Say what you will about Rep. Liz Cheney, she was right about former President Donald Trump: The guy is stuck in a delusion, and he’s trying to drag the rest of the party into it with him.
According to several reports, Trump has convinced himself that he’ll be back in the White House this summer. He allegedly believes the audit of Arizona’s Maricopa County will reverse President Joe Biden’s win in the state, with similar audits in Georgia and Pennsylvania to follow. Once those states overturn their results, Biden’s win will be declared illegitimate and Trump will be reinstated — or so his fantasy goes.
This is the kind of insanity one would expect from QAnon crackpot Lin Wood, not the former president of the United States. And while the reports may not even be true (members of Trump’s family have rejected them), would it be so surprising if they were? This is the man who has spent every day since the 2020 election complaining that it was stolen, the man who tried to convince several state legislatures to reject their own voters’ wishes only to then demand that his vice president overrule the Electoral College when the states refused. Is it really so crazy to think he’d try to pull a similar stunt again?
Especially since no Republican close to Trump wants to tell him to give it up. He tells them to insist the election was stolen and they nod their heads, purse their lips, and continue to try to balance making Trump happy with keeping the party grounded in reality. But it’s not working. As long as Trump is out there spouting off about this nonsense, the Republican Party moves further and further away from a realistic platform that could win it an election — and GOP leadership knows it.
This is why they want everyone to just stop talking about the election. Cheney wasn’t ousted from her leadership position because she dared to publicly disagree with Trump; she was ousted because she kept bringing up a subject that most congressional Republicans want to see disappear. The more the election is brought up, the more vocal Trump becomes about it, and the more impossible it becomes for the GOP to hold on to its little balancing act.
But the problem here isn’t Cheney. It’s Trump. Should she have focused so much of her attention on a public feud with Trump? Probably not. But she recognized something that most Republicans don’t seem to understand: that they can’t continue to pretend Trump’s election delusions are a thing of the past that will naturally fizzle out. Clearly, that is not the case.
