Liz Cheney

He wasn’t running to do anything. He was running to stay out of jail

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 9, 2024

The sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria yesterday took oxygen away from the airing of President-elect Trump’s interview with Kristen Welker of NBC’S Meet the Press. The interview told us little that we didn’t already know, but it did reinforce what we can expect in the new administration.

As Tom Nichols pointed out after the interview, when Donald Trump ran for the presidency this year, he “wasn’t running to do anything. He was running to stay out of jail. The rest he doesn’t care about.”

Nichols was reacting to the exchange that began when Welker asked the president-elect: “Do you have an actual plan at this point for health care?” Trump answered: “Yes. We have concepts of a plan that would be better.” “Still just concepts? Do you have a fully developed plan?” Welker asked.

The answer, nine years after Trump first said he would repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something cheaper and better, is still no. He went on to add, “I am the one that saved Obamacare,” although he spent his first term trying to weaken it.

Trump also reiterated his plans for revenge against those he perceives to be his enemies. He told Welker that when he is president, the Department of Justice should pursue and jail the members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, more commonly known as the January 6th Committee. He singled out committee leaders Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY).

But it was in his insistence on one specific lie that Trump was most revealing. He told Welker that there were “13,099 murderers released into our country over the last three years. They’re walking down the streets. They’re walking next to you and your family, and they’re very dangerous.”

This statement sets Trump up to be a strongman who will save America from great danger, but it is a lie that has been repeatedly debunked. It originated in a September 2024 letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX) listing 13,099 people convicted of homicide as being “non-detained.”

As Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato blog explains, “non-detained” does not mean free to roam the streets; it simply means that those in prison for homicide are not currently detained by ICE. Once they have served their sentences, they go back onto ICE’s docket to be deported unless their countries of origin don’t have repatriation agreements with the U.S., a condition that affects a very small number of people. Releases of criminal migrants into the U.S. dropped during the Biden administration from the numbers released during Trump’s term. In addition, as Nowrasteh points out, the 13,099 figure covers at least 40 years.

Welker tried to correct Trump: “The thirteen thousand figure I think goes back around 40 years,” she said. “No, it doesn’t,” Trump insisted. “It’s within the three-year period. It’s during the Biden term.”

Trump was intent on making Welker and the television audience accept an egregious lie, despite the fact it has been thoroughly debunked. His insistence echoed his determination in January 2017 to make the American people accept his lie that his inauguration crowd was bigger than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, although we could see with our own eyes that he was lying. He was demanding we reject our own experience and instead let him define how we see the country.

Trump built on a history of narrative shaping that ran through the Republican Party. In 2004 a senior advisor to President George W. Bush famously told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community,” believing that people could find solutions to problems based on their real-world observations. But such a worldview was obsolete, the aide said. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

America’s right wing has been able to shape reality in large part because of the 1996 advent of the Fox News Channel (FNC), the brainchild of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Shows on the FNC used clear, simple messaging with colorful graphics that told a story of an America overwhelmingly made up of white, rural folks who hated taxes and an intrusive government, and would do fine if they could just get the socialist Democrats to leave them alone. To spread the new channel, Murdoch initially offered ten dollars per subscriber to each cable company that carried it.

That right-wing echo chamber has expanded until it is now so strong that nearly 70% of Republicans falsely believe Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that the FNC had to pay more than $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after it lied to viewers about that election.

Trump has built on that Republican narrative to create a fantasy world that is badly out of step with reality. It is not easy to see how he will reconcile his vision with real-world events.

He and his supporters might try simply to tell voters that they have done what they promised, and hope that story sells.

When Trump threatened to put a 25% tariff on goods from Mexico until Mexico stopped undocumented migrants from crossing the border, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum told Trump that “encounters at the Mexico–United States border have decreased by 75 percent between December 2023 and November 2024.” Trump then simply told reporters that Sheinbaum had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border,” and his supporters trumpeted on social media that Trump had closed the border with one phone call.

But convincing people of an alternative reality might be harder with issues closer to home.

Trump has vowed to place a tariff wall around the U.S., for example, at the same time he has promised to bring down the price of consumer goods. “Economists of all stripes say that ultimately, consumers pay the price of tariffs,” Welker told him on Sunday. “I don’t believe that,” Trump answered. He might not believe it, but producers do: car manufacturers as well as major shopping chains have warned that tariffs will force them to raise prices.

On other issues, Trump will have a vocal and established opposition. After his threat to go after the members of the January 6th committee, former representative Liz Cheney said in a statement: “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting.“

“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power. He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building, and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave. This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history.”

Cheney called for the release of the evidence and grand jury material special counsel Jack Smith assembled “so all Americans can see Donald Trump for who he genuinely is and fully understand his role in this terrible period in our nation’s history.”

Nobel laureates generally try to stay out of politics, but today more than 75 of them in medicine, chemistry, economics, and physics wrote a letter to senators urging them not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services. They object to Kennedy’s stand against the scientists and agencies he would oversee. They noted that he has no credentials or relevant experience and that he has opposed life-saving vaccines, promoted conspiracy theories, and attacked the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.

Putting him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, they write, “would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors.”

There is also the chance that the Fox media empire will not effectively push a right-wing narrative much longer. The Murdoch family is in a struggle over control of that empire after the death of the 93-year-old Rupert. He and his eldest son, Lachlan, want to lock the company into its current political slant, but at least two of the three of Murdoch’s other children who are set to inherit the company do not share their father and brother’s politics.

Rupert has been trying to change the terms of the family trust to cement Lachlan’s control of the empire, but today a commissioner in Nevada ruled against him. Edward Helmore of The Guardian noted that the decision likely means that even if the children do not take the media empire in a different direction, divided leadership will weaken the right-wing message.

Almost 30 years after the Fox News Channel began to shape American politics with a fictional narrative, a different Fox media empire would almost certainly disrupt the right-wing bubble. A lawyer for Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch said they will appeal the decision.

Finally, Pennsylvania law enforcement officials today arrested a “strong person of interest” in the shooting of United Healthcare chief executive officer Brian Thompson. Tonight a court document shows 26-year-old Luigi Mangione has been charged with murder.

Gathering Army

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Denver Riggleman [reports] the text messages between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows.
Riggleman served as the United States representative for Virginia’s 5th congressional district. Riggleman acted as technical advisor the the January 6th Committee.
Source: Denver Riggleman

• Read an executive summary of the Jan. 6 committee’s final report
• Read a Timeline of Trump’s Attempts to Overturn the 2020 Election

Americans are waking up to Trump’s threats – “a risk that we simply cannot take”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

December 5, 2023

A new filing today by Special Counsel Jack Smith in the case United States of America v. Donald J. Trump for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election shows Smith’s office establishing that Trump has a longstanding pattern of refusing to accept election results he dislikes. 

As early as 2012, the filing notes, Trump baselessly alleged that voting machines had switched votes intended for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. In the 2016 campaign he “claimed repeatedly, with no basis, that there was widespread voter fraud,” and publicly refused to commit to accepting the results of that election. This pattern continued in 2020, but in that election he took active steps to seize power.

The filing introduced information that Trump, an agent, and an unindicted co-conspirator tried to start a riot at the TCF Center in Detroit as vote counting showed Biden taking the lead. As Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo points out, this scheme sounds much like the Brooks Brothers Riot of 2000 that stopped vote counting in Miami-Dade County in Florida. Roger Stone was a participant in the Brooks Brothers Riot; in 2020 he was working to keep Trump in office. 

Smith’s team shows how this pattern continued to play out in the 2020 election, with Trump urging supporters like the Proud Boys to back him, falsely asserting that the election had been stolen, and attacking former supporters who denied that the election had been stolen. The pattern has continued until the present, with Trump calling those who were found guilty of offenses related to the attack on the U.S. Capitol “hostages” and claiming they were “treated horribly.” 

Smith recounts these facts to establish Trump’s motive and intent on January 6, but his identification of a longstanding pattern indicates it would be a grave mistake to think Trump has any intention of campaigning fairly or accepting any result in 2024 other than his return to the White House. 

New House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who has endorsed Trump for president and was a key organizer of the congressional effort to keep Trump in office, has promised to release all the surveillance footage from the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Trump supporters insist that the full tapes will reveal that the attack was not as bad as the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol showed. Johnson said that the tapes must be shared publicly for “transparency.” 

Today, Johnson supported Trump’s message about January 6 when he said that he was making sure the faces of rioters are blurred in the surveillance footage. “We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ [Department of Justice] and to have other, you know, concerns and problems,”  he said. Johnson’s spokesperson quickly walked back the comment, saying Johnson meant to say that faces were blurred to prevent “all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any non-governmental actors.” 

Also today, Kash Patel, who served on Trump’s national security team and is widely expected to return in a second Trump administration, expanded the authoritarian threats Trump people have been making to include the media. On former Trump ally Steve Bannon’s podcast, Patel promised that the Trump team would fill government positions from top to bottom with loyalists and would use the Department of Justice to go after those perceived to be Trump’s enemies. 

“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel said. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

Yesterday, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who is promoting her new book, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, called out Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for his continuing hold on military appointments that kept more than 450 routine promotions from taking effect over the past ten months. Tuberville claimed his refusal to permit the nominees’ confirmations was an attempt to change Pentagon policy of permitting leave for service members in states that ban abortion to obtain abortion care elsewhere. But on NPR yesterday, Cheney wondered: “Why is Tommy Tuberville doing that? Is he holding those positions open so that Donald Trump can fill them?”

Today, under great pressure from members of his own party who worried the Democrats would change the rules to weaken the power of the Senate minority, Tuberville released his hold on most of the nominees. The Senate promptly confirmed 425 of them. 

Still, Tuberville retained holds on 11 officers of the most senior rank. According to congressional reporter for Punchbowl News Andrew Desiderio, the positions left vacant are commander of Pacific Air Forces, commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, Air Component Command for the United States Indo-Pacific Command, commander for Air Combat Command, the head of the Navy’s Nuclear Propulsion Program, the head of Northern Command (which defends the United States and coordinates defenses with Canada, Mexico, and the Bahamas), the head of the U.S. Cyber Command, vice chief of staff of the Army, vice chief of staff of the Air Force, vice chief of Space Operations, and vice chief of Naval Operations. 

Last night, Cheney explained to political commentator and television host Rachel Maddow exactly what a second Trump presidency would look like, Cheney said: “He would take those people who are the most radical, the most dangerous, who had the proposals that were the most dangerous, and he will put them in positions of supreme power. That’s a risk that we simply cannot take.”

Mark Joyella of Forbes took note of Maddow’s introduction last night, in which the host stressed the importance of protecting democracy. She began by emphasizing how much she and Cheney disagreed about everything in politics, so much so that it was as if they were on different planets at war with each other. 

Maddow made that point, she said, because “in civic terms, in sort of American citizenship terms, I think it’s really important how much we disagree. It’s important how far apart we are in every policy issue imaginable. It is important that Liz Cheney is infinity and I am negative infinity on the ideological number line. It’s important because that tells you how serious and big something has to be to put us, to put me and Liz Cheney, together on the same side of something in American life.”

The Rachel Maddow Show was the most watched news show on cable television last night, with 3.15 million viewers. The Fox News Channel’s show Hannity, hosted by personality Sean Hannity, had just under 2 million viewers. 

It seems clear Americans are waking up to Trump’s threats to stack the government with loyalists, weaponize the Justice Department and military, deport 10 million people, and prosecute those he perceives to be his enemies in politics and the media. Interviewing Trump tonight, Hannity tried to downplay Trump’s statements about his authoritarian plans for a second term by getting him to commit to staying within the normal bounds of a president should he be elected in 2024. The first time he was asked, Trump sidestepped the question. So Hannity asked again. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” he asked. 

“Except for day one,” Trump responded.

Republican Minority Leader McCarthy: “The country is too crazy … this is serious sh*t”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

April 27, 2022

Last night, New York Times reporters Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin released more of the audio recording of Republican leadership that they obtained in the process of writing their forthcoming book. This recording features a conversation among the House leadership on January 10, 2021. In it, the two top Republicans in the House of Representatives—House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and House minority whip Steve Scalise (R-LA)—agreed that the Trump loyalists calling out other Republicans as “anti-Trump” were endangering lives, including that of the third-top House Republican at the time, Liz Cheney (R-WY), who was also on the call. 

McCarthy noted that Representative Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH) had just sent him a recent tweet from Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) about Cheney and that McCarthy was going to talk to Gaetz to get him to stop. “We saw what people would do in the Capitol,” he said. “These people came prepared with rope, with everything else.” Scalise agreed, saying “it’s potentially illegal what he’s doing.”

McCarthy singled out Representatives Gaetz and Mo Brooks (R-AL) as key culprits, but he and the others on the call also discussed Representatives Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), and Barry Moore (R-AL). McCarthy said he was going to be talking to those people because “this is serious sh*t,” and they needed “to cut this out.” “The country is too crazy,” he said. “I do not want to look back and think we caused something or we missed something and someone got hurt. I don’t want to play politics with any of that.”

And yet, of course, they did not cut it out. Instead, McCarthy did play politics with it. He caved, Cheney lost her position in House leadership, and Gonzalez, once seen as a rising star in the party, announced in September 2021 he would not run for reelection. Gonzalez’s vote to impeach Trump for inciting an insurrection and his support for an investigation into the events of January 6 led Trump supporters to threaten him and his family. In his announcement that he was leaving Congress, Gonzalez called Trump “a cancer for the country.” 

Last night, after news broke of the recording, Gaetz issued a statement saying that McCarthy and Scalise “held views about President Trump and me that they shared on sniveling calls with Liz Cheney, not us. This is the behavior of weak men, not leaders…. While I was protecting President Trump, they were protecting Liz Cheney from criticism…. On the bright side, you no longer have to be a lobbyist with a $5,000 check to know what McCarthy and Scalise really think. You just have to listen to their own words as they disparage Trump and the Republicans in Congress who fight for him.” 

Gaetz is clearly throwing himself entirely behind Trump. Even his language here is like that of the former president. While Gaetz’s political loyalty is part of a larger story, it is also worth remembering that Gaetz is still under investigation for sex trafficking, and two of his associates have pleaded guilty in that case. One admitted to sex trafficking, and the other admitted to drug and fraud charges. Both are cooperating with authorities. Seeing Trump back in power could smooth Gaetz’s potential legal troubles.

Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson also went after McCarthy, calling him “a puppet of the Democrats…a man who, in private, turns out sounds like an MSNBC contributor. The chyron under his monologue read: “KEVIN MCCARTHY HATES PEOPLE LIKE YOU AND THIS SHOW.” News broke today that Carlson, who has openly supported Hungary’s rising authoritarian Viktor Orbán, will speak this summer at the Iowa Family Leadership Summit, a gathering traditionally used to launch presidential campaigns. 

Meanwhile, excerpts from that same new book say that early in the morning of January 7, after the January 6 insurrection, then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell told Martin: “I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow [Trump] finally, totally discredited himself.” McConnell said of Trump, “He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger,” adding, “Couldn’t have happened at a better time.” McConnell vowed to crush the extremist “sons of b*tches… in the primary in ’22.”

And yet now, a year later, the Trump loyalists are running strong, having abandoned the democratic ideology of the U.S. and replaced it with white Christian nationalism. They are embracing the same idea that Russian president Vladimir Putin advances: that the democratic principle of equality is immoral because it does not privilege white, straight, Christian men. They are trying to stop public discussion of race or gender, end the constitutional right to abortion, and center schools around the Christian religion. 

While pro-business Republicans could live with these ideas in the past if it meant getting the economic legislation they wanted, Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott have illustrated that the Trump wing of the party has abandoned Republicans’ traditional support for business. DeSantis infuriated Republicans as well as Democrats when he demanded a new—and evidently illegal—law to break up the independent governing zone under which the Walt Disney Company operates in Florida unless Disney stops supporting LGBTQ rights. And Abbott’s recent shutdown of trade to and from Mexico in order to “search” for drugs and undocumented immigrants cost the U.S. an estimated $9 billion in gross domestic product while turning up no drugs or immigrants. 

Meanwhile, 18 House Republicans, led by Jim Jordan (R-OH), warned Twitter that it could be investigated if it didn’t accept an offer from billionaire Elon Musk for its purchase. This is an uncanny echo of the techniques of the Ukrainian leaders who worked for oligarchs: those leaders used “investigations” to punish opponents, just as Trump hoped to do to Hunter Biden in 2019.   

The business Republicans appear finally to be fighting back, at least a little, likely recognizing that the extremes of the Trump loyalists will hurt them with the “suburban” voters they badly need. (By “suburban voters” they usually mean white middle-class voters, although the last census showed that in 2020, about 54% of Black residents within the 100 biggest American metro areas lived not in the cities themselves but in suburban areas.)

This week, they went after Representative Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), in what sure looks like a strategic move to distance the party from the Trump loyalists without actually losing the religious base. Cawthorn’s remarks about being invited to orgies with drugs made headlines a few weeks ago, and he has been embarrassed since by photos of him in lingerie, drinking with women, at a party. Perhaps to distract from that story, Cawthorn tried to take a loaded gun on a plane and was caught—this was the second time he was caught doing this—and then complained that the “political establishment” was out to get him. 

Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) called for a “thorough and bipartisan” investigation of Cawthorn’s potential involvement in an insider trading scheme involving the “Let’s Go Brandon” cryptocurrency, which appears to have been a pump-and-dump scheme. (But former president Trump and his son Don, Jr., also promoted the coin, and no one has complained about their participation.) Cawthorn called Tillis a “RINO,” a Republican in Name Only. 

Today, 17 Republicans were the only lawmakers to vote against a House resolution expressing support for Moldova’s democracy. As CNN reporters Melanie Zanona, Manu Raju, and Gabby Orr noted, when Trump loyalists do such a thing, they might be reminding McCarthy of their power to force more concessions on him if he becomes speaker with a small majority, enabling them to move the country in their direction no matter how unpopular they are.

The chaos in the Republican Party inspired Democratic political consultant Tim Hogan to tweet: “At this point I’m willing to believe Kevin McCarthy accidentally turned on a voice memo for the month of January and when he tried to delete it he accidentally forwarded it to the New York Times.”