The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

There are serious people in the United States this morning who will tell you the future of democracy in America rests with Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney.

This is because, confounding pundits across the American political spectrum, Republican voters continue to doggedly support ex-President Donald Trump.

Almost all polls continue to show Trump’s GOP approval ratings at or well above 70 percent, months after he left the White House, was muzzled by Twitter and Facebook, and has hardly left his seaside Palm Beach compound except to play golf.

Only McConnell, Romney and Cheney among current Republican leaders seem to stand against Trump. For liberals and mainstream observers across the political spectrum, these three are becoming the main resistance to the scary politics promoted by Trump and his sycophants.

For some, these three hold the key to internal GOP dissent that could undermine any Trump comeback. How to explain this seemingly counter-intuitive situation?

First of all, it’s important to remember that Kentucky’s McConnell was easily re-elected to a new six-year Senate terms last November, so he is free from the threat of a primary election challenge in the next two elections from a Trump-favoured opponent. And despite the jeers endured by Romney at a Utah state GOP gathering earlier this week, he is probably politically unassailable in Utah.

As embattled California governor Gavin Newsom is discovering, there is always the threat of a recall election, but this seems almost unimaginably improbable in the cases of Romney and McConnell in the states they represent.

Romney, the unsuccessful 2012 Republican challenger to Barack Obama, and McConnell, the wily GOP Senate minority leader, have both spoken out against Trump as forcefully as they feel they can do.

Romney, whose most prominent place in history may turn out to be his lone Republican vote in favour of impeaching Trump, is clearly personally affronted by Trump’s brash, rude, swaggering manner.

In the wake of the January 6 assault on the US capitol by Trump supporters, McConnell, whose personal style also clashes dramatically with Trump’s, suggested that while the former President did not deserve impeachment, he was and should be accountable in the criminal justice system for his actions in inciting the January riot.

Both senators clearly detest Trump. But like most Republicans, they supported the policies he pursued. Trump, who had never served in government, was openly scornful of policy debates and discussions. He readily adopted positions popular with the GOP base with no apparent reference to principle. Few observers suspected that he really cared about religious evangelism, abortion, resisting climate change, gun rights, limiting government spending or other key GOP priorities.

But many senators, representatives, governors and mayors do care about those issues.

They put up with Trump while he was President and now afterwards because the polls tell them he retains his popularity.

Trump was and is a means to an end. Whenever GOP politicians suspect that his usefulness is ebbing, he’ll appear to lose his influence rapidly. But if Romney and McConnell represent broader Republican establishment sentiment, Trump’s political demise will have been a long time coming.

Liz Cheney is both different and the same. She likely scorns Trump, not least for his harsh criticisms of her father. And she also voted very reliably for his policies. Unlike McConnell and Romney, however, this 54-year-old foresees a long-bright political future.

Has she chosen well to fulfil her ambitions?

A hot current topic in Washington is trying to understand Cheney’s political strategy. It is obvious the path to popularity with current Republican voters is to pay obeisance to Trump. Cheney has taken the exact opposite tack.

Just last week, she renewed her attacks on Trump. She addressed a gathering sponsored by one of the most reliably Republican-leaning of Washington’s numerous think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute.

“We can’t embrace the notion the election is stolen,” Cheney told her AEI audience.

“It’s a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy. We can’t whitewash what happened on January 6 or perpetuate Trump’s big lie. It is a threat to democracy. What he did on January 6 is a line that cannot be crossed.”

CNN first reported on Cheney’s remarks at the private AEI meeting, during which she also called the Constitution “our shield” and said a “peaceful transfer of power must be defended”.

Cheney declared on Twitter that “the 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”

She has also said publicly that Trump “does not have a role as a leader of our party going forward” and that it is “disqualifying” for any public official who opposed certifying the election results to run for the White House in the future.

The guess here is that Cheney has decided to push all her chips to the centre of the poker table and go all in on being the responsible, reliably conservative, alternative to Trump in the Republican Party. There are probably three main reasons for this.

First, she probably is quite sincere in her beliefs about Trump’s existential threat to American democracy.

Second, like many, mostly male politicians of both parties, she is doubtless driven by a desire to emulate and even exceed the achievements of her famous father, the former Vice-President, White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defence.

Opposing 2000 presidential candidates and political sons George W Bush and Al Gore offer some other recent examples of this phenomenon.

Bush was the son of a President; Gore’s father was a legendary senator from Tennessee. The resolute career and relentless drive of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is yet another case in point. Her father was a longtime Democratic powerhouse in Maryland and served as mayor of Baltimore.

Politics in Washington, for many families, is often a family business.

Third, Cheney doubtless aspires to the presidency for reasons all her own, including potentially being the first female US President. The daughter of one of the most successful American political figures of the second half of the 20th Century, she has crafted an unusual but hardly revolutionary course to the White House for herself.

Likely guided by her parents, both successful Washington insiders, Cheney got a University of Chicago law degree and worked for the American foreign assistance agency AID in both Poland and Hungary after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Later, she served in two different senior policy jobs in the State Department’s Middle East bureau.

She will be able to argue – and perhaps she will in three years – that she has just as meaningful foreign policy experience as her possible presidential nomination adversary and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Cheney has some support already. “Liz Cheney is a leader with deep convictions and the courage to act on them,” said McConnell. “She is an important leader in our party and in our nation. I am grateful for her service and look forward to continuing to work with her on the crucial issues facing our nation.”

Senator and notable Trump ally Lindsay Graham has said Cheney “is one of the strongest and most reliable conservative voices in the Republican Party. She is a fiscal and social conservative, and no one works harder to ensure that our military is well prepared.”

Not surprisingly, however, Trump has often struck back at Cheney since January. Most recently, he said “she is so low that her only chance of re-election (to Congress) would be if vast numbers of people run against her which, hopefully, won’t happen.

“The people in Wyoming never liked her much, and I say she’ll never run in a Wyoming election again!”

Cheney has quickly made a mark in the House of Representatives since she was first elected in 2016. A reliable partisan, she entered the week having been re-elected in January as the Number Three person in the GOP House leadership.

Most expect her to be pushed out from her leadership post as punishment for her defiance of Trump. But that will only burnish her credentials with her father’s allies, the Republican establishment and, not least, liberal commentators who are starting to celebrate her risky, apparently principled, opposition to Trump.

We can expect to hear much more from and about Liz Cheney in the months to come.