She has used her platform to make a powerful showing that Trump is unfit and that Republicans would be on a suicide mission if they nominated him again.
She has used her platform to make a powerful showing that Trump is unfit and that Republicans would be on a suicide mission if they nominated him again.
I ’m about ready to pronounce Liz Cheney the victor in the January 6 committee hearings.
No, I’m not saying that she has resurrected her House reelection campaign, or that “virulently anti-Trump” is a viable brand in the GOP. I am also not suggesting the January 6 committee is about to be converted formally into what it has de facto been all along: the third impeachment of Donald Trump, necessitated by the Democrats’ derelictions in the second impeachment — in which, rather than conducting the thorough investigation now underway and then competently pleading articles of impeachment that matched the sundry executive abuses, they rushed to politicize the impeachment in an effort to tar all Trump supporters as white supremacists, and all Republicans and conservatives who didn’t swallow whole their Insurrection!™ storyline as aiders and abettors of domestic terrorism.
Congresswoman Cheney has been very effective in relating the committee’s blistering case against the former president. In the short run, however, recent polls suggest an inverse correlation between the impression she has made on the country at large (favorable) and the impression she has made at home in red Wyoming, where pro-Trumpers dominate GOP politics (not so favorable).
There are two poles in GOP politics right now: (a) the too-gradually eroding pro-Trump faction that punches above its weight in intraparty matters and (b) the preponderant but diffident “wouldn’t it be nice if he just went away and let us fight today’s battles instead of relitigating 2020” crowd. These camps leave no traction for a “virulently anti-Trump” alternative — it motivates the former and, by keeping Trump front and center, irritates the latter.
That being the case, there is no stomach for impeaching Trump yet again. It’s not that he doesn’t deserve it. It’s that everything has its moment, and that moment is past. Today’s prudent Republican position is that Trump is a real problem but one that is fading (though too slowly); in the meantime, GOP objectives must be: Keep the spotlight on the faltering Biden administration and its ruinous woke-progressivism, wallop Democrats in the midterms, and then nominate someone who can win a national presidential election. The assumption is that the cumulative effect of pursuing these aims will marginalize Trump — and hopefully convince him not to run again because he doesn’t want to be seen as a loser, but at a minimum make him beatable if he enters the nomination sweepstakes.
If she’s losing on these fronts, then, how has Cheney won the January 6 committee?
Well, I have contended that the most intriguing aspect of the single-mindedly anti-Trump committee is the divergent motivations for that unanimous stance. Both committee Democrats and Cheney want to keep Trump relevant, but for different reasons.
Democrats hope the focus on Trump will divert the scrutiny of Biden. At the moment, $6/gallon gas and skyrocketing grocery prices make that unlikely. It’s not unreasonable, though, for Democrats to figure that Trump is a proven media-ratings grabber who is easy to goad into unhinged responses about the “Rigged and Stolen” 2020 election, which a decisive majority of the public knows was not rigged and stolen. Biden may get some breathing room if the committee spends June provoking Trump every few days with another hearing.
More to the point, Democrats want to run against Trump because he can’t win a national election. This is the most important iteration of an electoral strategy Karl Rove diagnosed in the Wall Street Journal this week: Democrats are intruding in Republican primaries because they’ve sussed out that the MAGA backing of fringy candidates is enough to beat more widely appealing Republicans. They’ve thus developed funding and messaging strategies that elevate the fringy candidates they’d rather run against in November’s general elections, in which the MAGA factor is greatly diminished.
On this line of thinking, Trump solves the Democrats’ most pressing problems: Biden is not up to the job, and Vice President Kamala Harris is even more unpopular than Biden. The conventional wisdom is that Democrats are stuck with one of these two, so their best shot at retaining the White House is Trump as the GOP nominee. (For what it’s worth, I don’t buy the conventional wisdom; I believe Democrats know they should have nominated Senator Amy Klobuchar in 2020, and they’ll figure out a way to do it for 2024. But that’s for another day.)
Cheney wants to keep Trump at center stage, too, but on a rationale that is night-and-day different.
Big picture, there has been no change, no revelation that has altered our understanding of what happened in this country in the two months from Election Night 2020 through January 6, 2021 — from the time the president of the United States made his first bracing allegation that the election had been stolen from him, through the “stop the steal” machinations, leading finally to the Capitol riot. Nevertheless, while we all know the basic story, granular details that boggle the mind and boil the blood have not gotten due attention — particularly from Americans who follow politics only sporadically.
Cheney appears to me to have been banking on this belief: If she could command the attention of the country for a few days in June, and present what happened as it has never been aired before, in a series of tight, well-scripted sessions, she could hammer home Donald Trump’s unfitness for office. And she could do it out of the mouths of prominent Republicans who served in Trump’s administration and championed Trump policies. That is, instead of partisan Democrat sources, Cheney would use testimony from sources who might be appealing to both pro-Trumpers and Republicans who have no use for Trump personally.
It is already manifest to those willing to open their eyes that Trump cannot win a national election. I believe Cheney is trying to ensure that he never has a chance to try. The point is to make Trump’s lack of viability so clear and undeniable that it ends his career as a candidate — to show the public, Republicans in particular, the parade of Trump horribles that Democrats could readily turn into ad after campaign ad. And even if he seeks the nomination anyway, as he seems poised to do, no party in its right mind would make him its standard-bearer.
There is also the obvious nexus between (a) the notion that Trump will be returning to the Oval Office in 2025 and (b) the grip he maintains on his supporters, which is what gives him such influence over the GOP. I suspect Cheney believes that if she can conclusively dispel the former, the latter will dissipate.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that Cheney’s motivations are partisan. Clearly, she is not beholden to a party that has forsaken her (and thus gone in a less conservative direction). Her conviction is that Trump’s re-accession to executive power would itself be an unprecedented constitutional crisis. I don’t want to take that on because there’s no point addressing something that’s not going to happen. It is enough to home in on the nomination question, since that’s the one we’ll have to deal with if Trump decides to run.
Also understand: My focus here is on the impact of the committee hearings as a national-television spectacle, not on their propriety. There remain more things wrong than right about the January 6 committee. No need to belabor the record with my objections to its one-sided composition and lack of cross-examination. The panel’s stampede over congressional norms and interbranch comity is alarming — Democrats and the Biden administration will soon come to rue the day they did this.
Furthermore, I’m puzzled by Cheney’s claim that Trump had a carefully thought out, rigorously implemented seven-part plan to reverse the election result. Trump is neither careful, thoughtful, nor disciplined. I don’t get why she would float this theory when it is unnecessary for purposes of demonstrating Trump’s unfitness or potential criminality. The prosecutor’s rule of thumb is to under-promise and over-deliver; the other way round can get guilty people acquitted.
Also, on that subject of prosecution, I believe the committee would set a ruinous precedent — one that would needlessly fan the flames of our national divisions and permanently engulf the Department of Justice in electoral politics — if it were to pressure the Biden DOJ into indicting Trump based on the notion that if a legal theory is frivolous, actions taken in reliance amount to fraud on the government or the corrupt obstruction of congressional proceedings.
To conclude (as I have) that Trump should have been impeached for trying to deceive the country (and actually deceiving his most rabid supporters) into believing the election was stolen is very different from saying he should be prosecuted. Impeachment is a political remedy that is triggered by a public official’s mendacity — even if it is insufficient to establish criminal fraud — because political office is a public trust, a privilege, not a right. Indictment, to the contrary, is reserved for private wrongs — penal crimes — as to which criminal intent must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt because the penalty is to deprive the accused of liberty, a right, not a privilege.
The Justice Department’s standard for establishing criminal intent should be even higher in a case touching on electoral politics. If the last eight years have taught us anything, it is that we don’t want the FBI and DOJ entangled in elections unless there is crystal-clear evidence of a serious crime. The failure to commit to this bright line is corrupting both our elections and our law-enforcement agencies.
All that said, though, Liz Cheney has used her platform to make a powerful showing that Trump is unfit and that Republicans would be on a suicide mission if they nominated him again. Democrats wanted to make Trump relevant in the hope that he gets the Republican nomination in 2024. Cheney wanted to make Trump relevant to illustrate that he can’t be nominated because it would mean certain defeat. She’s winning.