderate congresswoman, Stefanik went with Trump all the way on impeachment defense (both times) and the stolen-election narrative.
On that, she is hardly alone among House Republicans. But politically, she is a GOP outlier. As I said, I like Elise Stefanik. I like former Democratic senator Joe Lieberman, too. He’s a great patriot, but I’d never be in a political party he was leading. Especially once you get beyond national security, I disagree with him about too many fundamental things. And so it is with Stefanik.
So here is the problem. The conservative accommodation with President Trump was that, despite misgivings (not only about his character but about his historical Democratic leanings), you supported him because he campaigned on conservative objectives. The rationalization was that even if you could not be confident that he’d deliver on his promises, you knew the alternative — progressive Democrats — would be a catastrophe for the country.
The idea was that Trump’s political fortunes were tied to the advancement of conservative policies. With Stefanik, in stark contrast, the Republican establishment has now elevated Trump loyalty at the expense of conservative objectives. That is not a good deal.
Liz Cheney is a committed conservative. You can disagree with her on foreign policy, but her views on this subject have been caricatured by Trump followers. It is not true that she never saw a war she did not want to send your kids to fight. But she understands that the only “forever war” out there is the one jihadists are committed to waging against the United States. I have always opposed the sharia-democracy promotion that the Bush-Cheney administration favored; but that administration was quite correct, and so is former Vice President Cheney’s daughter, that jihadist organizations do not stop planning to mass-murder Americans just because Democrats and Trump Republicans grow weary of the effort to deny them safe haven.
In any event, conservatives disagree among themselves about this vexing national-security challenge — how interventionist do we need to be, how involved do we have to get in the governance of fundamentalist Islamic societies to ensure that they do not become platforms for terrorist attacks? The wide range of resulting opinions all fit comfortably within an identifiably conservative Republican Party. Liz Cheney, besides that, is a strong conservative across the board. Indeed, even if you think she ought to dial it back on the Capitol attack, she is animated by the fact that the unrest, which Trump encouraged, was directed at disrupting a congressional proceeding that the Constitution mandates. And the stated objective — viz., to prevent Congress from acknowledging the states’ certification of their electoral votes — was a blatant violation of constitutional principles of federalism that conservatives revere.
Regardless of whether you believe Cheney is temperamentally suited to leadership, a Cheney-led party would be an unmistakably conservative party. A populist Trump party would not be as reliably conservative, and a Stefanik-led party would be centrist — leaning left on many things of great importance to the Right. Such a party may keep the Trump supporters on board. But it is going to lose some conservatives, perhaps many, depending on how things go.
Biden has been in office for less than five months, but that’s been enough to show that he was elected on false premises: He is not a moderate, he is not a unifier, and he will not rein in his party’s rabid left flank. The country is increasingly on edge, and the worst is likely yet to come. Maybe that will be enough to lift Republicans to victories in 2022 and 2024. But I wonder. If the GOP subordinates conservative principles to the populism of its not-very-popular former president, 2022 and 2024 could end up looking a lot like the Georgia special election that loosed woke progressivism on the land.