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Rep. Liz Cheney speaks at a primary Election Day gathering at Mead Ranch in Jackson, Wyo., Aug. 16.
Photo:
Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
John F. Kennedy’s
much quoted, little understood “Profiles in Courage” is basically a book of political career management. Its key sentence dismisses as an absurdity the idea of expecting professional politicians, at every moment, to be ready to throw away their careers and livelihoods over matters of principle. In the meat of the book, he details the exceptional cases of congressmen who took stands they knew would be fatal to their re-elections. Even so, some had their parachutes ready.
Daniel Webster,
who voted for a compromise with slavery repugnant to his Massachusetts constituents, resigned his Senate seat and became secretary of state.
A no-name rural Ohio congressman today can kiss his career goodbye if he’s on the wrong side of Trump voters so he doesn’t get on the wrong side of Trump voters. Different situations, different profiles in calculation.
Liz Cheney
has a name that already makes her a big fish in the small pond of Wyoming politics. As the state’s sole House member, she outranks in exclusivity and name recognition even its two senators. What she lacked was a simple path to further advancement commensurate with her national assets and expectations.
Claims about her courage can be overdone. She’s a professional. She has taken brickbats for sure but she’s not thrown herself on the pyre. She is betting intelligently on her future in full recognition that most politicians don’t become president but her chances are as good or better than they were before she opposed
Donald Trump.
Her political celebrity is enhanced. Her name is as familiar now to 330 million Americans as it was previously to 581,813 Wyoming inhabitants.
Ms. Cheney’s biggest long-run risk may come not from antagonizing Mr. Trump but from antagonizing millions of voters by making common cause with Jan. 6 committee Democrats like
Adam Schiff,
whose lying and cynicism have been every bit as corrosive as Mr. Trump’s. At an appropriate moment, it will pay her to talk a great deal about her opposition to the Russia collusion hoax.
Remind yourself, too, that
Joe Biden
was being a profile in calculation when he phoned Ms. Cheney after her Tuesday GOP primary loss. His priority wasn’t helping Ms. Cheney. His priority was further discombobulating Republicans (and, let’s face it, strengthening Mr. Trump who is the best ally Democrats have in their current straits) by elevating Ms. Cheney’s visibility and connecting her to Mr. Biden.
So what about her oft-stated claim, which justifies it all, that Mr. Trump represents a “unique threat to democracy”? The adjective is important.
Mr. Trump obviously isn’t unique in relation to Democrats who promoted the collusion hoax to discredit the 2016 election, or even unique in relation to the Trump of 2016 who claimed the outcome was “rigged” when he thought he was losing to
Hillary Clinton.
He obviously isn’t unique in relation to
Stacey Abrams,
who claimed the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election was stolen from her, or in relation to numerous Democrats who said
George W. Bush
stole the 2000 presidential election.
A columnist for London’s Economist magazine ventures that “Mr. Trump has again and again broken through the boundaries of the American political imagination.” The statement would command more social acuity if it had said Mr. Trump had been the occasion for such boundary breaking. To anybody with an honest imagination, much of the breaking was done by his enemies. In unminced words, the CIA analyst turned social critic
Martin Gurri
recently noted the “total blindness” of Barack Obama’s speech at Stanford decrying the role of political disinformation: “He never mentioned the most effective disinformation campaign of recent times, conducted against Trump by the Hillary Clinton campaign, in which members of his own administration participated.”
None of this excuses Mr. Trump but it raises a question of who exactly has been learning from whom.
We enter here upon the gnarliest territory. Mr. Trump is clearly unique in one sense, but it’s not obvious whether it strengthens or weakens Ms. Cheney’s case. Unlike these Democrats, his lies are not embraced and trumpeted by credentialed institutions and the mainstream press.
It feels weird to say it, but if Mr. Trump represents a unique threat (and maybe he does), it’s because his lies aren’t the establishment’s lies, they aren’t the media elite’s lies, and yet his lies have a purchase with a large and possibly decisive electorate. Offhand, only one lie heard in normal, everyday American discourse seems to me close in size to Mr. Trump’s 2020 lie, and that’s the routine, universally affirmed lie, which is nowhere found in the science, that climate change is the end of the world.
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the August 20, 2022, print edition.
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