The Bulwark Podcast - Liz Cheney: A Clear and Present Danger

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

Donald Trump will never be the lesser of two evils. We must unite, look beyond partisanship, and vote in ways that will maintain the republic. Liz Cheney joins Charlie Sykes on today's podcast. show notes: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/liz-cheney/oath-and-honor/9780316572064/?lens=little-brown 

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And I don't need to tell you that Liz Cheney is one of the most remarkable figures in American politics. I described her the other day as Republican royalty or perhaps part of the nobility of the Republican Party in the sense that she grew up in and around Republican politics. She is a deeply conservative Republican who, as a child, hung out with presidents of the United States, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, and of course, her own father, who was two-term vice president of the United States. But the reason why the spotlight is on Liz Cheney, is that she has become probably the nation's most powerful and eloquent prosecutor of the case that Donald Trump should never be allowed back in the Oval Office. As you know, she was number three in the Republican hierarchy in the House of Representatives, but she committed the cardinal sin of pointing out that the big lie was a lie and saying that the duty of her colleagues was to uphold the Constitution, not to serve the political interests of Donald Trump. And for that, she was stripped of her position, is the number three leader of the House of Representatives, and then, of course, was defeated for reelection.

She is out now with a new book, a bestselling book. She is making the rounds of television, garnering massive ratings. Her book is at the top of the Amazon bestsellers list. And I have to tell you, this book, the Liz Cheney Oath and Honor, a memoir and a warning. The warning is the memoir, the story of what happened on January 6th, which she tells in graphic detail. When I picked this book up, I assumed that I wouldn't learn anything because like most of you, we lived through this. We watched the hearings, those remarkable hearings. We have watched the trials as they have unfolded. But in pretty direct prose, she tells the story, she names the names of what happened, reconstructing how close this country came to losing its democracy. And that's not hyperbole as you read her book. Let me just read you from the prologue of this book, because every word feels like a hammer blow. This is from the of the moment, she writes, when American democracy began to unravel.

It is the story of the men and women who fought to save it and of the enablers and collaborators whose actions ensured that the threat would grow and metastasize. It is the story of the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office and of the many steps he took to subvert our Constitution. A bit later, the end of this story has not yet been written. The threat continues. The outcome now is in the hands of the American people and our system of justice. The methods Donald Trump is using to undermine our democracy are not unique to him. I saw authoritarian leaders use many of these same tactics in Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, and across the Middle East when I was working for the U.S. State Department. History is full of similar examples in countries around the world, but never in the United States until now. Like other aspiring autocrats, Donald Trump

cannot succeed alone. He depends upon enablers and collaborators, and every American should understand what his enablers in Congress and in the leadership of the Republican Party were willing to do to help Donald Trump seize power in the months after duty remains the same. It is up to each of us to take seriously our obligation to safeguard the miracle of American freedom. We must abide by our duty to the Constitution and demand that our political leaders do the same. Politicians who minimize the threat, repeat the lies, or enable the liar are not fit for office. Most importantly, we cannot make the grave mistake

of returning Donald Trump, the man who caused January 6th, to the White House or to any position of public trust ever again. Liz Cheney, welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I really appreciate it. You've been very, very busy. What do you hope to accomplish with this book? Well, let me just say first, I'm just such a fan of yours and of your commitment to truth-telling throughout what's been a really difficult period and to the Bulwark as well. So thank you for having me on. And I hope to be able to help educate people about the inside story of what happened over the last three years, both in the Republican Party and also in the House of Representatives. It's a story that we thought couldn't happen in the United States, and it did. So I hope it helps to tell people the truth.

The subtitle is a memoir and a warning, but the story is the warning, isn't it? As you go through in detail, I have to say, when I picked up the book, I was not sure that I was going to learn a lot of new things, but you name names and you put it in detail. And in the context, I think, of the looming threat. So let me play a quick sound, but this is something that you said during the January 6th hearings last summer to your fellow Republicans. In our country, we don't swear an oath to an individual or a political party. We take our oath to defend the United States Constitution. And that oath must mean something. Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain. So let me ask you the same question

that I asked Adam Kinzinger, Paul Ryan, and a lot of others. How shocked are you by what has happened to your party? I'm really stunned. I think part of this story is a story of just, in some ways, it's been heartbreaking, but just disbelief. I spent a lot of time working in countries around the world that, throughout history, they had experienced something similar to what we've gone through, countries that aren't free. And to see it happen so quickly in terms of people willing to go along with what they knew to be dangerous behavior and to be lies was really, really shocking. Well, and this comes through in the book, you know, the day by day as you're

watching your colleagues. And again, you know, all of these people, I mean, you know, Kevin McCarthy, you know, Steve Scalise, you know, you've dealt with them on a daily basis, you know, Mike Johnson. And what comes through in the book is how in real time, it was shocking and stunning to watch the way they trimmed the truth, flip flop, flat out lied, capitulated. I mean, this was this had to be an experience. And I think this is one of the things of the book is that, you know, time and time again, you think, well, surely this person is not going to do this. And then they do. Exactly. And if you go back and you look at sort of what was going on in the days just after January 7th, the party was nearly united, nearly unanimous, frankly.

Right. And understanding how dangerous this was, understanding how the lack of fitness for continued participation in our political process Donald Trump had demonstrated, but that just really sort of dissipated, especially after Kevin McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago because he needed access to Trump's donor lists. And so he was willing to... And Trump was sad and needed to be fed. Well, there was that, yeah. There's that story. I actually wrote at one point about you know, about the January 7th Republicans. It sometimes feels that you and Adam Kinzinger are the only January 7th Republicans left.

Well, there are a few others. On January 7th, what percentage of Republicans do you think would say, yeah, absolutely, we just have to move on from this guy. This is it. We're done. On that day. Even Steve Scalise, you know, Kevin McCartney, everybody was saying it basically. And the other thing that was going on was you had people like Tom Cole, who was then the ranking member of the rules committee, telling us what Donald Trump did here, this was impeachable. There's real grounds for impeachment. We have the memo from the senior Republican staff on the rules committee laying out why his conduct was in fact impeachable. So everybody understood.

There was a moment of real clarity. And the stunning thing was how quickly that changed. Before we get into all of this, and I want to focus on the warning, your description of what happened, how close we came and what it might mean for next year. But let's just deal with the news cycle for a second, because I'm sure everybody else is asking you this. I know that you are committed to doing everything absolutely possible to prevent Donald Trump's re-election, that that is the worst case scenario. So talk to me about this speculation that you're thinking about a third party. Yeah. I mean, what I've said is I haven't made any decisions yet. And the last thing that I will do is anything that will help Donald Trump. You know, there are some

people today who say, well, if you're opposed to Donald Trump, then you need to automatically endorse the Democrat. And my view is I'm not confident at this moment that the Democratic Party, we don't know exactly who the nominee is going to be, but I'm not confident they can beat Trump. I think that it would be irresponsible at this moment, frankly, to say we're going to put all of our eggs in that basket. They have to prove that they can defeat Trump. And I think it's going to take, frankly, more than that. So I think that we'll know more in the next couple of months. We'll see who the Republican nominee really is. We'll see who the Democratic nominee is. And I think all of us who recognize the danger that Trump poses will be able to make decisions then about what's next. So what do you think? Should Joe Biden run for re-election? That's up, obviously, to Joe Biden and to the Democratic Party. I don't want to go down that path of giving advice. What do you think? I think that right now we have a number of policy areas in which the Biden administration is failing to do the right thing, and that is giving potential

strength to Donald Trump. When you look at what's happening on the border, for example, when you have even Democratic mayors and governors around the country saying, this has got to stop. We cannot have the kind of lack of knowledge of who's coming into this country that we have right now. I'm worried about where we're headed on national security issues, for example. Fundamentally, we have to be able to defeat donald trump and we can live with those those bad policies if we have to but we can't give people a reason to say to themselves you know what i know donald trump is dangerous i know that what he did was wrong but he's the lesser of two evils because he's not so i i think it's incumbent on everybody to unite and ensure that we look beyond partisanship and vote in ways that will make sure we maintain the republic.

Well, let's set aside the politics for a moment, because I want to go back into this book and the story. The other day, you made a lot of headlines when I think it was on the Today Show. You were asked, do you think that Donald Trump, he became president again, would leave peacefully? And I think a lot of eyebrows went up when you said that, no, you do not think that Donald Trump would leave office. And I had just finished reading your chapter about what was going on in the Department of Defense, how far he was willing to go in the military. So first of all, let's just talk about that. Why do you think, this is a big deal, it's a radical thing to say, that Donald Trump would refuse to leave

the presidency even though he'd be constitutionally obligated to do this. Why do you say that? Because he tried it once already. I mean, that's precisely what he did in 2021. He had lost the election and he attempted to seize power. That was the multi-part plan that he put in place to try to overturn the election and then not to tell the mob to leave the Capitol, not to send help to the Capitol. So we've seen him do it once. Now he failed and he failed for a number of reasons, including because there were very strong and honorable Republicans at state level around the country, people in the senior levels of his administration, Capitol Police officers, Metropolitan Police officers. I mean, there were a number of reasons why he failed, but now he's had practice. And so I'm frankly surprised that anybody is surprised that that's what he'll do. He's already demonstrated that's what he'll do. It's interesting, you know, as you go through, you talk about the ethos that was beginning after the election of whatever the Constitution said we had to win.

You quote Jim Jordan is standing up saying he didn't really care about the legal process, the recounts. All that matters is staying in power. And then, of course, you have what was going on in the Department of Defense. And at the time, I think some people were alarmed. Reading your account, I think we were insufficiently alarmed about it. You go through how he fires his Secretary of Defense during a transition, which is a shocking development. He appoints someone that you describe as probably the least qualified Secretary of Defense in history, and then put in many of his loyalists, you know, Kash Patel, Douglas McGregor, Brigadier General Anthony Tata, guys who should never be in positions of trust.

And you said this was an ominous thing to come. So people like Mike Flynn were openly telling the president that he should use the military to seize voting machines. Yeah. How close did we come to that? Because you played a central role in getting all of the living secretaries of defense to sign a letter saying that the Department of Defense should play no role. And I remember at the time thinking, oh my God, how alarmed must they have been to sign that letter? How dangerous was it, Liz? It turned out that it was even more dangerous than I knew at the time. At the time, certainly, you know, as you point out, we were watching, all of us who pay attention

to these things, we're watching these firings, we're watching him put unqualified loyalists in place, listening to Mike Flynn suggest he should deploy the military to rerun the election or to seize voting machines. So there was a lot of concern, but at all times, you know, and I think people still experience this today, you're sort of held back from imagining the worst because it's never happened in America. And so, you know, as we watch this unfold, and then there was a piece by David Ignatius in the Post talking about these concerns, and Ignatius suggested that what should happen is a delegation of senior Republicans should go privately to Trump and tell him to concede.

We all knew that was not ever going to work, that there had to be a public warning. And it was a very chilling public warning, but it was intentionally very direct and named the acting Secretary of Defense specifically by name, made clear that there would be personal criminal liability for people who attempted to carry out illegal orders or attempted to use the military to involve them in our election process. It was very concerning at the time. Then when we were working on the Select Committee investigation, and it became clear that Donald Trump had in fact, you know, threatened to fire the chief of staff of the army simply for the act of issuing a statement saying the military has no role in our election process. You write that he was enraged

when leaders of the military said the military is not going to have any role in this election. Right. I mean, so clearly this was something that mattered a great deal to him at that time. Yeah. And we also learned through the investigation more about what happened in the meeting on December 18th in the White House when Mike Flynn was proposing the very things that he'd been talking about in some of his public interviews. And he still talks about those things today. And Donald Trump has said that he will be one of the senior people in his administration. So it's a very, very real threat. So here's a simple but meaningful gift idea for that grandparent who lives across the country, a digital picture frame from Aura. I mean, it's perfect for sharing pictures of all the things they can't be there to see from family vacations to their grandkids' graduation. Okay, in this particular case, I am the grandparent,

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These frames sell out quickly, though, so get yours before they're gone. Terms and conditions apply. Let's go back to some of the people that you had worked side by side with. And just a reminder that you were number three in the House Republican leadership. You were in the room when many of these discussions were made. Your portrayal of Kevin McCarthy, I found fascinating. It's kind of a character study as you watch. And again, I think some of us know, you know, Kevin McCarthy, you know, waffled and weaseled and, you know, said one thing in public and then did something else. I mean, that way,

that pattern has been there. But so what do you think about Kevin McCarthy today, particularly the trajectory of his career, the guy who knew that Trump lost the election, knew that Trump's legal arguments were bullshit, knew that he had incited the riots on January 6th, goes down to Mar-a-Lago, feeds him, nurses him back to health, becomes the speaker, and is ousted in this humiliating fashion. Just give me your Kevin McCarthy take. Well, I think that he's a pathetic figure in many ways in our history. But I also think it's important not to minimize the damage that he did, because even though he's somebody who didn't seem to have strong ideological beliefs, he was leading the Republicans in the House. And at each moment when his determination to do the

right thing could have made a difference, he determined instead to do the wrong thing. So I talk in the book, for example, about the whole process of objecting to electoral votes. And we'd obviously gone through a huge debate internally about it. But once the violence happened, I obviously made clear that I believed it was unconstitutional to object. And I certainly assumed that in the hours after the attack on the Capitol, there would not be a continuation of the objections. And in fact, that's what Kevin told me. He was not going to continue the objections, but then he did.

And it's just an example where there are these moments where, because he was the leader, had he done the right thing, he could have taken a lot of people with him. And instead, he sort of led the conference again and again and again down this path where it ended up with Donald Trump maintaining a real grip on a conference that was dependent on him, particularly for campaign money. Now, one of the more vivid stories you tell is exactly this moment after the attack on the Capitol and the question, would they go ahead with the objections?

And you were talking with Kevin McCarthy's own legal counsel who looked at you and said, Jim Jordan just told me that he just got off the phone with Kevin. And Kevin told him the opposite, that Kevin, in fact, was going to go ahead with the objections. Jordan said that Kevin is going to carry on with the objections. And you're right. This can't be right, I thought. There's no way that any leader without those objections go on in the wake of the violent assault on the Capitol. The idea was so unimaginable that I assumed that Jordan was lying. I was wrong. It turned out that Kevin was lying. So again, this is one of the things that I found so powerful about your book is the real-time kind of heartbreak and soul-crushing of watching this happen.

And there are so many people there. I mean, you could just sort of run down. I'll give you like a little rapid fire, you know, people who play a major role in this. Elise Stefanik. What happened to Elise Stefanik? Well, I mean, everybody who knew Elise when she seemed to be guided by some level of principle back in the Bush administration asks themselves that question. What really surprised me was the fact that on the call on January 4th that I was listening

in on, I'd been invited to this call. I'm not sure that the Trump folks remembered that I was on their distribution list. But as they were describing on January 4th, the process by which Pence, according to them, was going to reject legitimate electors, Jason Miller said, well, this support for this plan goes all the way from Jim Jordan to Elise Stefanik in the House. Now- Quite a spectrum, right? Right, right. Narrow spectrum. But my ears perked up thinking, well, wait a minute, is Elise in on this? Why is he mentioning Elise in particular? And I don't know the answer to that. But I think, you know, she's somebody who

very clearly is not guided by principle anymore. I was very curious reading the book, because there's a lot in this book about the role that Mike Johnson played in that completely bogus amicus brief that would have thrown out tens of millions of American votes. And you're quite critical of the role that he played, that he knew that it was proper, or he should have known that it was, you know, legally bogus. Yeah, he knew. And he engaged in what you describe as bait and switch. Yeah.

He then misled the members, telling them that they were signing on to something different. Were you able to get that after he became Speaker, or was this in the book before he became the fifth string speaker of the house? No, it was all in there before. I had to turn the book in for final printing on September 1st, and I spent so much time talking about Mike Johnson before he became speaker, because I was so troubled by what I had seen and troubled by the destructive role that he played. So what does it say that he has gone on to be the Speaker of the House of Representatives? I mean, what were you thinking as you watch your writing about, I mean, Jim Jordan, who

is one of the worst players who becomes nominated to be Speaker, and then Mike Johnson, who played one of the most dishonest, disreputable roles in the attempt to overthrow the election, and now he's Speaker. What does that say about the Republican conference? You know, several things. I think, first of all, by the time the vote came around in which Johnson was elected Speaker, I think the Republicans were exhausted. Obviously, it'd been really, I don't remember exactly how many days, but they'd been through a really humiliating process of not being able to name a speaker. So I think there was exhaustion. I also think that there were a number, many members who

did not know Mike's history with respect to these issues, who didn't understand some of the positions that he's taken on policy issues. So the fact that he was also relatively unknown, I think made him acceptable to people that I suspect will come to regret that they supported him. And I think it's clarifying, and it's clarifying in a negative way, but it's clarifying in the sense that this is the person that the Republicans have entrusted with the speakership. Speaker of the House is the second in line to the presidency behind the vice president. And we know without question that you cannot count on this group of people led by Mike Johnson to defend the constitution. And I think it makes very clear how important it is that he not be the speaker on January 6th of 2025 when the next electoral votes will be counted,

when you could potentially have the presidential election thrown into the House. But it makes clear the task there as well. This message comes from BetterHelp. Can you think of a time when you didn't feel like you could be yourself, like you were hiding behind a mask? BetterHelp online therapy is convenient, flexible, and can help you learn to be your authentic self so you can stop hiding. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit

betterhelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp,ELP.com. So there are actually heroes in this book. I mean, there's a lot of villains, there's a lot of disappointments in the books, but Cassidy Hutchinson, you know, continues to be just this remarkable figure and has very openly, you know, given you credit for encouraging her to come forward. And I guess that, again, is one of those moments you have this young 20-something-year-old aide who is willing to do something that all the grown men in the White House were so afraid to do. Can you talk to me about that a bit? Yeah. I mean, Cassidy was and continues to be just a real example of courage and someone who made a very clear decision that she knew that the country and she knew that history was watching and she knew that it was very important for her to do the right thing. at the time, and then also about what went on afterwards in terms of her interactions with Trump World during the committee's work itself. Young women like Sarah Matthews is another example.

Caroline Edwards, who was a Capitol Police officer, you know, who had an obviously very different and very violent experience to which she testified in front of the committee. But the role of women, Shea Moss and Ruby Freeman, women who in different ways faced really difficult and important decisions and faced threats and who stood up to those at the time and when they were called to testify in front of the committee, that is a story that gives me hope and has certainly inspired me, and I hope will inspire others. There's so many things I want to ask you, but I guess all of us who have been through this particular process of the disillusionment and the excommunication, what do you most regret as you look back on this? Is there something that you look and say, I'm sorry I did

that, or I wish I would have done something different? Regrets? You have a few, Liz Janie? My regret is that I ever supported Donald Trump. I certainly wish I had not done that. I don't have any regrets about doing what was right in the period of time after the election of 2020 and then after January 6th. And to me, it was not as though there was sort of a moment of making a choice about it because it never felt to me like there really was a choice. It felt to me like it was clear that what Donald Trump presented was a clear and present danger, was a threat to the country. There was never a moment where I thought, well, maybe since he's a Republican and I'm a Republican, then I need to look the other way. It makes me sad that I was wrong about a number of my colleagues and about their willingness to do the right thing.

In addition to sort of the role that so many women have played, I also think that the young people in the book, men and women, young people I've talked to around the country, young people on the Hill, it was very interesting to me over the course of the post-January 6th period, how many young staffers would come and tell me that they understood the threat, that they appreciated what I was doing, even if their bosses, the members for whom they worked, weren't willing to acknowledge the threat. Young people get it. That certainly gives me hope as well. What do you think happens next year? What happens with Donald Trump? Does he win the presidency or does he go to prison? What's more likely? Well, he can't win the presidency. I think

as you know, and as I've been making clear that the future of the country really does depend on making sure he doesn't win the presidency. We'll see what happens. His trial in the January 6th case starts in March. And I continue to hope that although segments of the Republican Party and most of the candidates for the Republican nomination maintain this position that they'll support him even if he does end up being a convicted felon. I don't believe that the majority of the American people feel that way. And I think that the truth does matter. And as

people see the truth come out in the trials, see the evidence presented, I urge people to go to the GPO website and look at all of the evidence of the January 6th committee and read our final report. It's a mountain of evidence about what he did and about what we all have to do to make sure we protect our democracy. The book is Oath and Honor, a Memoir and a Warning by Liz Cheney, national bestseller. Again, thank you so much for everything you have done and for joining us today, Liz Cheney. Well, it's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me on. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast.

I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.