One of the most glaring differences between the two major political parties in America is that, for the most part, the Democrats are a Borg-like hive mind while Republicans often behave like a drunk dysfunctional family at a Thanksgiving dinner that no one wanted to go to. Sure, the Dems will occasionally pretend that they’ve got some in-fighting going on, but Granny Boxwine is still in charge over on Capitol Hill after the dust settles.
Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are new problems for the Democrats and are unique. Meanwhile, the Republicans always have one or two in their D.C. ranks who seem to take perverse pleasure in backstabbing their colleagues and their constituents. There’s an almost endless succession of them. There was a brief break in the Senate between John McCain and Mitt Romney, but those gaps never last too long.
Over in the House, Liz Cheney has been the Republican turncoat of choice for the Democrats for over a year now (no one pays attention to Adam Kinzinger, not even his constituents). Like all Never Trump Republicans, Cheney is under the mistaken impression that she is being guided by deep principles. I can assure you that, here in the modern media era, a principles-guided journey never ends up in frequent appearances on MSNBC and CNN, lying about an insurrection that never was.
Cheney loves to babble on about the “cult of personality” that surrounds Trump. There may be some of that, but most of the ardent Trump supporters I know took the same journey I did: we were skeptics at first but then loved the way he governed when he got into office. We became fans of what he did, not who he was.
I would argue that the real cult of personality around Trump is occupied by the Never Trump crowd. They’re solely focused on their hatred for Trump, eschewing any objective conversation about his accomplishments while in office. Accomplishments that were achieved, by the way, while he was meeting constant resistance from unhinged Democrats, their flying monkeys in the mainstream media, and the diaper-filling Never Trump tantrum throwers like Cheney.
Liz Cheney is essentially a woman without a party right now. Republicans can’t trust her and — as with every Republican who takes this route — the Democrats don’t really want her, at least while she’s in Congress. Cheney ceases to be of use to them if she switches parties. Should she manage to get reelected (I covered how that might happen here), she’ll be the epitome of Republican in Name Only.
More likely is that she’ll end up at MSNBC or CNN, doing the Nicolle Wallace shtick.
Either way, she knows deep down that none of this is about principle. She picked what she thought would be the winning team and she failed. You can see it in her eyes. Every time I see a picture of her now or see her on television, she’s got the blank, forlorn stare of someone in a hostage video. This time it’s the mainstream media playing the role of ISIS and it’s her soul that was taken prisoner.
The path to redemption for Cheney begins with turning her back on the January 6 kangaroo court but, as we’ve seen with most of the Never Trump crowd, there is no going home again. She’ll have to live with her decisions, and the sellout checks will no doubt help with that.
That blank stare isn’t going away, though.
