If you once told Liz Cheney that she would be on the presidential campaign trail with a Democratic candidate, ousted from the party she spent her life working for, and making Swiftie allusions to an audience at Boston College, she would have said you were full of it.
But stranger things have happened in the past decade.
“There are many policies that I may not agree with Vice President Harris about, but I just have absolutely no doubt, having spent time with her, that she understands the stakes,” Cheney said.
Former Republican Congresswoman Cheney returned to the Heights on Tuesday evening for the Council for Women of BC’s annual colloquium.
Cheney represented Wyoming’s at-large congressional district in the House of Representatives from 2017 to 2023. She served as chair of the House Republican Conference, the third highest-ranking position in the House Republican leadership, from 2019 to 2021, and vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack from 2021 to 2023.
Having spoken at BC just over a year and a half ago, much of Cheney’s talk on Tuesday echoed her remarks from her first visit—the Jan. 6 riots, shifting tides within the Republican Party, and alarm over former President Donald Trump.
But while attendees at her 2023 visit pressed Cheney if she would consider running for president in 2024, this visit was a stop off of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign trail, where Cheney is working to get out a country-over-party vote from Republicans.
“I feel very hopeful about this bipartisan coalition that’s running this presidential election,” Cheney said. “It’s something that’s very moving in a way that I hadn’t expected.”
Cheney joked that her “walk out” song for Harris’ rallies has been “Change (Taylor’s Version)” by Taylor Swift, a tidbit that earned her a few laughs and some light applause from the audience.
While she emphasized that her views don’t align perfectly with those of Harris, Cheney said the tone Harris is prepared to set for the country far outshines Trump’s.
“We are not a cruel nation—we just aren’t,” Cheney said. “When you look at what he did on January 6, when you look at the lies about the way that hurricane victims can get assistance, the lies about Springfield and immigrants, there’s a fundamental cruelty there, and it’s not who we are.”
Cheney knows a thing or two about cruelty—her team spent tens of thousands of dollars on private security following an inundation of death threats she received following her vote to impeach Trump in 2021.
Cheney recalled being on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6 and getting the alarming call from her father, Dick Cheney, that started it all.
“He said, ‘President Trump just said that we have to get rid of the Liz Cheneys in the world,’” Cheney said. “And my dad knew this was dangerous, and when I think about that call from him, and I think about obviously his concern as a father, but his real heartbreak, as well, about our country.”
Cheney said the period immediately following Jan. 6 was a moment of soul-searching and reckoning for the Republican Party—one that ultimately sent her to the party’s outskirts.
“There are many people who I thought would do the right thing but didn’t,” Cheney said of her former colleagues in Congress as they dealt with the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol Building.
Though Cheney is currently a vocal critic of Trump, she was a reluctant supporter of the former president when he faced Hillary Clinton in 2016. Cheney said that while it is important for leaders to be open about changing their minds, it is also important for voters to disseminate honest reconsiderations from placative rhetoric.
“I think voters have to be able to say, ‘All right, that’s sincere,’” Cheney said. “‘That change is a sincere one.’ Or, ‘This politician is saying what they think they should say to get my vote.’”
Cheney also encouraged the audience to be wary of the rhetoric they consume from the Trump campaign in the lead-up to Election Day on Nov. 5.
“When you see the Trump campaign making these statements that they’re so far ahead and they’re in for a big victory, it’s all garbage,” Cheney said. “But they’re trying to condition the ground so that after November 5, they can say, ‘Well, we should have the victory, but it was stolen from us.’”
Despite what she flagged as warning signs in the Trump campaign, shortcomings of her former colleagues, and uncertainty for the weeks and months ahead, Cheney said she continues to hold an abundance of hope for the country’s future—one that relies on young people getting politically active, she added.
“The only thing that ever makes the difference is people who care and people who are willing to go out and work hard and be engaged and advocate for the causes that they care about,” Cheney said. “We need you to do that.”
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