In Her Bestselling Memoir, Liz Cheney Can’t Bring Herself to Mention the Monster Under the Bed

Without a doubt, the nation owes a debt to Liz Cheney, whose new memoir, Oath and Honor, rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists this week. The book recounts the aftermath of the 2020 election, as Cheney—a politician of the type that used to be described as a rock-ribbed conservative—found herself increasingly at odds with the party that has dominated her life. Daughter of the man who, as George W. Bush’s vice president, is widely considered the architect of the Iraq war, representative from the deep-red state of Wyoming, she was shocked to see GOP leaders she had once respected kowtowing to Donald Trump’s claims that the election had been stolen.

“The things we do for the Orange Jesus,” she overheard Republican Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee sigh as he signed a document objecting to the electoral count on Jan. 6, 2021, not long before a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. As the rioters attempted to break down the doors to the House chamber, members were told they needed to prepare to hide under their chairs. “We need to get the ladies off the aisle,” announced Trump loyalist ringleader Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, who reached a hand out to Cheney, offering, “Let me help you up.” Cheney understandably went ballistic (this was not the first time she’d been treated with clueless condescension by her GOP colleagues) and swatted his hand. “Get away from me,” Cheney reports she retorted. “You f—ing did this.”

Cheney’s adamant position on Trump’s loss and her role as co-chair on the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 attack killed her own reelection bid in Wyoming, a genuine sacrifice many of her fellow GOP officials lacked the guts to make. She helped secure the testimony of dozens of witnesses, overwhelmingly Republicans, to Trump’s multiple schemes to overthrow the election. Her stern, composed demeanor during the televised hearings, where she deftly managed to embody implacable authority without triggering the usual misogynist reaction, earned her surprised fans on the left. She plausibly claims some credit for the failure of Trump-endorsed, election-denying candidates in the 2022 midterms.

As Rachel Maddow said in a recent interview with Cheney, she may disagree with the former congresswoman on just about every policy issue, but she still admires Cheney’s “relentless” nailing of the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and spinelessness of her GOP colleagues when it comes to Trump. In Oath and Honor, Cheney condemns former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy as “craven” and lacking in “the courage and the honor to abide by his oath to the Constitution.” Mike Johnson, the current speaker of the house, she reports, tricked Republican members into signing onto an amicus brief supportive of Trump’s false claims of election fraud by lying to them about the document’s contents. Of New York Republican Elise Stefanik, Cheney writes, “Many of us who had known Elise since before she abandoned all principle were curious about how she had lost her sense of right and wrong.”

Bracing as it is to see a Republican politician unafraid to call Trump and his cronies as she sees them, Oath and Honor is not without its evasions. What makes Trump memoirs so fascinating (and I’ve read a lot) is the many varieties of self-deception they exhibit. What do people tell themselves before hitching their wagon to a narcissistic grifter with absolutely no morals? Some, like Cassidy Hutchinson, were simply too naïve and dazzled by the glamour of national politics to realize what they were getting into. Others, like former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, could not resist Cabinet positions that represented the apotheosis of their careers. One-time national security adviser John Bolton made the mistake of thinking he was the smartest guy in any room and therefore could bend Trump to his own ends.

But as Oath and Honor tells it, Cheney seems to have suddenly woken up in December 2020 to find American democracy under attack. Liz Cheney is no fool. She knew Trump cared nothing for the American principles she says she cherishes, that he had no idea how to govern, and that he can’t even conceive of a motivation beyond self-interest. Nevertheless, as a representative, she voted with Trump 93 percent of the time during his presidency. Her outrage that Trump refused to honor the peaceful transfer of power and tried to overthrow the election is well taken, but what did she expect? If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

Oath and Honor often invokes the Founding Fathers, brave Americans who died fighting for our freedoms, Abraham Lincoln, and Ronald Reagan. These are the touchstones of Cheney’s patriotism, and it is heartening that in this rather gaseous rhetoric she found the gumption to stand up for the Constitution and her oath to protect it. But she can’t seem to bring herself to ask how the party she loves has degenerated to the degree that this is the man chosen to lead it.

Cheney’s brand of Republicanism is “pro-business” and favors “small government”— euphemisms for eliminating taxes on the rich and allowing large corporations to do whatever they want to the environment and their workers, while the government limits its activities to handing out fat military contracts and securing corporate economic interests overseas. These policies aren’t very popular, and after decades of free-market economics, wealth has become concentrated in so few hands that the people who actually stand to benefit from Cheney-style conservatism could barely fill a convention center, let alone constitute a significant voting bloc.

To win over enough voters to keep themselves in office, the GOP has had to drum up culture-war division and redirect working-class resentment from the rich to the educated. Just how much Republican leadership actually believes in the social conservatism it uses to attract voters is forever up for debate. Cheney herself is ostensibly pro-life, yet Oath and Honor displays an attitude toward women and their competence and potential that can only be called feminist. Would Cheney insist that one of her own daughters bring to term an unwanted pregnancy that endangered her life or threatened her career? Cheney’s sister, Mary, is married to a woman. In 2013, while running for the Senate, Liz said she opposed same-sex marriage, causing a rift in her family. She later admitted on 60 Minutes that she was “wrong,” but did she ever really mean that opposition in the first place, or was she just pandering to the same base she condemns McCarthy, Johnson, and Jordan for appeasing?

The base haunts Oath and Honor. It’s the boogeyman under the bed that Cheney can barely bring herself to mention, let alone scrutinize. The problem, she insists, is that Trump, in his seemingly omnipotent malevolence, has misled American “patriots” and lashed them into a paranoid frenzy. That he did so using a well-developed propaganda apparatus long employed by Republican politicians to stoke culture-war hatred and fear goes unacknowledged.

Never in Oath and Honor does Liz Cheney admit that Trump’s following is a Frankenstein’s monster that her Republican Party built to win elections, a monster that then turned against it. Kudos to her for realizing how dangerous it has become and doing the best she can to fight it; she has made and is making a genuine contribution to beating back Trumpism, and we can’t afford to smack her away and say, “You f—ing did this!” But this understanding has come awfully late. If only she and the rest of her party had woken up sooner.