Liz Cheney remains a conservative in her father’s tradition despite defying Trump

Weeks before one of America’s best known businessmen, Donald Trump, was sworn in as president on an overcast day in Washington DC, a different politician with a similarly familiar name took her oath of office elsewhere in the Capitol.

Liz Cheney was then both a freshman congresswoman from Wyoming and a stalwart of the neoconservative philosophy espoused by her father Dick Cheney, the former-vice president under George W Bush who died on Monday. Trump had repudiated Bush’s invasion of Iraq in his campaign for president, but the congresswoman nonetheless went on to become an ally in bending Republican lawmakers to his will.

It was only after the January 6 insurrection that Cheney broke with Trump, making what turned out to be a lonely stand against his dominance of Republicans that wound up ending her political career. The then-former president orchestrated her ouster, first from Republican leadership, then from the House of Representatives entirely. Liberals would lionize Cheney for her defiance as an emblem of the “good Republicans” they long hoped would one day expel Trump from the party, even though she never broke with her conservative Republican politics.

The Cheneys’s view of American power may now seem farther from relevance than at any time since Bush left office, but signs of it linger in Trump’s new administration. Though he promised to be a peacemaker while campaigning for re-election last year, the president has ordered the first-ever US bombing raid on Iran, blown up boats he claims are carrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela and ordered a formidable naval flotilla to the South American nation’s coastline, while mulling airstrikes on its territory.

“Many of the people who are around him actually were in favor of the Iraq War, and I think with that influence, he’s being influenced towards regime change war in Venezuela,” Republican senator, Rand Paul, told reporters last week.

Liz Cheney is certainly excluded from that group. Rising to chair the House Republican conference just after winning her second term in office, Cheney’s time in leadership was brief. After a mob of pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol, she became the highest-ranking Republican to break with the president.

“The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president,” Cheney said, as she voted to impeach Trump over the violence.

She would go on to serve as vice chair, and one of two Republicans, on the House committee that investigated the attack. But her political fate was sealed. House Republicans voted to strip her from her leadership post in May 2021, and she lost her primary the following year, in both cases to lawmakers that have hewed closely to the president’s positions.

Through it all, Cheney remained a conservative in the tradition of her father. As recently as 2021, she joined him in defending waterboarding, the brutal interrogation technique Bush’s CIA used against terrorism suspects, and restated her opposition to abortion and the Affordable Care Act. When Joe Biden’s priorities came up before the House, she mostly voted against them.

None of that was enough to stave off Trump’s wrath. As Republicans moved to depose her from leadership, she took to the House floor to call the former president “a threat America has never seen before”.

“He risks inciting further violence. Millions of Americans have been misled by the former president. They have heard only his words, but not the truth as he continues to undermine our democratic process, sowing seeds of doubt about whether democracy really works at all,” she said.

Nor did her father hold his tongue.

“He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big. I know it. He knows it, and deep down, I think most Republicans know,” the former vice-president said of Trump in a television ad for his daughter’s failed bid for a fourth term in 2022.

Both Cheneys would go on to endorse and, in Liz’s case, campaign with, Kamala Harris last year. Trump in turn blasted Dick Cheney as “an irrelevant RINO” or Republican in name only, and “the King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars”. Biden later awarded Liz Cheney the Presidential Citizens Medal and, in his final hours as president, issued her a preemptive pardon after Trump threatened her prosecution.

When the president this year ordered seven B-2 bombers to fly more than 14,000 miles from Missouri to attack Iran’s nuclear sites, John Bolton, a neoconservative veteran of both the Bush and Trump administrations who has since become a bitter enemy of the president, praised him for taking a course of action he has advocated for decades.

“I can say unequivocally, I think president Trump made the right decision for America in attacking the Iranian nuclear program,” he told Bloomberg Surveillance. “We could have done it in the first term, too”.

Cheney, by contrast, remained silent.