How Liz Cheney became a ‘Republican outcast’

Liz Cheney gives a speech after conceding defeat in the primary election

(Image credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Republican Liz Cheney has lost her seat in Congress after voters in Wyoming elected a Trump-backed candidate in the primary elections.

The 56-year-old congresswoman has “paid the price” for her “staunch opposition” of Trump, wrote David Smith in The Guardian, losing the vote to a relative political newcomer.

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Cheney has been an outspoken critic of the former president since the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol building, and was vice-chair of the House Select Committee investigating the event. She was one of two Republicans to join the committee and one of just ten to vote to impeach Trump.

Conceding defeat, Cheney said she could have “easily” won the election if she had been willing to side with the former president over claims the 2020 election was rigged. Instead, she declared that “no office in this land is more important than the principles that we are all sworn to protect” and said she would “do whatever it takes” to stop Trump from becoming president for a second term in 2024.

‘A rising Republican star’

Cheney was once seen as a “rising Republican star” but after becoming “her party’s most dogged Trump detractor” she has found herself as an outlier, wrote Shane Goldmacher in The New York Times (NYT).

Her landslide defeat shows the “remarkable degree” to which Donald Trump has control over the Republican Party, and is the most “revealing” indication so far of the “party’s realignment”.

The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, she has been part of “political royalty”, said Smith in The Guardian, and her defeat to a Trump-backed candidate is a “blow to the last vestiges of the Republican Party establishment”.

Cheney has been one of the “most conservative lawmakers in the US” and is “far from being moderate”, said Edward Luce in the Financial Times, voting with Trump 93% of the time during his stint in the White House. Her subsequent “fixation” with bringing about Trump’s downfall has seen her become “America’s most celebrated electoral suicide”, but her ousting “begs the question: what defines today’s Republican Party?”.

‘The new orthodoxy’

In the case of the current Republican Party “the extreme sets the narrative”, wrote Luce. The GOP is more “strongly motivated by what it hates than by admiration of Trump”.

Like Cheney, many anti-Trump Republicans have seen themselves alienated from the party in a “cleansing of Trump critics”, wrote Goldmacher in the NYT. Trump allies are working to “censure or oust those who break with the new orthodoxy”.

Despite her defeat, Cheney has “issued a rallying cry for the defence of democracy”, said The Guardian, and we should “not accept that her political career is over”. Many of those praising her are “advocating a presidential run in 2024” when it is strongly rumoured that Trump will stand.

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Richard Windsor is a freelance writer for The Week Digital. He began his journalism career writing about politics and sport while studying at the University of Southampton. He then worked across various football publications before specialising in cycling for almost nine years, covering major races including the Tour de France and interviewing some of the sport’s top riders. He led Cycling Weekly’s digital platforms as editor for seven of those years, helping to transform the publication into the UK’s largest cycling website. He now works as a freelance writer, editor and consultant.