MISSOULA, Montana – Liz Cheney said Thursday that what former President Donald Trump did on January 6th is as “evil as you can imagine” and as much of a “dereliction of duty of an American president we have ever seen.”
“[Trump] was watching [the riot] on television, and he thought the mob was doing the right thing. And no matter how many times people pleaded with him to tell the mobs to go home, he wouldn’t do it,” the former Wyoming representative said in a talk at the University of Montana’s 2023 Mansfield Center Lecture series. Cheney took questions from former Montana Governor Marc Racicot. The Montana GOP passed a resolution in February rebuking Racicot’s status as a Republican due to him endorsing Democratic candidates over GOP ones.
“And did he not do it for over three hours, but in the middle of the violence, when the attack was happening, he sent out a tweet saying that Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what Trump wanted him to do,” she said.
The former Wyoming representative added, “We know now from, from testimony that when that tweet came out at 2:44 [p.m.] and people in the crowd were reading it to each other, that there was a surge in the crowd, both outside the Capitol and among those who were in the Capitol. And it directly contributed to violence.”
Cheney said Donald Trump tried to overthrow the fundamental structure of America’s republic after he tried to “overturn” the 2020 presidential election.”
During the January 6th riot, Cheney said she remembered being “very angry” and wondering “how in the world could this happen inside the United States?”
Cheney said what Trump had done was a “high-crime” misdemeanor and that he should have been “impeached immediately” because he was a “clear and present danger.”
During her speech, Cheney thanked the Capitol Police, Metropolitan Police, and other law enforcement members for “the battle that they waged” on January 6. She said their service was “absolutely fundamental” to preventing a much worse “crisis that day.”
“A very small handful of Capitol Police Officers who were on the western front of the Capitol and who were bending the doors on the west front. I think it’s important for the American people not to let the ferocity of that battle leave our consciousness. It’s important to go back and to remember to look at the video of that battle, particularly on the west front of the Capitol.
Cheney claimed that if the Capitol Police Officers had not held those doors on the west front of the Capitol, there would have been a “massacre that day.”
“Lives were lost, but we would have had thousands of more people killed,” Cheney said.
The only person who ended up dying during the riot was an unarmed Ashli Babbitt. Lt. Michael Byrd shot and killed her inside the Capitol. Byrd will not face charges for killing Babbitt.
Then-U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund said federal security officials ignored his calls to call in the National Guard before and after the riot.
In the days after January 6, Cheney said Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA-20) showed a “lack of leadership.” The former representative said there was unity amongst House Republicans about the danger of what had happened on January 6 and wanting to hold Trump accountable, but it didn’t last.
“I took for granted, that we all sort of had a common view of if the Constitution is fundamentally at risk we will all do the right thing. We won’t put politics or our own survival ahead of it, and I was wrong.
“It’s dangerous for the country because if the Republican Party and the leadership of the party, elected Republicans in the House, not all of them, but a great majority of them have been given repeated opportunities to choose between Donald Trump and the Constitution. They’re not choosing the Constitution. Time and time again, they have chosen Trump.”
Cheney said that the Republican Party has “abandoned the values on which it was formed” and it has “become dangerous to democracy.”
“There are some people who say, ‘Well, this issue will go away, Donald Trump will go away.’ That’s not true that he won’t go away, he has to be defeated.”
Trump is the clear front-runner in the GOP presidential nominee race. Morning Consult shows the former president is almost 50 points up over his closest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
According to the RealClearPolitics average of presidential polls done between September 14 and October 3, Trump holds a +1.1 advantage over President Joe Biden.
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Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network. Email tips to Zachery at [email protected]. Follow Zachery on Twitter @zacheryschmidt2.
