The New Yorker Radio Hour - Liz Cheney on Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Jeff Bezos

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

In recent weeks and months, dozens of prominent security and military officials and Republican politicians have come out against Donald Trump, declaring him a security threat, unfit for office, and, in some cases, a fascist. Way out in front of this movement was Liz Cheney. Up until 2021, she was the third-ranking Republican in Congress, but after the January 6th insurrection she voted to impeach Trump. She then served as vice-chair of the House Select Committee on the January 6th attack. She must have expected it would cost her the midterms and her seat in Congress, which ended up being the case when Wyoming voters rejected her in 2022. Since then, Cheney has gone further, campaigning forcefully on behalf of Vice-President Harris. David Remnick spoke with Cheney last week at The New Yorker Festival, shortly after Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, blocked its planned endorsement of Harris. “It absolutely proves the danger of Donald Trump,” Cheney said. “When you have Jeff Bezos apparently afraid to issue an endorsement for the only candidate in the race who’s a stable, responsible adult, because he fears Donald Trump, that tells you why we have to work so hard to make sure that Donald Trump isn’t elected,” Cheney told Remnick. “And I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We've seen in recent months and weeks something absolutely unprecedented in politics, a range of prominent security and military officials and Republican politicians have not only come out against Donald Trump, but they've also declared him a security threat, unfit, and in some cases, a fascist. Let's not lose sight of how unique that is. Way out in front of this trend was Liz Cheney.

Up until 2021, Cheney was the third-ranking Republican in Congress. Then after the January 6th insurrection, Cheney voted to impeach Donald Trump, and she served as vice chair of the House Committee investigating January 6th. She knew that would cost her seat in Congress, and it did. Wyoming voters sent her packing. Since I last spoke with Liz Cheney about her memoir, Oath and Honor, she's taken the step of campaigning on behalf of Vice President Harris.

We spoke last week at the New Yorker Festival. You know, I've obviously been around campaigns for a long time, and I have a, having had, I think, a perspective that very few people have, having been deeply involved and engaged inside Republican presidential politics and now on the other side. You know, when I look at having spent time on the road campaigning with Vice President Harris, having watched her interact with and talk to independent voters, undecided voters, we are very closely divided nation, there's no question. when you think about at the end of the day,

what is really moving people is what a second Trump term would mean for the women of this country. And women, and I say this, you know, as someone who has been pro-life, but there are women across this country who are watching what's happening in places like Texas, in places like North Carolina, who are watching state legislatures make decisions that are preventing women from getting fundamental basic health care. And at the end of the day, when you look at the percentages of women who vote versus percentages of men, I think that we will see absolutely that you've got a lot more people who will be voting for Vice President Harris, who may not be saying it publicly, but at the end of the day, it'll be enough.

to pull her over the edge. Just to put a little pressure on that point in terms of prediction, in 2016, the polls underpolled Donald Trump. In 2020, that happened again, in fact, rather severely in some states. Why won't that happen again? I think there are a couple of things going on.

One is that you've got polling and modeling that has been changed specifically because of that. And secondly, what we have seen each time is that Donald Trump really has a ceiling. You were campaigning with Kamala Harris two weeks ago, three weeks ago? Last week. And you were in a really resonant place. You were in Ripon, Wisconsin. A couple weeks ago, yeah.

And you made a joint appearance with her. This is the birthplace of the Republican Party. And it was a beautiful day. It's a very pretty town. I've been there. The crowd is chanting. Thank you, Liz. and as you began to speak, you choked up.

Well, it was unexpectedly moving for me. And there were a couple of reasons. One was, well, the Harris campaign had asked me a couple of days earlier what I wanted my walk-on music to be, which I hadn't anticipated needing walk-on music. But I happened to be with one of my daughters when the requests came in, and she immediately said, change, Taylor Swift, Taylor's version, change. And there are some wonderful lines in there, like they may be bigger, but we're faster and we're never scared.

And so when I first walked on stage and I heard change playing, And I looked over and I saw my daughter. And she was emotional. And the feeling of, I mean, it was very nice to hear people saying thank you. But it was also just a moment that felt like it was a bigger moment than politics. And to be there, to be saying, look, as a country, we only survive. if we elect people who are going to abide by their oaths of office. And to be there at, you know, where the Republican Party was founded,

I was born in Wisconsin also, so it always feels like coming home. You know, looking at this question of, are we going to have a president who's a fundamentally cruel and depraved person, or are we going to elect Kamala Harris, who she and I don't agree on, a number of issues. But man, I absolutely know that she's going to do what she believes is right for our country and she's going to abide by the Constitution. Trump ran against Nikki Haley in the primary. Nikki Haley here and there did quite well. Certainly a lot of votes that could mean a lot

in swing states if they swing to Harris. Nikki Haley, of course, after saying horrendous things about Donald Trump has endorsed Donald Trump. But do you think her voters will vote for Donald Trump? Well, I think you left out a few swings of the Nikki Haley pendulum. He's had a couple of... Yes, I did. But I have been talking to and meeting with people who supported Nikki Haley, and they are voting for Kamala Harris.

I don't think there's anything, frankly, that Nikki Haley could do to get those voters to vote for Donald Trump. And many of them, I think you will see in early voting even already, you're beginning to see that they're voting for Vice President Harris. In recent days, we've read accounts of how the former chief of staff, John Kelly, and others have described how Donald Trump has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler. Mark Millies, who's the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that Trump is a fascist? You've heard the F word is very much in the air. Is Donald Trump a fascist? I think that you'd be hard pressed to say he's not. And, you know, everybody has to stop and think to themselves, this is Donald Trump's longest serving chief of staff. I think it's really important

to take a step back. And this goes back to your first question, which is that, you know, we have this unprecedented coalition, this unprecedented wave of support for Vice President Harris that you've never seen before, at least in modern political history, from Republicans. And frankly, some of the bravest people who have stood up are people like the mayor of Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Very Republican area of Wisconsin, long-serving Republican mayor, who has come out publicly and said, I'm voting for Vice President Harris. And when you see that, those people don't have to do that. And like I believe there'll be millions of Americans who just cast the vote and don't speak publicly. But that also tells you where we are. Mitch McConnell has in a book that's about to be published, I think it's an oral history.

Mitch McConnell calls Trump stupid, a despicable human being, unfit. Mitch McConnell endorses Donald Trump. I don't well yeah could you help me with that throughout that whole period first of all if McConnell had voted

to convict him we wouldn't be where we are today Donald Trump would have been convicted and you know McConnell's approach for a lot of the period since January 6th was let's just ignore him you know if you just ignore him don't talk about him he'll go away

and then when that quit working McConnell decided to endorse him. I mean, it's like really the opposite of a profile and courage. Leadership really matters. But what's stunning to me is this. A few weeks ago, we published excerpts from the prison diaries of Alexei Navalny. Alexei went back to Russia knowing he would be imprisoned and would likely die in a prison cell. We don't expect ordinary human beings. We don't expect a human beings. We don't expect of ourselves, probably, to give our lives routinely for principle. But what drives Mitch McConnell to such hypocrisy?

What drives the owner of the Washington Post to refuse to allow his own newspaper to publish an endorsement? This is not like he would sit in a prison cell? Well, yeah, I mean, on the issue of the Washington Post, look, first of all, it's fear. And fear is Putin's weapon, too. Fear is how autocrats govern. And so while I think it's really, you know, it's a disgrace that the Post apparently decided to pull the endorsement,

I would say, number one, that isn't going to affect a single undecided voter anywhere. in this country. But it absolutely proves the danger of Donald Trump. When you have Jeff Bezos apparently afraid to issue an endorsement for the only candidate in the race who's a stable, responsible adult because he fears Donald Trump, that tells you, that tells you why we have to work so hard to make sure that Donald Trump is. isn't elected. What seems to me to raise the danger is to signal to the autocrat that his people are weak and his people, even the wealthiest among them, will bow down. And without a

spine, you cannot stand up. And I canceled my subscription to the Washington Post, just saying. Liz Cheney, former representative from Wyoming, will continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm speaking today with Liz Cheney, who's been campaigning. for Kamala Harris. She told me that she's reconsidered not just Donald Trump himself, but what she called the toxic environment of partisanship in Washington. Is the lure of partisan politics that severe, though? You voted for Trump in 2016 and again in 2020, and it was really not until the insurrection on Capitol Hill that you broke him. I have that right? Yeah, I spoke out against him very clearly when he did and said things that I thought, you know, clearly had gone beyond.

And I think it's... But when you look back on it, is it, what were you making an accommodation because you overlapped on certain issues? And in which, how does this work? I think it was a couple of things. I mean, it certainly is my, my biggest, you know, professional regret ever supporting him. But, but, you know, you do get into a place, you know, when we certainly saw, happened with Trump, which is, well, he doesn't really mean, like, okay, what he's saying

is crazy, but he doesn't really mean it, which, of course, post-January 6th, you know, post the 2020 election, there's no question that he means it. And I think that, you know, the lesson that is so important for us now is to realize when he says things like, I'm going to terminate the Constitution, or I believe that, you know, the enemy within is something that should be dealt with by the deployment of military force. He means those things. Give me some insight in what it took for your father to make a similar decision and why George W. Bush has not. Well, it was not a difficult decision at all for my dad. He has been absolutely, I would say, as concerned for maybe even longer than I have been, about the danger that Donald Trump poses.

And I can't explain why George W. Bush hasn't spoken out, but I think it's time, and I wish that he would. What is our complicity in the creation of Donald Trump? I was interested to listen to the conversation with Michael Beshloss, and he said, look, and he had nothing good to say about Donald Trump. But he said, you know, there was 9-11. There were two misbegotten wars. There was NAFTA, which backfired in many ways for a lot of working-class people.

There was an economic collapse in its aftermath and a growing and growing and growing inequality in this country. Some of these dynamics helped create Donald Trump, it seems to me, in arguably, or maybe you disagree. I mean, I see it a little bit differently than that. I think that, you know, certainly there has been growing inequality. You know, I know that when I look at Wyoming, the state, the people that I used to represent, There's a very real, and I believe legitimate concern and fear that people have,

that the government in Washington, that they can't influence it. Nobody in Washington's listening to them. If somebody issues a regulation or makes a determination about something that's going on on land that you're trying to graze cattle on, it'll destroy your livelihood immediately. And you feel like you have no recourse, no voice. And that is a very real thing. And I think that Donald Trump absolutely tapped into that. There's no question.

I also, one more point on this, I think politicians have, for a long time, we've been toxic. And we've launched attacks at each other. And, you know, we got to a place in this country where, you know, you would hear political adversaries say that others were a threat, a threat to the Constitution or a threat to the future. of the country. There's a tendency sometimes among voters to think, oh, we've heard politicians issue these warnings before. So, you know, just to write off these warnings as just more politics. And I think that also means we all have a huge responsibility when this election's over. that we get back to being able to engage on substance and have vigorous debates about substance

in a way that that is policy-focused and oriented. You talk about this coalition and a coalition that, I guess, stretches from AOC to you? Dick Cheney to Taylor Swift. Fair enough. But there weren't too many people leaping out of Congress voluntarily to stand up. Yeah, and I think it's, you know, in fact, when I talk about two or three. Yeah, I mean, well, when I talk about the dishonor, you know, I, I am talking about elected Republicans.

And I think it's, it is important to differentiate between elected Republicans and Republican voters writ large. My question to you is this, are these jobs so good? in other words is it so cool being a congressman or a senator that you will give up your soul to not have to go back

to your home district and be a teacher again or some honorable profession is it so amazing I mean I don't yeah I think you know it goes to the point

like term limits you know which is something that I've never been a fan of term limits for members of Congress um I think there are constitutional issues, but after I watched how many elected Republicans decided that their own re-election

was more important than the oath they swore to the Constitution, you know, I do think we need to think about things like term limits. There's an infinite, apparently, capacity for people to rationalize their behavior. And one of the things that I saw after the 2020 election was members of Congress who would say, and Mike Johnson was at the top of this list, we're just going to do this one more thing for Donald Trump.

Just one more thing. You know, we're just going to file this brief that Johnson knew was unconstitutional, illegal. We're just one more thing, because that'll show him how much we support him and then he'll concede and we can all move on. You know, that's on the day of January 6th before the attack. there were these sheets laid out in the Republican cloakroom.

And I walked in, and I could see my colleagues walking down the list, signing their names on these sheets of paper. And I asked the staffer in the cloak room what they were. And she said to me, well, those are the objections. And so people were saying, well, I'm going to object to the Arizona electors and Pennsylvania electors. and I sat there and I watched one of my colleagues come by, very big Trump supporter. And as he signed his name on the sheet, he said kind of out loud to anybody who could hear,

he said the things we do for the orange Jesus. And that, so they know. They know what they're doing. You live long enough, you make mistakes. You live long enough, you change your mind. sometimes it's not the courage of one's convictions, but it's the courage to change one's convictions. God knows it's happened to me.

I've written things that I look back on and regret. In 2019, you said of the Democrats, they've become the party of anti-Semitism, they've become the party of infanticide, the party of socialism. Do you feel that you've changed markedly or on big issues like Iraq? How do you look back on that?

there's a lot in that question. So first of all, let me touch on anti-Semitism. There were a couple of Democratic members who had said some very clearly, had tweeted some very clearly anti-Semitic tweets, and the Democrats in Congress refused to put legislation on the floor to condemn, I believe it was Representative Omar. my view then and my view now is it doesn't matter which party is saying things that are anti-Semitic

all of us at all times have to stand against anti-Semitism and and so I think part of that I would not I would not change and I think that you know one of the real fallacies in this election is that somehow Donald Trump is going to be an ally, an ally of the Jewish people. I mean, this is, Donald Trump dined at Marilago

with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier. J.D. Vance appeared on Tucker Carlson's show within days of Tucker Carlson platforming neo-Nazi propaganda. and Donald Trump is ending his campaign apparently with Tucker Carlson. So the anti-Semitism that the Republican Party is now excusing and accommodating is despicable.

There are certainly things that I've said that I wouldn't have said or that I would have said in a different way. There's no question. I always think about when Speaker Pelosi appointed me to the select committee and one of her staffers and handed her a piece of paper that said, these are the top ten worst things Liz Cheney has ever said about Nancy Pelosi. And I was really glad that they stopped at 10. What was the worst? I mean, I don't remember, but I'm sure it wasn't good.

Yeah, you too. I don't. It had something to do with her spine, not reaching her brain, I think. But look, I think that it goes to the previous point that, you know, it can be very easy in politics, especially, I think, in Congress, to just to sort of go to your corner and say, all right, Any idea that comes from the other side, we're going to fight against and try to defeat. And I wish that I hadn't done that as many times as I did. Certainly I have said some things that I, you know, would say differently.

But I also know that, you know, there have been some pretty mean things said about me, and more importantly, some pretty mean things said about my dad. And I think that all of us, we ought to step back from this a bit. of, you know, launching the worst kind of attack because then, number one, we can't move forward together, but number two, when we have the threat that we have now, you know, you want to be able to convey to people, this really, this really matters. This is really much beyond politics. I'm guessing that a lot of people are thinking the following thing. This has been really interesting, but I'm terrified about the election to come.

I've been anxious now for what time is it? Nine years. And I don't understand my own country, or I don't understand half of the country. Right now, we're having a conversation that hinges on a couple of hundred thousand people, whether it's raining in Pennsylvania on a given day. That's the razor's edge we're describing.

and I think I'm getting this right. Am I not, brothers and sisters? There is an incomprehension of the other half of the country, and surely it can't be that the other half of the country is bad or morally deficient or something. And sometimes I read the explanations for this. Brett Stevens the other day in the New York Times on the op-ed page wrote, and it took him until last week to say that or whatever it was, that he was finally going to pull the lever for Kamala Harris. Fine.

What he said was, if the Republicans win, if Trump wins, who's at fault? The nasty liberals who are condescending and terrible to the rest of the country? If Trump wins, who's at fault? Trump's not going to win. You're saying that for spiritual nourishment, or you really believe it? No, both. But I really do believe it. And, you know, there are a whole bunch of reasons that we are where we are.

I tend to think one of the biggest ones is because elected Republicans failed to do their job. The voters, you know, I've had people say to me, if it's that big a deal, why isn't Mitch McConnell saying it's a bigger deal? Why didn't the Senate convict him? If more Republicans had done the right thing, the country would not be looking into the edge of the abyss we are today. Liz Cheney, thank you so much and thank you. Liz Cheney represented Wyoming in Congress from 2016 to 2022 after serving for years in the State Department. She was vice chair of the House Select Committee on the January 6th attack.

I'm David Remnick. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. At New Yorker.com, you can find a timeline of the most consequential. moments of this election, as well as the magazine's endorsement essay on Kamala Harris. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow,

Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barge, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccett. Special thanks this week to Catherine Sterling, Amanda Miller, Nico Brown, and Michael Etherington. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.