Liz Cheney, the Republican From the State of Reality
LARAMIE, Wyo.—Liz Cheney will probably lose her job on Tuesday, in large part due to her crusade against Donald Trump. Trump will surely taunt her as a big RINO loser, but Cheney has no plans to end her fight against him. She is already looking past her anticipated defeat here and into a future that could include—I suspect—a primary challenge to the former president in 2024.
“It’s clear that our party is really sick right now,” Cheney told me when I spoke with her last week. “The Trump forces that are trying to pull us into the abyss are really strong and really fighting.” Punching back has not been a winning formula for Cheney’s reelection bid in America’s reddest state. Her Trump-certified challenger, the election-denying Harriet Hageman, is well ahead in the polls.
At the very least, though, Cheney won herself another big celebrity endorsement the other day: Kevin Costner! She of the cowboy-hatted actor wearing an T-shirt on what appears to be the set of the hit Paramount series . “Real men put country over party,” she captioned her photo of Costner, who is in many ways a typical Cheney supporter circa 2022: a liberal-leaning recent convert who does not live in
