Liz Cheney, in a typically contentious interview with Fox Information’ Bret Baier, at one level addressed the community’s viewers with a message: Don’t vote for Donald Trump.
“We will have conservative insurance policies with out having to torch the Structure,” Cheney mentioned. “And so what I might urge folks watching as we speak who’re going to be voting in these caucuses and in these primaries, vote for someone else. Don’t vote for someone who already tried to grab energy.”
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Now an outcast from the Republican social gathering for her criticism of Trump and her warnings about giving him a second time period, Cheney has made quite a few appearances throughout different media shops as she promotes her ebook, Oath and Honor. Her first massive sitdown was with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and there was some query as as to whether she would seem on Fox Information in any respect. On CNBC, Cheney criticized Fox Information host Sean Hannity for “enabling” Trump.
On Particular Report on Monday, Baier advised her, “We have now a coverage right here to listen to from all sides, and we needed to ask you to speak about your ebook.”
The interview, which ran simply wanting 10 minutes, didn’t begin with Cheney’s ebook however with Baier’s query about how she views President Joe Biden’s response to the Israel-Hamas warfare. “I’m apprehensive that they’re attending to abandon Israel, and I believe we’re in a state of affairs the place Hamas should be destroyed,” Cheney mentioned, providing some criticism of the administration.
However that fed into a degree she made a number of instances all through the interview: Her opposition to Trump just isn’t about coverage, however of his efforts to stay in energy after the 2020 election, together with his conduct on January 6, 2021, together with what he has vowed to do in a second time period.
“He tells us day by day,” she mentioned. “For those who have a look at the steps he must take by way of merely refusing to implement courtroom orders, or adjust to courtroom orders with which he disagrees, placing folks in key positions …. unethical legal professionals who would assist him, frankly, blow by way of most of the guardrails in our Structure. I believe it’s a very actual concern.”
Then Baier learn from a Wall Avenue Journal op ed from final week through which the author, Allysia Finley, known as the notion of “Trump as dictator” a “basic case of projection.” Finley went on to assert that it’s Biden who has abused govt energy, ignored the legislation and “run roughshod over particular person liberties,” whereas Trump “must deal with a hostile media and a federal paperwork that may be throwing pots, pans and candlesticks at him at each step.”
“Nicely, I believe they’re fallacious,” Cheney advised Baier. “We might not should guess about what the following President Trump would do as a result of he did it earlier than. He wouldn’t have round him the those that had been round him, frankly, the those that the nation will hear from as his trial strikes ahead, who had been all his appointees…those that advised him on January sixth, as you and I had been speaking that day, truly, that he wanted to inform the mob to go dwelling.”
Baier, although, caught with the op ed, contending that Cheney has not been vocal about Biden’s govt orders to cancel scholar loans, ban evictions and mandate Covid vaccines. For a time, he and Cheney talked over each other.
Cheney mentioned that she didn’t assume it was true that she had not weighed in on among the matters, earlier than making the purpose that Trump’s case was completely different. She even cited Baier’s personal ebook on George Washington.
“The final chapter of your ebook is named “The Reward of a Peaceable Transition of Energy.” That’s what we’re speaking about,” she mentioned.
“This isn’t about me,” Baier mentioned.
“That’s proper. However that’s a vital idea….Each single president, Republican and Democrat, since George Washington, has ensured the peaceable transition of energy. Donald Trump tried to grab energy.”
“This isn’t about coverage. I voted with Donald Trump 93% of the time. That is concerning the nation. It’s concerning the republic. It’s concerning the Structure.”
Cheney, who was as soon as a Fox Information contributor, additionally gave the impression to be making an attraction to the Fox Information workforce, invoking one among its late conservative commentators. “I come right here to Fox, and I sit within the Charles Krauthammer inexperienced room, and I understand how a lot, how revered Charles was, by you, by me,” she mentioned. “And Charles taught us an entire bunch of issues. However one among them is that some issues should matter, and rising above politics, rising about partisanship, recognizing our obligation to the Structure, is essentially the most conservative of all conservative ideas.”
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