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Former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney made clear her war against former President Donald Trump won’t be limited to her endorsement of Kamala Harris and will include campaigning in battleground states this fall.
In an interview Friday at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Cheney also said her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, would be voting for Harris. The audience erupted in cheers after she mentioned her father’s vote.
Later, the former Republican vice president — one of the two living to say they wouldn’t back Trump — himself issued a statement confirming his daughter’s remarks, saying Trump “can never be trusted with power again.”
“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” he said in a statement.
Trump, in a post on Truth Social, was dismissive of the former vice president’s endorsement of Harris. “Dick Cheney is an irrelevant RINO,” he wrote, using the acronym for “Republican in name only.”
The Harris campaign welcomed Dick Cheney — and anyone else in the GOP who wants to join what it said in a statement are hundreds of other Republicans who support her.
“The Vice President is proud to have the support of Vice President Cheney, and deeply respects his courage to put country over party,” said Campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon.
In her remarks, Liz Cheney also said she would endorse Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas) in his Senate race against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.
“Defeating Donald Trump is frankly important but there are numbers of candidates around the country who have embraced election denialism and I think it’s really important that we defeat them, too,” said Cheney, once the No. 3 leader of the House Republican Conference. “One of the most important things we need to do as a country as we begin to rebuild our politics is we need to elect serious people.”
Her remarks follow a Wednesday speech at Duke University where she announced her vote for Harris and warned of the “danger” she says Trump poses. Cheney, who briefly weighed her own third-party candidacy, told battleground state voters who oppose the former president that it isn’t enough to write in another candidate’s name on the ballot, a point she reiterated Friday.
The former Wyoming representative has long been a fierce Trump critic, but her announcements this week represent a significant ramping up of her rhetoric against the former president ahead of the 2024 election. She was ousted from her seat after she refused to back down from her criticisms of Trump following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and served as the vice chair of the Jan. 6 select committee, which probed the riot.
“Those of us who believe in the defense of our democracy and the defense of our Constitution and the survival of our Republic have a duty in this election cycle to come together and to put those things above politics,” Cheney said Friday. “I look forward to the days when we will again be having debates about tax policy and national security and everything else, because that will mean we have made it through what is right now a very grave threat to a functioning republic.”
Cheney said she is not an official surrogate for the Harris campaign, though she will travel battleground states to talk about the importance of defeating Trump.
She also has a PAC, which spent hundreds of thousands of dollars opposing Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and Republican Secretary of State nominee Mark Finchem in the 2022 election. The PAC, called Our Great Task, has already offered thinly veiled criticism of Trump in a D-Day video.
The former Wyoming representative was ousted from her seat in Congress following a primary defeat backed by Trump and his political operation. Her opponent, who ran with Trump’s support, was advised by those in his camp and was funded by his donors.
Cheney said Friday she did not speak at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in part, because she had traveled to London to see Taylor Swift.
