ANKENY, IOWA – DECEMBER 02: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks … [+]
Former Rep. Liz Cheney says the stakes in the 2024 presidential election are far higher than one party winning over another—that democracy itself will be on the ballot. In an interview Monday morning on NBC’s Today, Cheney told Savannah Guthrie that “a vote for Donald Trump may mean the last election that you ever get to vote in.”
Cheney said she believes that if Trump wins and returns to the White House, he would move to extend his stay in office beyond his second term. “You think he would try to stay in power forever?” Guthrie asked.
“Absolutely,” Cheney said. “He’s already done it once. And in fact, if you look at what he did in the run-up to January 6th, in terms of his pressure on the vice president not to count legitimate electoral votes, his pressure on the Department of Justice, on state officials, and then refusing to send help when the Capitol was under attack, he’s already attempted to seize power.”
EDINBURG, TEXAS – NOVEMBER 19: Former President Donald Trump gives remarks at the South Texas … [+]
Cheney, who served as a key Republican on the January 6 Committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, lost her bid for re-election. In a new memoir, she writes about the months after the 2020 election, including a description of a “really depressed” Donald Trump—so shattered by his loss that he was “not eating.”
Trump, who continues to dominate in most early Republican presidential polls, used his Truth Social platform to attack Cheney early Monday morning, writing that “Crazy Liz Cheney, who suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome at a level rarely seen before, writes in her boring new book that Keven (sic) McCarthy said he came to Mar-a-Lago after the RIGGED election because “the former president was depressed and not eating.” That statement is not true. I was not depressed, I WAS ANGRY, and it was not that I was not eating, it was that I was eating too much.”
WASHINGTON, DC – December 19: Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as the January 6th Committee meets for its … [+]
Cheney, in her interview with Savannah Guthrie, said that voters will have to choose next November between voting for Trump—and voting for the Constitution. Cheney said America’s democracy survived the aftermath of the 2020 election because there were people around Trump and people in battleground states “who stopped him” and did not give in to pressure to overturn election results.
“We won’t have that safeguard again,” Cheney said, with the possibility of the United States becoming a dictatorship “a very real concern. And I don’t say any of that lightly.”