May 12, 2012
The day this goes up, Liz Cheney is likely to be removed from her position as the third highest ranking Republican in the House of Representatives. If she isn't, she certainly seems to be on her way to that result and has nearly forced the issue.
If present indications are correct, she's likely to be replaced by Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, whose is much more to the center politically than Cheney, and whose only qualification for holding the position is that she ironically supports the Donald Trump claims that the election was stolen. Cheney, who voted much more often for Trump policies than Stefanik, will lose her position as she's consistent that Trump lost the election and won't back down on her view that Trump's post election efforts, and those of his supporters, resulted in an impeachable offense. Cheney is likely to be remembered for her actions at this time alone, if nothing else (although I feel there will be other things to remember her for). I.e., history will judge her kindly for her steadfastness. Stefanik is likely to be judged much more harshly by history, indeed likely pretty harshly by 2023.
There was room on the old thread, but clearly we're entering a new stage of this race both locally and nationally, with much of the drama, and nauseating drama at that, being played out on our home turf.
The drama.
That latter fact, I'd note, will result in piles of misbegotten punditry opining on what the residents of the state think, with very little of it being close to accurate.
What brings this to a head is Elizabeth Cheney's refusal, as noted, to back down and adopt one of the two Republican mantras that are in circulation right now, one being adoption of the Trump lie that he won the election and the other being "we need to just look forward right now", which is a way of simply trying to ignore what happened and hope it doesn't matter. There are plenty of GOP figures everywhere adopting the first position, and most of the significant members of the Republican Party in the Senate have adopted the second.
Cheney, on the other hand, is calling for squarely addressing it, investigating it, and casting those responsible into the political wilderness.
Cheney's steadfastness is proving to be a difficult matter for Republicans who feel that they need to be aligned with Trump, in spite of whatever they personally privately believe, as they fear Trump voters. They ought to be fearing voters to be sure, but they're likely judging this incorrectly, perhaps massively so.
Cheney on the other hand not only is steadfast on her position, but to the consternation of Congressional Republicans, won't hold her tongue on it. Truth be known, many of at least the older Republicans probably secretly agree with her but political calculation combined with cowardice causes them to remain silent.
Cheney's position is a brave position. But Cheney doesn't act without thinking, so the question is, politically, and indeed personally, what is she thinking?
Well, I think she's gamed it out, and is aiming for 2024. . . with sights set on the White House. If that sounds implausible, let's look at where the GOP is right now, and why its likely to get a double dope slap due to Donald Trump.
The miscalculation
In order to do that, we need to look back prior to the 2016 election and figure out what the GOP was then, who was a member of that party, and who in the GOP is still from that party, and who isn't.
And we really have to go back to. . . well the beginning.
The GOP was originally a liberal party. There's no two ways about it. Founded by the anti slavery Whigs, it was heavy for a role for government in the economy and for equality before the law for all races. On that last item, as is often pointed out, there was a scale of views and it is far from the case that every Republican was free from racist views or even wanted to free the slaves in the states where slavery existed. Indeed, that isn't the case, by and large. But the Civil War answered that question and the GOP evolved during the war.
That was the party that emerged from the war. It was for civil rights, albeit in a 19th Century context, it was for a large scale role by government in the economy (it had passed the Homestead Act, built the Transcontinental Railroad, and had passed the Mining Law of 1872) and big business loved it. If that latter fact seems strange, keep in mind that government involvement in the economy at that time tended to very much favor large industries over large landowners. The Democrats of the period, anchored to the South, remained fixated in the Southern agriculture economy which favored large landowners and which was hostile to industry.
With the compromise ending Reconstruction in the 1870s, the Party remained pro civil rights but not in a terribly effective way. But it effectively remained in favor of government intervention in the economy, in a 19th Century fashion, and it remained favored by business. The legacy of its origin, however, caused it to retain a strong progressive strain and when Progressivism developed as a political force in the late 1890s, it surfaced in the GOP.
Indeed, it briefly captured the GOP during the Theodore Roosevelt era, but it soon emerged in the Democratic Party as well. Roosevelt's failed run for a third term and his death soon thereafter settled the question in the GOP, and it rapidly became a conservative northern party. It remained pro civil rights, a legacy of its history, but not terribly effectively. It came to soon be characterized overall by a business oriented type of conservatism. That conservatism caused the party to fade from influence in the 1930s due to the Great Depression as the liberal Democrats, one wing of the Democratic Party, emerged. That wing remains in the Democrats to this day, and following the death of the Southern Democratic Party in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, it's what characterizes the modern Democratic Party.
The conservative GOP of the 1930s, on the other hand, lacked a central theme of any kind other than sort of a gut reaction opposition to the Roosevelt policies of the New Deal and an increasing rejection of the rest of the world. By the onset of World War Two it was solidly isolationist.
The Second World War rapidly made the GOP of the 1930s look pretty sad and it limited on through the war and into the post war world. It had always been solidly anti communist, however, and the onset of the Cold War combined with the Red episodes of the late 40s and early 50s rapidly changed the party into a conservative anti communist party with strong business support. That was the party that existed from the late 1940s through the Nixon era.
During that era, as we've dealt with elsewhere, William F. Buckley came up as a conservative thinker and an increasing number of conservative converts coalesced around his thinking. When Richard Nixon fell from grace and Gerald Ford became President the party went into turmoil. That's the period, however, that Republicans George Bush I and Dick Cheney began to make their appearance.
It was Ronald Reagan who brought that new thinking into office, although with huge compromises to get there. The most significant compromise was abandoning the party's long strong backing of civil rights in order to woo Southern Democrats away from the party, a policy that was nearly immediately successful. Gambling on civil rights having already been a success and therefore not needing ongoing strong backing, the gamble entailed an unforeseen risk of opening the party up to strong reactionary elements that didn't share the Buckley view of the future. Already by the end of Reagan's second term those forces were emerging in the form of Republicans who were extremely hostile to government itself and who were reviving long discounted theories of states rights and nullification.
The Reagan Era carried on up until the 2016 election.
Donald Trump's real success in 2016 was based on two things, one of which effectively destroyed the Buckleyite intellectual conservatism of the GOP. The first reason for his success was the incredibly dim nomination of Hilary Clinton as the Democratic nominee. A prior political failure, she was detested by a large number of Americans. Without that misstep, Trump would not have become President.
The second reason, however, was that both parties had repeatedly betrayed the blue collar working class of the country in regard to any number of policies and they'd had enough. Trump picked up on that and that class, torn between Bernie Sanders whom the Democrats worked to tank, and Donald Trump, went with Trump. They nearly had to as the Democrats worked to stab Sanders in the back.
The nomination of Trump surprised the Republican establishment which didn't believe it could occur. And his election likewise did as well. With that having occurred, the wide assumption in and out of the party was that the new populist could be co-opted as a voting base for the Buckleyite party and serve as loyal soldiers, more or less. This miscalculation, made by nearly everyone, was epic.
Instead, what occurred is the populist seized control of the party, with Trump working to see that his base rose up in it. Now the Republicans are effectively in the same position that they were in 1912. They're two parties and they don't' know what to do.
Inside the GOP there's basically three lines of thought right now. One is that if the problem is ignored, it'll go away. Trump will go away, and the populists will lose their fire and actually become lukewarm loyal foot soldiers, just as expected in 2016. This is the view that predominated following Trump's defeat, but there are real fears that this thinking was wrong. This is basically the McConnell view.
The second view is the populist view, the view of people like Marjorie Taylor Green or any number of other parties. That view is that they are the GOP. With a short sense of history, and no particular desire to visit it, their view is that henceforth the party is a Trumpite populist party. This view varies in scale, with some, like Lindsey Graham, taking a mild view of it that's not hostile to democracy. But some in this camp are outright hostile to it, taking a strongly nativist view on who is and who is not even entitled to have an opinion that counts. The latter wing is, frankly, scary and borders on fascism.
The third view is the calculating long view. That, I suspect, is the Cheney view.
Cheney, from a savvy political family, is gambling that she'll survive the 2022 Wyoming Congressional election, which I think is a good gamble, and that some time in the next two years Trump will fall in some fashion. My guess is that she's wagering that Trump will be indicted. I somewhat wonder if, given her connections with the intelligence community, she knows things back channel that not only would contribute to a Trump fall, but a major downfall. I.e., George Bush I, who employed her father, was head of the CIA. Dick Cheney was head of the Defense Department. What if she knows or suspects that the ongoing claims of a Trump connection with the Russians are true? [1].
It's also possible that she's just counting votes, long term, and is calculating, and I'd guess correctly, that in 2022 the GOP is going to take a pounding.
Consider this. Republican Senators haven't represented the majority of Americans, by population, since 1996 and they've been basically a minority party, in terms of party registration for eons.
That's deceptive some ways, as for part of that time the Democrats were basically two parties, but its hugely significant for others. Right now only 25% of the American public registers as Republicans. Only 31% are registered Democrats, which isn't actually a lot better. 40% of American voters are registered as independents, taking a "pox on all your houses" approach.
This isn't as new or dramatic, we'd note, as some would have it. In 2004, for example, the figures were basically reversed with more people registering Republican than Democrat, so thing scan and do change. What is holding steady, however, is that the center independents are now a huge political demographic.
That middle demographic splits pretty evenly between Republicans and Democrats, but it also is reluctant enough not to join either party. And since the election this year Republicans have been joining it in droves.
Those voters are center right voters who probably never liked Trump but who were degusted or revolted by things that occurred in November and then again in January which the GOP is now doubling down on. Those are the same voters who supported every GOP candidate after Gerald Ford and before Trump, and who were uncomfortable with Trump from the onset. Now they're repelled by him.
With over 40% of the independents leaning Democratic from the onset, the Democrats have a clear voting advantage to start with. This has already been critical in both the November 2020 election and runoff elections. While the GOP did well overall in November, starting with Trump's post election antics and absolute refusal to believe he lost the election, the disdain for him is spreading to the party at large. The GOP should recover the House in 2022. I'm guessing is that Cheney is betting they won't.
And that alone may explain her calculations. If the Democrats advance in the House, and the Senate, in 2022 it'll be a second referendum on Trump. It's my guess that both of those things will occur, in part because supporting the GOP right now comes at the intellectual price of supporting Trump's ongoing claims he won when he didn't, and in part becaus it comes at he price of putting up with people like Marjorie Taylor Greene. And the remaining part will be because the country will have resumed full employment by that time and it might be on to a transformational economy, like it or not. If that's all the case Cheney can emerge in an environment in which political reckoning has to start occurring and will. It wasn't Nixon fans, for example, who came back into power when the GOP did in 1980.
And if that is the case when the GOP goes to pick a Presidential candidate in 2024, it isn't going to be people like Ted Cruz who chose to go down on the Trump ship who are going to be the front contenders for the GOP Presidential nomination. The Democratic candidate will be Kamala Harris. The Republicans are going to almost have to nominate a woman. Liz Cheney is about the only candidate who will be on the field. Not the only one, but almost.
That latter fact, I'm guessing, is in her calculations.
Of course, she has to survive the 2022 election in Wyoming first.
The Wyoming primary
I'm guessing that she will.
Wyoming isn't really as conservatives as people like to imagine and it has a really long history of reelecting incumbents no matter what. And its a one party state.
That last fact means that those people who naturally would be in the Democratic Party in the state are in the Republican Party as the primary is the election. Republicans know that which is why they've been attempting to pass purity tests and the like.
Wyomingites are also highly nativist and this reflects itself back in the fact that a lot of the politicians that listing the county parties don't realize that they're listening to imports, quite often, who have the time and funds to be involved in politics whereas typical Wyomingites don't. Or those involved at the county level are from narrow interest but likewise have the time and the funds.
This is why once things get out of the parties and into the elections, Wyomingites don't tend to vote as conservative as people suppose they will. Cheney' sticking to her guns probably has far more support among voters than GOP county committees would ever guess. Moreover, a couple of the candidates that are set to run against her didn't meet with early success in their own counties, suggesting that support form them even where they have won may be thinner than supposed.
And the nativist element is accompanied by a feeling that we ought to support those who are in office, even when we don't like them that much, and we'll rally around one of our own who is under attack. That means a lot of people who are mad at Cheney now will vote for her in the primary election. We don't like Matt Gaetz running around tell us who to vote for. And finally, the impact on the state of politics imported from out of state during good economic times seems likely to start drying up, perhaps forever. People who moved up from oil producing states elsewhere and brought their regional politics with them are likely to start moving back to their states of origin. Those like Foster Freiss who moved in with large bankrolls may, if the economy of the state keeps heading in the direction its headed in, find that even the GOP in the state will find ways to tax them here. If all that's the case, and to at least some extent it will be, the GOP may find there's more doggin' heel cow crap on your Stetson voters than there are low heel designer boots and clean broad brims around, with all that means in terms of traditional state views.
Between now and next year, we're going to hear a lot about this constantly. But we're over a year away. Cheney will go into the primary with a plethora of candidates against here, but I'm guessing and she's betting, that she'll be the only one to emerge. The more candidates that try to elbow their way in between then and now the more likely that is. And if Trump loyalty turns out to be loyalty to an indicted former President whose clearly guilty of something, or one who has Russian taints, that's more likely still.
The question may be, then, what happens in 2024.
The current race:
So, in regard to the House race, more than a year away, whose running. Well. . .
Liz Cheney. You know who she is.
Anthony Bouchard: Bouchard is a member of the legislature from Goshen County who has been in a lot of local political spats and who is a far right firebrand in the legislature. He originally came into the public eye through a firearms organization he's central to. He was also the first well known candidate to announce against Cheney.
Bouchard is firmly in the Trump camp and appeared, with Chuck Gray, at the Matt Gaetz rally against Cheney.
Chuck Gray: Gray is a hard right member of the legislature whose first appearance in the Wyoming political scene was an unsuccessful run at the seat he now occupies in the House. He was appointed to that seat upon his predecessor's death and is a Natrona County radio personality.
Gray and Bouchard will be competing for essentially the same demographic and in some ways have analogous political careers. When this occurs, it tends to result in a regional contest, with supporters from various regions supporting their local candidate. That disfavors Gray as candidates from Casper are rarely supported by the rest of the state, although a lot of the state isn't that keen on Cheyenne either. In any event, if Gray and Bouchard stay in through the end of the primary they'll soak up a lot of the support base for each other.
Bryan Eugene Keller: He's a resident of Laramie County who has registered but I don't know anything else about him. A Google search didn't turn up much either. It's likely safe to say that Keller, absent something really surprising, will draw very few votes in the race.
Denton Knapp: Knapp is a retired U.S. Army Colonel and a current Brig. Gen. in the California National Guard. He's from Gillette originally and claims to be generally fond of the Cheney and to respect her past role in Congress.
Knapp received a lot of press for his announcement yesterday, but almost all of it boils down to "Retired Army Colonel. . . " which won't get him far. In the last Senate Race one candidate was prominently noted to be a retired Air Force officer and that didn't take him anywhere. Truth be known, while the country remains in a post war hagiographic era regarding veterans, a lot of that has become shallow acknowledgement and his long career in the service isn't likely to get him very far and may even hurt him in nativist Wyoming. Gone for thirty years? Brig Gen of the California National Guard? He'll have to come up with a lot more than that.
Knapp is presently a Californian, living in Orange County, and will have to reestablish residency in Wyoming. This will also hurt him. After a thirty year absence and then a relocation to Wyoming, coming back just to run for Congress won't be well received. In fact, it wasn't well received when Liz Cheney did that, which is why in her first race she took fewer votes than her two combined opponents in the primary.
Marissa Selvig: Mayor of Pavilion. Selvig announced early and has a website, but has received very little attention thereafter. She's disadvantaged to a degree as Bouchard and Gray have a bigger audience by default.
Selvig interestingly focuses on her dedication to the constitution, which she holds is the "second" most important document in the American system, the first being the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence is a single purpose document with no post declaration legal import, so that's an unusual position. Otherwise, her stated positions are conventional typical local Republican.
Selvig's campaign is unlikely to gain steam anywhere. Her stated positions don't really serve to distinguish her from Cheney, and if she was to distinguish herself by going in the now trendy rightward direction, she'd be indistinguishable from Bouchard and Gray.
Darin Smith: Smith is a businessman and lawyer in Cheyenne, according to the information he's put out. He was the campaign manager for the failed Foster Freiss Gubernatorial run and his views reflect that. Freiss is a backer of his. That fact probably gives Smith a spending advantage over other candidates trying to unseat Cheney. He stands out in that he's less fanatic in his endorsement of the Trump election stolen myth while still endorsing it in a lukewarm fashion.
Smith's stated positions on his campaign site by and large are typical for the Wyoming GOP including the insistence that "we" need to get coal back on the market. The problem with some of those positions is that they fail to acknowledge trends that have now passed a certain jump the shark level. Coal was declining, for example, under Trump. Regarding Trump, Smith's campaign site has the "Take America Back" phrase on the first page, which is really slang for "I believe the election was stolen" to some ears, whether Smith means that or not.
Smith joins Cheney in being a lawyer, which none of the other candidates are, which means that he knows that a lot of the pro Trump rhetoric that's grounded in the Constitution and what not is legally baseless and he should know its factually baseless as well. It'll be interesting to see if he, like Knapp, attempts to nuance his position on the 2020 election.
The thing that uniformly distinguishes all of these candidates from Cheney, except perhaps for Selvig and Keller, the latter of whom is a mystery, is that they're all backing Trump to some degree, with Knapp the less enthusiastic about it. Indeed the irony of this race is that Cheney's stance has brought her a fair amount of support from rank and file Wyomingites while also bringing her the ire of the county parties. Her original weakness was that she wasn't from here, which was a strike against her the first time she ran. In that race, the two main opponents split the vote and she took office. Since then she's risen in Congress and as a result of her stance, has risen in admiration in the eyes of a lot of people who were lukewarm about her before. She's almost certain to win this race.
No Democrats, by the way, have announced to run as of yet. Somebody will, but it will be the Republican Primary that determines the issue.
Other races? Well, there is one that has a competition, sort of, right now, and that's the Governor's Race.
Mark Gordon: Gordon is the incumbent, he'll run again. He hasn't registered yet.
Gordon defeated a slate of hard right candidates in the 2018 election. Some of those candidates were pretty unhappy about the results with Foster Freiss being the most unhappy. Given this we can expect some hard right Republicans to surface and challenge him, although he'll win reelection.
In fact, one such candidate has announced he'll run, but hasn't registered.
Rex Rammell: Rammell is a perennial and unelectable candidate who ran last time and will again. His views can be characterized as being on the fringe right/libertarian side.
May 12, 2021, cont:
Yesterday there were rumors around that Ed Buchanan, the Secretary of State, might toss his hat in the ring for Cheney's position. Some time in the day, as being reported now, he made it clear in no uncertain terms that he has no intent of doing so whatsoever.
Kasie Hunt of NBC news, who is one of my favorite reports, has written a long op ed that's been published on the NBC site. I recommend finding it. It contains these powerful sentiments:
In the days since, I’ve struggled with how to cover the attempts from various politicians to rewrite the history of what happened on Jan. 6.
I was there. I saw what happened. I saw and heard how scared everyone was. I see now people standing in the way of an accounting of what happened because they have political ambitions or because they are concerned about the consequences to their own families or careers.
I have to choose, every day, to keep the faith in the American project, the American dream. To keep the faith in a system of government that a handful of ambitious idealists believed in several centuries ago, so much so that they built the Capitol dome not just as a monument but a living place. A deeply flawed one, to be sure, but one that at least strove to form a better, more perfect union.
One hundred days after my home away from home was invaded by a violent mob intent on destroying the foundation of our democracy, I am choosing to believe in something so much bigger, so much more enduring, despite all of its flaws.
Yesterday, also, Republican Senator Josi Ernst of Iowa, Republican, accused her own party of "cancel culture" in its effort to remove Cheney from her leadership position.'
Cheney, for her part, delivered a defiant speech, stating:
Every one of us who has sworn the oath must act to prevent the unraveling of our democracy. This is not about policy. This is not about partisanship. This is about our duty as Americans. Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar, I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former President's crusade to undermine our democracy.
Meanwhile, the long pondered possibility of the GOP splitting into two parties is now occurring. A body of influential Republicans is publishing a letter later this week throwing the gauntlet down on the party and indicating their intent to form a new party if the GOP continues in its Trump centric direction.
Pundits will note that no third party has been successful since the Republican Party formed in the wake of the Whig collapse. But no major party has seen a rift this great develop in its ranks. The only comparable one is the one that existed in the Democratic Party in the 30s through the 60s, but that was effectively papered over by the Democrats themselves which accommodated southern Democrats in spite of their effectively having nothing in common with northern Democrats.
The last major effort at a third party was the Progressive Party in 1912, but the lesson there may not quite be what pundits would recall. The Progressive Party was very nearly successful in that election in spite of having almost no lead in time prior to the election, and Republicans who departed for it did control some state houses until the leaders of the Progressive Party repaired their rift with the GOP by 1916. When Theodore Roosevelt left it, and then died, it effectively ended the party.
Taken that way, the party was too closely associated with one man, Theodore Roosevelt, and ideology, which it definitely had, wasn't enough to keep it going. The GOP right now is entirely associated with one man, Donald Trump, and while it does have a populist set of ideals, contrary to what some have maintained, their so closely bound up with an singular, very old, figure that its on shaky ground for that reason alone. Those fighting to be Trump's heir, and they are doing just that, really don't have broad popular support. Moreover, as the party is presently so closely identified with Trump, its ideological position is muddled and unclear. Political movements which have a singular human identify tend to fail as people are always imperfect and, moreover, personality cults don't last.
Starting a new party would undoubtedly present a long shot of sorts for those bolting, but the GOP only can count 25% of registered voters anyway. That's a lot different than the situation in 1912. It's claimed about 47% or so of Republicans are real Trump fans, which is a lot, but that's 47% of 25%, which isn't a lot. If 53% of Republicans aren't Trump diehards, we can figure some percentage of them would migrate to the new party. If it was even only half of them, that would mean that the new party would be about 10% of registered voters and the GOP a mere 15%. If we further figure that about half of the independents lean Republican and half of them likewise would lean towards a more traditional, and more democratic, conservative party, that would make the new party fully competitive with the GOP. Of course, both would be doomed in the 2022 election.
Having said that, at least a few members of Congress would likely switch to the new party. As the GOP is the minority party in both houses, it would be more or less politically safe for them to do so as it won't cause the GOP to lose control of either house. Moreover, the few who did that would suddenly be power brokers, the way Joe Manchin presently is. Indeed, it wouldn't be completely impossible that some middle of the road Democrats might switch as well, although that would be politically much more risky. If some were willing to do it, it'd create an interesting situation in which a handful of Senators and Congressmen would effectively control Congress, and govern from the middle.
Which might actually be what the American public wants.
May 12, 2021, cont:
Headline from the Tribune:
Cheney loses leadership post after House Republican vote to remove her
May 12, 2021, cont:
Cheney to Kasie Hunt:
I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office. We have seen the danger that he continues to provoke with his language. We've seen his lack of commitment & dedication to the Constitution.
May 14, 2021
House Republicans voted to put Stefanik in third position in the GOP in the House. She's to the left of Cheney, but is a Trump backer.
Without saying as much, she's also female and it seems fairly clear that she knew that it was likely that the GOP, in replacing Cheney, would favor a woman in the same position.
For her part, Cheney, if anything, has ramped up her opposition to Trump.
Taking a step back from all the theatrics, it seems clear following all of this is that an internal GOP struggle is going on regarding how to deal with the Trump base, including Trumpites recently elected to the House. For the most part, it's clear that there's really more members of the GOP "establishment" than acknowledged in the party. The Senate Republicans pretty clearly are in that camp. Some in the House are as well, and then there's various shades of Trumpites in the House. Some are extreme.
The problem is how to deal with real hardcore admiration for Trump out in Republican areas. Many rank and file members of the party have either gone over to Trumpism or came into the party as Trumpite populists. The Republicans don't want to drive them away or force them to greater extremity.
Most of the leadership has adopted the strategy of simply ignoring all of it based on the thesis that Trump will go away but his base will remain, at which time the establishment wing of the party can reassert itself, take control of the party back, but retain the support of the populist. The party seems comfortable with being a populist party overall, providing, from the establishment view, it can shed itself of the more extreme Trump elements. This is pretty clearly the position that Mitch McConnell is taking. The gamble is that they won't lose ground at a devesting rate as moderate Republicans become independents. Taking the 30,000 foot view, that's the problem that most of the longer term House Republicans were taking with Liz Cheney, as they were upset that she wouldn't shut up.
People with Cheney's view, however, hold that the party must flat out confront the attempt to defeat the election which Trump waged following his defeat or it'll forever taint the party and doom it to extinction. By analogy, the majority establishment approach views Trump's actions as having caused a bad bruise where as Cheney views it as a gushing wound. The majority approach in the House felt it couldn't accommodate her vocal opposition to Trump as it stood to drive off Republican populist voters who were completed vested in Trump. However, it appears that many in the establishment in the Senate feel that it would have been better to continue to allow her to speak. The wisdom of that latter approach is that Cheney hasn't stopped speaking, and if anything is speaking louder than ever.
Finally, there are those in the House that are completely vested in the House. The establishment wing's problem with them is that they won't shut up either. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, is busy trying to pick fights with people like AOC. And Matt Gaetz, potentially facing charges of paying for underaged sex, is still touring around being very Trumpy and visible.
Nobody knows how this is going to play out yet. The GOP, which did well overall in the last election, is being presented with a lot of issues by an administration that's leaning heavily to the left and which is gambling with the economy and the border. These are tailor made issues for the GOP. The House leadership feared that it couldn't get to them as long as Trump remains an issue, and Cheney, they felt, was making it an issue. Cheney feels Trump is an issue anyway and he needs to be openly kicked to the curb.
The irony, therefore, is that Trump remains such a polarizing figure that he may well go on to doom Republican chances, as noted above, in 2022 and 2024.
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