Is Dick Cheney running for president against Donald Trump in 2024 or supporting his daughter’s primary bid? Hard to tell from this ad.
By this point, no one actually expects Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney to win her primary on August 16, most polls have her down at least double-digits, sometimes more.
Cheney’s opponent, the Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman, has run a good campaign and continues to resonate with the voters in the state.
Much to the contrary, Liz Cheney continues digging herself deeper and doubling down on her anti-Trump rhetoric.
Never fear, however, because Dad’s coming to the rescue. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, a longtime Wyoming resident, like his daughter, released an ad today which was more aimed at bashing Donald Trump than offering reasons why Liz Cheney should keep her congressional seat:
The ad itself seems beneath the former vice president. It’s vindictive, cold, and condescending to Trump voters around the country. In one way, it proves why the Bush-Cheney wing of the Republican Party lost the hearts and minds of the GOP base over the past decade. Instead of running over your voters, maybe try talking to them and lose the condescending tone.
As for the assertions that there has never been a threat to American democracy greater than Donald Trump? Few aside from Liz Cheney’s mailing list or the average CNN primetime viewer buy into such hyperbolic assertions.
After all, the country has faced actual threats to democracy, like *checks notes* a civil war where the country split in two. Other than that, though, Trump was the worst according to Cheney, a man part of an administration that left the White House with an approval rating in the mid-20s.
It took Donald Trump, an outspoken non-politician from New York, to throw shade on the Bush-Cheney years and remind Republicans that their party used to be about winning wars rather than spending an eternity stuck in “nation building” giving our blood and oil to do it. Then what? We leave Iraq and now Biden gives Afghanistan back to the Taliban and the world resets.
Some were quick to note this all in response to the ad:
Who is this FAKE COWBOY hanging around in the forest? It's DICK CHENEY. Wow! What a weird "commercial" — he's busting on Trump. Am I the ONLY one who remembers Cheney's BLOOD LUST for OIL and WAR? And how about those "WMDs"??? pic.twitter.com/2ckf2DQa1m
— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) August 4, 2022
Perhaps the other irony is that while Liz Cheney continues her constant appeal to Democrats with her anti-Trump rhetoric, an ad from her father isn’t helping the cause on that side of the aisle, either:
Our new friend Liz Cheney has trotted out her evil old man for a closing campaign ad. War criminal who shot his friend in the face and went for the Scotch before he went for the cops calls Trump a "coward." War criminal calls someone else a threat to the republic.
I just can't.— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) August 4, 2022
The Bush-Cheney brand, and it’s pertinent to include the Bush part, is finished in Republican political circles. Former President George W. Bush presided over a period where the federal government grew at unprecedented rates and civil liberties were eroded with the use and abuse of the Patriot Act and other government surveillance programs.
What about Wyoming voters? What do they think of the Cheney brand? As this CNN piece demonstrates, there will be no love lost if she goes down in defeat:
Liz Cheney knows she’s done in Wyoming come August 16. She’ll go down but she’ll go down fighting the way she wanted to fight.
On the surface, Wyoming simply deserves representation focused on the issues that the voters care about, not continual investigations into Donald Trump and ongoing partisan witchhunts.
The next time a Cheney is on the ballot might be the 2024 Republican presidential primary. That should be fun.
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