Liz Cheney says she’s ready to consider a third party, warns of ‘grave’ threat of Trump-led GOP

Liz Cheney, once a rising leader in the GOP who has become a crusader against Donald Trump, says she may soon be ready to forge a new third party − or even run for president with one in 2024.

“I certainly hope to play a role in helping to ensure that the country has … a new, fully conservative party,” she told USA TODAY in an interview Monday about her new book, “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning,” out Tuesday. “And so whether that means restoring the current Republican Party, which … looks like a very difficult if not impossible task, or setting up a new party, I do hope to be involved and engaged in that.”

She said she also hasn’t ruled out joining a bipartisan ticket in next year’s election, like the one proposed by a group called No Labels, an independent campaign that promises to put both a Republican and a Democrat on the ballot.

“I think that the situation that we’re in is so grave, and the politics of the moment require independents and Republicans and Democrats coming together in a way that can help form a new coalition, so that may well be a third-party option,” she said.

Meanwhile, she is in the odd position of urging Republican voters to elect Democrats to the House and Senate, warning that Speaker Mike Johnson and his GOP caucus, beholden to Trump, she says, can’t be trusted to certify the legitimate results of the next election.

“It’s not a position that I’ve arrived at lightly,” she said.

Cheney said she wouldn’t run on the No Labels ticket if it seemed likely to play a spoiler role, helping to elect Trump − which is what many top Democratic and nonpartisan analysts warn. A third-party ticket could give voters who won’t vote for Trump but aren’t sold on the likely Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden, another place to go.

That calculation would affect her decision, she said, calling the defeat of Trump the crucial task to save democracy and protect the Constitution. “The president who’s willing to ignore the rulings of the courts, the president who’s willing to ignore the guardrails of our democracy is an existential threat,” she said.

A different world before his rise

There was a time when the sky was the limit for Liz Cheney within the GOP.

B.T., that is. Before Trump. 

She is a member of a family that once helped define conservative Republicanism, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and author Lynne Cheney. First elected to the House in the same 2016 campaign that put Trump in the White House, she was elected to the congressional leadership, with chatter that she might be the first female Republican speaker, a conservative version of Nancy Pelosi. She was considered a potential candidate for the Senate, or even national office. 

But she voted to impeach Trump for the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and she accepted Pelosi’s request that she co-chair the committee investigating the insurrection, helping give it some bipartisan patina and burning her bridges with Trump and others in the GOP. She was ousted from her leadership post and routed in her bid for the party’s nomination for a fourth term in Congress. 

She isn’t a person given to regrets, she said. “My only regret is supporting Donald Trump.”

Her goal now is to shame Republican officeholders to stop being what she calls “enablers” and “collaborationists” of Trump, unwilling to say in public the criticism some deliver in private. She quotes Tennessee Rep. Mark Green, when members were being urged to sign on to unfounded objections to the electoral vote count in 2021, as “sheepishly” saying, “The things we do for the Orange Jesus.’”

Green’s spokesperson has denied he made the comment.

Why did Kevin McCarthy go to Mar-a-Lago?

She is brutal on then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Two days after the election, she reveals, he told her Trump had acknowledged to him that he knew he had lost. Three weeks after the Jan. 6 insurrection, when she challenged McCarthy for visiting Trump at Mar-a-Lago, he defended his visit by saying Trump’s staff was worried because he was “really depressed” and “not eating.”

Trump denied that Monday in a message posted just after midnight on Truth Social saying McCarthy visited him “to get my support, and to bring the Republican Party together.” He denied “not eating,” adding, “it was that I was eating too much.” He called her book “boring.”

“Crazy Liz Cheney,” he said, “who suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome at a level rarely seen before.”

She laughed that off.

She recalls the emotional moment her father told her, “Defend the republic, daughter.” And the times her five children have embraced her and gotten angry at the attacks on her.

“I’m so proud of you,” her youngest son said when she came home after a day of the televised hearings by the Jan. 6 committee. Then he brought her down to earth. “And now can we please focus on getting me my learner’s permit?”