OAN’s Brooke Mallory
6:41 PM – Sunday, May 28, 2023
Liz Cheney, a former U.S. representative and the daughter of Dick Cheney, urged recent college graduates to stand up for the truth and berated her House Republican colleagues for failing to do enough to refute former President Donald Trump’s statements regarding the 2020 election.
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The Wyoming Republican reiterated her harsh critiques of Trump in a commencement address at Colorado College, although she avoided discussing her own political future or Trump’s 2024 reelection bid.
Cheney, who earned her degree in political science from Colorado College in 1988, said she remembered entering a campus building as a political science student and seeing a Bible scripture inscribed over the entrance that read, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”
“After the 2020 election and the attack of January 6th, my fellow Republicans wanted me to lie. They wanted me to say the 2020 election was stolen, the attack of January 6th wasn’t a big deal, and Donald Trump wasn’t dangerous,” Cheney claimed on Sunday.
“I had to choose between lying and losing my position in House leadership,” Cheney continued.
She also made an effort to relate her academic experiences to her work as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
In her three terms in Congress, Cheney advanced to the No. 3 GOP leadership position in the House, a position she later lost after supporting the impeachment of Donald Trump after the U.S. Capitol breach on January 6th, 2021.
In her speech, Cheney addressed issues she has supported since she left office in January, including her work on the House committee looking into the U.S. Capitol breach and defending democracy from the dire threat she claims to see in Trump. Additionally, Cheney urged more women to run for government and made an effort to criticize one of Trump’s lawyers in 2020 for recent comments she made regarding college students voting.
“Cleta Mitchell, an election denier and adviser to former President Trump, told a gathering of Republicans recently that it is crucially important to make sure that college students don’t vote,” Cheney said. “Those who are trying to unravel the foundations of our republic, who are threatening the rule of law and the sanctity of our elections, know they can’t succeed if you vote.”
Mitchell had reportedly brought up the topic of polling booths on college campuses and the convenience of voting as potential issues in an audio clip of her presentation from a recent Republican National Committee retreat.
While Cheney was speaking, a good majority of the audience of young adults and parents cheered, however, many people also booed very loudly. As Cheney spoke, some students who were against her being the speaker even turned their chairs away from the podium.
Since she left office, Cheney’s busy speaking schedule and talking points of choice have increased rumors that she would be considering running in the 2024 GOP presidential primary. However, this is all just speculation currently.
No other Republican politician has been as outspoken and passionate about how much they detest Trump as Cheney has. The irony of this is that while her father served as vice president, a large majority of voters felt the same way about him, and usually much worse. Dick Cheney’s notoriously low 13% approval rating is well known.
Many factors had contributed to Cheney’s low approval rating, like how he reportedly handled the Iraq war, his preferred tactics in torturing detainees, or his love of spying on Americans through the NSA.
“[Dick] Cheney had devised, and Bush approved, an NSA operation to monitor the phone calls and emails of U.S. citizens without a warrant, part of which later became known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program. After more than two years of going along with ‘the vice president’s special program,’ the Justice Department concluded that parts of it were illegal,” The Atlantic reported.
Despite the difficulty of the task, Liz Cheney’s adamant opposition to Trump and her position as vice chairwoman of the House committee gave her a strong platform from which to solicit financial backing for a White House bid.
Super PACs set up to back her campaign are still active, and this month they even paid to run attack commercials against Trump on radio stations in New Hampshire.
Cheney was assigned to a professorship at the University of Virginia after leaving office. She had left because she was succeeded by a Trump-backed Republican who had defeated her in the previous year’s primary.
She will be speaking on Thursday at the Michigan-based Mackinac Policy Conference.