Rep. Liz Cheney announced that she is “thinking about” running for president the morning after a stunning landslide loss of her congressional seat in the Wyoming primary.
Prior to her defeat, Cheney was one of the few remaining neoconservatives who held office.
On Wednesday, with over 99 percent of the vote counted, Cheney was losing the primary for her seat by approximately 38 points. The race was called for her challenger, Trump-endorsed conservative lawyer Harriet Hageman, roughly an hour and a half after polls closed.
Appearing on NBC’s Today Show on Wednesday morning, Cheney announced that she was launching a new organization aimed at keeping former President Donald Trump out of office.
“We’ve to get this party back to the principles and values on which it was founded,” Cheney said.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter boasted that in previous elections she received more than 70 percent of the vote and that “the path to that same victory would have been very easy,” but claimed that she wanted to focus more on her opposition to Trump than winning.
“There’s no political office that’s more important than the principles that we take an oath to defend,” Cheney said. “I think that defeating him is going to require a broad and united front of Republicans, Democrats and independents. And that’s what I intend to be part of.”
When asked by host Savannah Guthrie if she lost sight of issues that mattered to her constituents in Wyoming, Cheney claimed that “as a nation, you don’t get the opportunity to debate and discuss any other issue” when facing “a fundamental threat on our republic.”
“I will do whatever it takes to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office,” she said.
NOW – Liz Cheney says she is thinking about running for president following her resounding primary defeat.pic.twitter.com/0lNeGAsEYo
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) August 17, 2022
When asked if this included a run for president, Cheney said that was something she is considering.
“That’s a decision that I’m going to make in the coming months, and I’m not going to make any announcements here this morning. But it is something that I am thinking about, and I’ll make a decision in the coming months,” Cheney said.
Cheney, like her father, holds extremely hawkish foreign policy views. In2006, while working for the State Department and chairing the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group, she strongly advocated for a regime change war with Iran.
Throughout her career, she has also championed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and has spent a decade and a half supporting and defending the use of torture methods for prisoners, including waterboarding.
In 2009, Cheney founded an organization with Bill Kristol called Keep America Safe, which promoted their hawkish neoconservative policy positions.
