Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney spoke with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC for the first time Monday to explain some key parts of her forthcoming book, Oath and Honor, which contains a dire warning of a second Donald Trump administration and castigates any members of her party who want to usher it in.
At one point, Cheney describes how, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, she felt that Trump allies’ schemes to overturn the result would eventually run their course, and then the president would concede.
“Each time I saw something come up, and I kept thinking—and I think a lot of us kept thinking—all right, look, he’s going to bring these court challenges but, of course, once the courts have ruled, he will concede and move on,” she told Maddow.
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But even after lawsuits got tossed out of court one after another, Trump and some of his closest advisers and lawyers didn’t relent, she said.
“Each time we thought we were at an end, we weren’t really at an end,” she recalled. “I think this was probably the most chilling moment where it was suddenly real that this wasn’t just some sort of a PR effort to suggest that he hadn’t lost the election. There was a very real plan to stop us from counting legitimate electoral votes. And frankly, that realization and that recognition, it was nauseating because it was so scary."
In her book, Cheney details the more than 60 lawsuits that were lost by Trump’s campaign or others filing in support of his cause, leading to the Jan. 6 insurrection. The former lawmaker warned Maddow that Trump, who faces felony indictments in Georgia and Washington, D.C., over his attempts to overturn the election, might not adhere to court rulings should he become president again.
“If we get into a situation where you have a president who is charged with ensuring that the laws are faithfully executed, who has just this awesome power… to determine whether or not this country is going to continue to be a republic, is going to continue to function as a nation of laws, when you have a president who is willing to go to war with the rule of law, to ignore the rulings of the courts if he doesn’t agree with them, that has the potential to unravel everything,” she said.
Cheney’s book comes out Tuesday.
