Liz Cheney is calling on George W. Bush to make his voice heard on the “danger that Donald Trump poses.”
During a live interview that aired Friday on The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast, Cheney said, “I can’t explain why George W. Bush hasn’t spoken out, but I think it’s time, and I wish that he would.”
The episode was recorded last week during The New Yorker Festival, prior to Trump’s shocking comments that he wanted to see Cheney “with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her” and “guns trained on her face” this week.
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And yet Cheney seemed to foreshadow those comments when she talked about taking Trump’s words both seriously and literally. “You do get into a place when, we certainly saw it happen with Trump, ‘Well he doesn’t really mean [it]. What he’s saying is crazy, but he doesn’t really mean it’—which of course post January 6, post the 2020 election, there’s no question that he means it,” she said.
Cheney’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, served under Bush, and has come out against Trump, saying he should “never be trusted with power again,” and backing Harris for president. Liz Cheney told The New Yorker’s David Remnick that it was “not a difficult decision at all” for her father to endorse Harris.
Bush, on the other hand, has kept mum about Trump and his incendiary rhetoric. His daughter Barbara Bush issued a shock endorsement of Harris earlier this week.
Barbara Bush campaigned for Harris in the crucial state of Pennsylvania over the weekend, telling People she was “inspired” to join the vice president and was “hopeful [Pennsylvania voters] will move our country forward and protect women’s rights.”
George W. Bush was asked by the Daily Mail whom he and his wife would vote for in the 2024 election back in September, but he declined to answer. In 2016, he didn’t vote for either candidate, and in 2020, he told People that he wrote in Condoleezza Rice, rather than choose a candidate.
