The end is the beginning. Beaten to the hilt in Tuesday’s Republican primary in Wyoming but vowing to ‘do whatever it takes’, in the name of God and freedom, to block Donald Trump’s path, Liz Cheney would likely surrender useful in running for president in 2024. She is thinking about it, of course. Given the dysfunctional electoral system that is that of the United States, she might go and snatch from Trump the handful of votes likely to harm him decisively. We can always guess. How, however, would that cure the far-right cancer that is eating away at the Republican Party?
In the immediacy of the campaign for the mid-term legislative elections in November, we see metastases everywhere. The defeat of M.me Cheney, the lonely Republican heroine of the opposition to Trump, she who had easily been elected three times to the House of Representatives, is emblematic of the stranglehold that the ex-president retains on the party. , of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for ‘inciting insurrection’ during the January 6, 2021 Capitol storming, four were defeated in the primaries, four others did not run again and only two survived the excommunication decreed by the billionaire.
According to the specialized site FiveThirtyEight, at least half of the Republican candidates who will run in November for the House, the Senate, the post of governor, attorney general or secretary of state (responsible for the electoral process) are downright “negationists of the election” (election deniers) or at least deemed it useful to “flirt” with the “stolen presidential” lie. Another site, that of Ballotpedia, shows how important the domination of the candidates dubbed by Trump is: three-quarters of the candidates for a post of governor he supported won. Its influence is of the same order among the candidates for the Senate. That said, seven states still have to hold Republican primaries by November. We imagine that Mme Cheney will not remain silent.
In any case, neither his legal disputes about his tax shenanigans nor the overwhelming evidence gathered against him by the commission of inquiry into the assault of January 6, of which Mme Cheney is the co-chair and whose report is expected by November, has so far weakened her influence on the party and on activists. No more than the search of the FBI at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, which rather rebuilt, until proven otherwise, the unit around his status as a victim.
Liz Cheney had an epiphany, so much the better. A dyed-in-the-wool conservative, belonging to the American upper caste, she remains very close ideologically to Trump for having voted 93% of the time in the House in favor of his policies when he was president. She is also the daughter of Dick Cheney, the superpowered former vice-president and neoconservative of George W. Bush, architect of an undemocratic conception of power through the “imperialization” of the presidency, which Trump cannot use. not disagree. That is to say that, if the Cheneys are today losers in the intra-republican war launched by Trump against the “establishment” and the old “elites”, they have partly prepared the ground for the catastrophe in which sinks American democracy today.
For having succeeded in creating around him a cult of personality, Trump is caricatural at the same time as he is a complex phenomenon. Great is the mystery of the faith that he inspires. Everything merges into a perfect storm of misinformation, victimization, class conflict, Trump’s ability to ignite white Christian identity insecurities, capture righteous popular anger — all the while entertaining the gallery and intimidating his opponents. By purging the ranks of the Republican Party on the basis of his own political correctness, Trump has allowed a new guard to emerge practicing the culture of cancellation in its own way. Mme Cheney is its most spectacular victim.
Electorally insignificant, the very conservative Wyoming, which Trump won with 70% of the vote in 2020, his best national score, is a good illustration of the turn he is trying to impose on the American right. Republicans have always played on the anti-state, anti-federal government vein in states where they saw fit. It is a vein that Trump exploits to the full, which cannot reign without throwing oil on the fire everywhere and all the time. There is a climate of civil war in the country, suggested Liz Cheney this week. In effect. One can hardly hope that the November elections, which should normally be in favor of the Republicans, will help to appease it.