“Right now we are facing a domestic threat we have never faced before – and this is a former president trying to unravel the foundations of our constitutional democracy,” Cheney said in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. . in Simi Valley, California, where her speech was greeted with standing ovations. “He is being helped by Republican leaders and elected officials who have been held hostage by this dangerous and irrational man,” he said. Ms. Cheney spoke at a time when Mr. Trump is potentially on the verge of announcing a presidential campaign for 2024, according to his advisers, raising the prospect of a leading candidate in early polls who is also facing active civil and criminal investigations. Mr. Trump also continued to repeat lies about his defeat in the 2020 elections, claiming that his fight was “stolen”. “As the full picture unfolds with the Jan. 6 commission, it has become clear that the efforts overseen and involved by Donald Trump were even more creepy and threatening than we could have imagined,” Cheney said. Republicans, he said elsewhere, “must choose” because “they can not be both loyal to Donald Trump and loyal to the Constitution.” It was an impressive comment by the daughter of a former Republican vice president, Dick Cheney, against the current Republican leader, even though he is out of office. Ms. Cheney was a supporter of Mr. Trump until shortly after the 2020 election, when he criticized him for his baseless allegations of fraud. In May 2021, he said he regretted voting for him last year. Ms. Cheney, who was forced to step down as the No. 3 Republican in the House last year as she repeatedly denounced Mr. Trump over the January 6 events, has become a rather isolated figure within a party that remains in to a large extent in the pursuit of the former president. She is considered a possible presidential candidate in the 2024 elections, in which she could try to place a flag that shows how the party has been transformed from what her father helped to reshape from Trumpism. Ms. Cheney began her speech by talking about anti-democratic countries around the world and nations that are rivals to the United States, including Russia and China. From there he spoke about Mr. Trump. He praised Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Mendowe, Trump’s last White House chief of staff, for her public deposition in Congress a day earlier. “Her bravery and patriotism were amazing,” Ms. Cheney said. Ms. Cheney faces a Trump-backed qualifier for her Wyoming headquarters in August, and the race is widely seen as a difficult battle for her.
