Today, Explained - Liz Cheney and the Big Lie

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

A push to remove Cheney from her House leadership position shows how Trump, marooned at Mar-a-Lago without Twitter, continues to hold sway in the GOP. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. It's a tough week to be a Republican representative with a firm grasp on reality. Which is a roundabout way of saying it's a tough week to be Wyoming representative Liz Cheney. Andrew Prokop has been reporting on Cheney for Vox. Liz Cheney, the number three Republican in the House of Representatives leadership, is not going to hold that job very much longer. Tonight, Liz Cheney's days as the number three Republican in the House appear to be dwindling. On Wednesday, Republicans will vote on removing her for refusing to back former President Trump's lie that the election was stolen. The party is planning on holding a vote Wednesday morning among the House GOP conference.

And it is viewed as basically certain that she is going to be ousted from that post. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy circulated this letter. It's clear that we need to make a change, he wrote. Her crime is that she has continued to say that the behavior of Donald Trump after the 2020 election, she continues to say that all that was bad. You know, we've had a situation where President Trump claimed for months After the 2020 election, she continues to say that all that was bad. You know, we've had a situation where President Trump claimed for months that the election was stolen and then apparently set about to do everything he could to steal it himself. And the House Republicans, they don't like that she continues to say that all that was bad. Another way of saying this is that the House Republicans this week

will punish one of their party leaders for telling the truth. For telling the truth in a way that they find inconvenient to them. Some of these Republicans justify to themselves by saying that, you know, this is politics and you want to spotlight your party's most favorable message, issues that help unite your party and whatever she may believe about the 2020 election. The fact that she continues to make headlines about her attempt to say that what Trump did was bad is a problem for Republicans in their quest to retake Congress in 2022. And because of that, they don't want her in leadership. Okay, well, before we talk about what this means for the GOP, let's just talk about Liz Cheney.

Who was she before this 2020 debacle? I imagine she's related to someone we might be familiar with. Yes, Liz Cheney is a daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Vice President Dick Cheney has accidentally shot and injured a friend with whom he was hunting on a ranch in South Texas. Whittington is in the hospital right now after Mr. Cheney sprayed him with shotgun pellets while trying to hit a quail. She only joined Congress pretty recently. She was first elected in 2016, and she is the sole member

of the U.S. House of Representatives from Wyoming. And despite just joining Congress in 2017, she already had this meteoric rise to become the number three Republican in House leadership in early 2019. And she's been talked about as someone who has quite the political future in the Republican Party. She's been discussed as a potential Speaker of the House. She's been discussed as a potential U.S. Senator, even a potential presidential candidate. She has very

conservative views, seemed to have good credentials with the party. Her career seemed to be headed in the right direction until she started to butt heads with one Donald Trump. And when exactly does she start to butt heads with one Donald Trump? I mean, she was in office for four years while he was president, and it seems like we're only really hearing a lot about her now that he's not. So her initial disputes with Trump did surface in 2020 or so. She's very much of the Cheney wing of the Republican Party. When it comes to foreign policy, she's a hawk. She supports U.S. intervention abroad. So when Donald Trump was trying to withdraw troops from various conflicts overseas,

she made clear that she was opposed to that. I am deeply, deeply concerned and I oppose strongly the president's decision, apparently, to withdraw troops from Syria. The apparent decision that we're now going to be looking at withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. These two decisions would be disastrous. So there were already tensions before the 2020 election. But after it is when things really got serious. When Trump started to lay the groundwork for overturning the election, when he started making these claims of voter fraud

that had absolutely no basis in fact, she spoke out and she said that it's important to respect our system and to preserve our democratic system. And she continued to say that as December stretched into January. It's more illegal for you than it is for them because you know what they did and you're not reporting it. She was especially bothered by the leaking of an audio of the

phone call in which Trump had called Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and urged him to find votes that would flip the state of Georgia from Biden to Trump. Tell us, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already. And so there was discussion in early January as Trump's allies were preparing a challenge in Congress.

And Liz Cheney wrote a 21-page memo in early January to her colleagues saying there's no basis for refusing to respect the election results, for saying it set a terrible precedent for Congress to throw out certified state results, and basically that this is a very bad idea. And so all of this happened before the events of January 6th itself, when Trump gave a speech egging on his supporters. And in fact, he mentioned Liz Cheney by name. And we got to get rid of the weak Congress people, the ones that aren't any good. The Liz Cheneys of the world, we got to get rid of them.

And then his supporters headed on over to the Capitol and stormed in. And that whole disturbing scene unfolded. The single greatest threat to our republic is a president who would put his own self-interest above the Constitution, above the national interest. Cheney was very angry about that. What happens after the insurrection on January 6th? What happens is that Democrats start launching this effort to impeach Donald Trump for a second time. And in a bit of a surprising move, Liz Cheney decided that she would support this effort. A pretty remarkable thing for the number three Republican in leadership.

Releasing a statement that says, in part, the president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled this mob and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president. The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution. I will vote to impeach the president. And so, you know, this isn't just, you know, sadly, reluctantly, Democrats are bad, too. But I will sadly vote to impeach. This is Donald Trump betrayed his office more than any other president in history. And that is why he must go. And she voted that way. She was one of 10 Republicans in the House to vote that way. And the number three House Republican,

Congresswoman Liz Cheney, facing a backlash from her GOP colleagues, some of them. Almost immediately, some of her conservative colleagues began calling for her removal. Not just that, some of her colleagues make a trip to her home state, right? I'll confess to you, this is my first time in Wyoming. Yes, our friend of the show, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, decided to fly to Wyoming and hold an event there. He had never been to the state before. And he was like, oh, already I know that everyone here is fed up with Liz Cheney because, you know, she's so bad. She she hates Donald Trump so much. So there is this effort to purge her from the leadership. but when the vote is held in early February, it fails. This is a closed door vote and a secret ballot vote, so we don't know how anyone voted. But the final outcome was 61 votes to remove Cheney and 145 votes to keep her in the job. So even though a lot of the House Republicans were publicly

behind Trump and saying there were problems with the election, it seems that secretly they had a bit more sympathy for Liz Cheney and what she was saying and doing than they were willing to make clear publicly. They were happy to keep her in the job then. Sounds like that changes. What happened since then when she still had the support of her colleagues? So the problem was basically that she just kept on being the skunk at the garden party. She kept on mentioning this thing that happened, that Donald Trump tried to overturn a Democratic election result. She thought that was bad, and she kept mentioning that was bad. And things really came to a head in late April during the House GOP's policy retreat to Orlando, Florida. So basically,

the Republicans all gathered for this big event. They were going to raise money. They wanted to put forward a good message for the party. I think as we look at 22 and 24, we're very much going to be focused on substance and on the issues. And I think that's where we've got to to be the party's presidential nominee in 2024. And Republicans started to get annoyed by this. One Politico report said that many in the party began buzzing about Cheney, viewing her as, quote, an unwelcome distraction from the party's message. So then President Joe Biden gave his address to a joint session of Congress a few days after the policy retreat, and Cheney gave Biden a fist bump there.

Uh-oh. Yeah, yeah. A fist bump with the current president of the United States this week, even leading Cheney to tweet, Some Republicans thought that was bad form. And then Monday of last week, Trump issued a statement saying the fraudulent presidential election of 2020 should be known as the big lie. So then Cheney shot back on Twitter, the 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading the big lie in all caps, turning their back on the rule of law and poisoning our democratic system.

And that seems to be really what was the tipping point. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said on Fox News he's been hearing a lot of criticism of Cheney. He was caught on a hot mic saying he's had it with Cheney. I think she's got real problems. I've had it with her. I've had it with her. It's, you know, I've lost confidence. Leaks poured out saying that Republicans were going to dump Cheney. She seems to have recognized that she was toast. Reportedly, she's not really been making calls to line up supporters because she knows it's hopeless. And so it seems like that's it.

That's the end for Liz Cheney's career in the House Republican leadership. More with Andrew in a minute. I'm Sean Roms from It's Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos.

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Andrew, just to take a step back here, back away from Liz Cheney and get back to the lie, why is it that the House GOP is so gung ho on purging its leadership of a very conservative politician who had this big, bright future within the party who happens to just be saying, let's admit that this whole thing is a farce and Biden won the election fair and square. Well, the core reason is because Donald Trump remains extremely popular among Republican voters. So anyone who attempts to point out a very bad thing that Donald Trump did is kind of interfering with Republicans effort in their view to put forward a message that will get them elected and win back

Congress in 2022. Even if doing that perpetuates this so-called big lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent, that Joe Biden isn't the rightful president of the United States? Oh, they're all happy to perpetuate it. They've all made their peace with it. And remind us how effective perpetuating this lie has become. I mean, how many Republican voters in this country do we know actually believe this lie at this point? So a poll for CNN in late April found that two thirds of Republican voters either believe or think it's possible that the election was stolen from Trump. And it can be convenient for even Republicans who know that's not true to have their voters believing it's true. And in Republicans mind, that might that might spur these voters to work extra hard to take Congress back from the Democrats and to elect a Republican in 2024. It feels like it was just maybe a little too late for Liz to call out dishonesty from the former president. Could she have done more in the course of his four years in the White House to stand up to the lies, to the attacks on Democratic norms before it was too late, which

it now appears to be. I mean, you can look at it in two ways. You can look at it to say everyone in the Republican Party who supported Donald Trump in any way is in a sense complicit in allowing his rise because, you know, any individual one of them could have spoken out against him. The other way that I personally look at it is that if Liz Cheney had spoken out to condemn Donald Trump in 2015. I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. In 2016. Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.

I think it's real. I did not. Science is real. I do not say that. And I think it's important that we. In 2017. That was some crowd. We had the biggest audience in the history of inaugural speeches.

In 2018. I think that the report yesterday, maybe more importantly than anything, it totally exonerates me. There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. 2019. Remember the dishwasher? You'd press it.

Boom. There'd be like an explosion. Five minutes later, you open it up. The steam pours out. The dishes. Now you press it 12 times. Women tell me again, you know, they give you four drops of water. She probably wouldn't even have been in Congress anymore in 2021 for this second impeachment. go after Donald Trump, like Senator Jeff Flake or Senator Bob Corker or Representative Mark Sanford

or Representative Justin Amash. They see their support among their own voters completely collapse. They realize they can't win a primary or they actually lose the primary. And then they're not in Congress anymore. And it looks like that might be what happens to Liz Cheney sometime after her likely loss of this leadership position this week. Do we know who's going to replace her in the GOP leadership tree? Well, Representative Elise Stefanik, who is going to be elected to this role, it's expected. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is throwing his support behind Elise Stefanik to replace Liz Cheney for the number three Republican leadership post. She's gone on

Steve Bannon's radio show and she said this really wild audit that Republicans are doing in Arizona to the election results, hunting for fraud with this very shady company. She said that that's a great thing and that it's very important to have that done. What are your thoughts about what's going on in Arizona? I fully support the audit in Arizona. We want transparency and answers for the American people. And Stefana clearly sees it in her career interest to be seen as a huge Trump supporter.

And she's not planning on doing the right thing for for the American democratic system at a later date. Since his first day in office, President Trump has fought tirelessly to deliver results for all Americans, despite the Democrats' baseless and illegal impeachment sham. And what of the former president himself? You don't really hear a lot from him anymore because he's not on Twitter, I guess. But what's he up to? So he's been issuing statements about all this. He's been cheering on the effort to oust Cheney. And he is supposedly just holed up at Mar-a-Lago, licking his wounds and getting ready for a potential next act for himself. But he doesn't seem like he's ready to leave the stage, even if his voice is less omnipresent than it used to be.

And the GOP is just on autopilot fighting for his lie for the sake of future elections. It does seem that Trump has primed the Republican base to disbelieve any result that has a Democratic win. Even if it's a large landslide, he'll just say that it's a fake landslide. And now it's important to recognize that he didn't come anywhere close to success in this effort in 2020. His efforts to pressure Republican state officials failed, and his efforts to get Congress to overturn the election were always doomed because you need both houses and Democrats control the House of Representatives at that point. But we don't know whether that will continue to be the case. I think that it's really important for people like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He was in his job. He was a conservative Republican.

And when Trump was trying to dispute the election, Raffensperger was in the post and he said, no, Trump is completely full of it. And he was a big problem for Trump and his narrative in his attempt to dispute the election. But if Raffensperger had spoken out about Trump and had said that Trump was a horrible person in 2017 or 2018, he wouldn't have been in his job at Georgia's secretary of state. That's just how the modern Republican Party works. Some people say that this line of thinking is kind of, you know, a self-serving justification for Republicans who want to keep their careers despite being morally appalled by certain things that Trump does. But I do think that seeing how 2020 played out, there's something to it. It's important to have Republicans in these key roles in Congress, in the states, who are not just totally captured by the Trump base and who will be willing to

stand up like Brad Raffensperger, or at least to not like fully use their powers in an attempt to help Trump steal an election or the next crisis, however it may unfold, who will respect the results of the next election. If your goal is to cast blame on Republicans for being complicit with Trump's rise, there's something to that, absolutely. But also from a practical perspective, anyone who does speak out too strongly about this gets purged from the party and replaced with a hardcore Trump supporter. Then you are in a way just helping pave the way to the next electoral crisis. Andrew Prokop, he's a senior correspondent at Vox. Find and read and, heck, support his work at Vox.com. you