Liz Cheney vouched for President Donald Trump in his bid for the U.S. presidency in 2020.
But when a mob attacked the United States Capitol on January 6, as Trump espoused false claims that the 2020 election was stolen in his loss to then-President Joe Biden, Cheney became one of Trump’s major critics in the Republican Party at the cost of her career.
The former Wyoming representative and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney was cast out of the third-highest Republican leadership position and her Congressional career ended with a resounding defeat in the 2022 primaries.
Since then, Cheney published “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning” — which details her memories of the January 6 attack and the aftermath — and continues as a professor at the University of Virginia.
Cheney’s criticism of Trump did not cease Tuesday night as the second speaker in UB’s 2026-27 Distinguished Speakers Series. Before she took the Center for the Arts stage, Cheney answered questions from The Spectrum and other students in a student-led Q&A session, further condemning Trump in the wake of the 2026 congressional midterm elections.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Spectrum: You vouched for President Donald Trump back in 2020, but since then have become one of his major critics within the Republican Party and warned others repeatedly what another vote for him means at the cost of your career in the party. Now, in the aftermath of the midterm elections, as Republicans are starting to flock away from Trump, what would you say to your peers as someone who has been on both sides of the coin? Would you have done anything differently back then?
Liz Cheney: What I would have done differently is I wouldn't have supported Donald Trump. When he was first elected, a lot of Republicans — and I grew up as a Republican, was in the Republican Party my whole life — thought he was an unusual candidate. He's somebody who is different from presidents we've had before.
I thought that he would find that the structures that are inside the White House — the National Security Council structure, the executive secretariat, all of the structures — are there to help presidents make decisions and to guide them and make sure they get the best advice.
Just after the 2020 election, he began to make these claims about the election being rigged. A couple of weeks after the election, I was in Republican leadership in the House of Representatives and put a statement out that said, "Look, if the president has evidence to back up these claims of fraud, then he should produce the evidence. But if he doesn't, he needs to respect the sanctity of our election process."
I watched what was going on after the 2020 election and, of course, January 6, and, to me, those were actions that no person who's sworn a duty to the Constitution can stand by. Certainly no person who has sworn a duty to the Constitution as he did would refuse to tell that violent mob to leave the Capitol. He did that for over three hours.
I was very surprised and disappointed that more of my colleagues on the Republican side didn't stand up and say publicly what so many of them were saying privately. There was real unanimity right after January 6 that this attempt to overthrow the election was completely unacceptable, and I wish more of them had had the courage to say those things publicly.
What we saw last week in the election results was that the American people, now having seen nearly two years of President Trump in office, send a very clear message that this isn't the kind of leadership, the kind of governing that they want.
UB Student Council Representative Shaurya Jain: In your career, you've faced situations where your personal beliefs and your political responsibilities conflicted with each other. How would you encourage students to remain true to their principles while also building relationships with people who have opposing values and views?
LC: I don't think that my personal beliefs and my political responsibilities were in tension because anyone who's in an elected or appointed office’s primary duty is to the Constitution, and there were certainly a majority of elected officials in the Republican Party who put their politics ahead of their duty to the Constitution.
Your question about working with people that have disagreements is at the heart of how we should conduct ourselves, and how the voters want our leaders to conduct themselves.
What we need more of is for both sides to say, "Wait a minute, let's sit down and talk about these issues,” and to make an effort to talk to people you don't agree with so you can ask questions and learn from them.
I found that many of the members I served with who I had particular respect for, who might have been on the other side of the political aisle, were people I could go to and say, "Look, I don't agree with your view on this, but tell me, why do you believe that? Why are you advocating for x, y and z? And I'll tell you why I'm advocating, you know, for these things."
That's the way that you begin to find common ground and solutions that are bipartisan.
Tavis Macomber: I was wondering if there was anything you wish the Obama administration or, even, the Bush administration had done differently to sort of prevent the rise in far-right populism that led to Donald Trump's election in the first place?
LC: There's a lot of blame to go around. When I think back on the Obama administration, there were certainly many policies I disagreed with. When I was representing Wyoming, and Wyoming ended up being the state that gave Donald Trump the largest margin of victory of any state in the whole country, something that I saw repeatedly was people who were trying to make a living ranching, but whose everyday lives were heavily impacted by regulations coming from Washington. And they were often regulations that no elected official had anything to do with.
It was a very common thing for people to feel that, "Washington is not listening to me. They're destroying my livelihood and I have no way to be heard."
What Donald Trump did was he convinced a lot of people that he was listening to them. And that's such a sad thing when you think about it, because it is a betrayal of good people all over the country who felt like, "Okay, he's listening to me. I'm gonna vote for him."
But, of course, it was a lie and led to this rise of populism, which, again, has roots in issues that are very real. But what we've seen so far is a president who tells people that they can count on him to do what they need and then certainly doesn't.
Erin Walker: Why do you feel your Republican colleagues did not speak up after what happened at the Capitol on January 6? And do you think because of their lack of pushback on Donald Trump, that has allowed his unconstitutional actions to go further? And what ratio or fraction of the responsibility is put on the administration and the checks and balances that our House and Senate are willing to push at him?
LC: There's no way that Trump could do the damage, all of the damage that he's done, without elected officials who were willing to help him. Some of those elected officials help him by publicly defending things that are indefensible. Some have helped him just by staying silent. It's a pattern that we’ve seen, frankly, all over the world if you look at authoritarian leaders in other places. None of them succeed on their own. They all have collaborators. They all have enablers.
The Republican Party went so far in enabling him that they basically let him lead them off a cliff to destruction. President Trump, in the immediate hours [following the midterms], seemed to be a little bit conciliatory, and said things about working with the Democrats. It sounded like maybe we were going to see a difference in behavior. But that changed very quickly. And, of course, we’ve seen him make Stephen Miller the chief of staff and the Republicans in the House just elected Jim Jordan as their leader. All of which says the Republican Party, as it exists today, has not heard what the voters of this country were saying to them.
Not only is Donald Trump accountable and responsible for what he's done, but the people who have enabled him are as well.
Ryan Alpert: Looking back at your time in Washington, do you believe the Republican Party has become concerned with maintaining power rather than the core principles it began with? And how do you think the midterm results will affect behavior?
LC: One of the ironies of this period is that there are a lot of people who claim that they're conservative or say that they’re Reagan Republicans, for example, and use that to defend their support of Trump.
But if you look at Trump's policies, they aren't conservative policies. He's abandoned pretty much everything the Republican Party used to stand for. I'm afraid for what we're going to see in the last two years of his presidency. You have to anticipate that it's going to be very chaotic. Things could get worse before we swear in a new president, simply because he is so unstable and irrational.
Now, once you get the new Congress sworn in, that you will see Congress begin to play the role it's supposed to play in terms of checks and balances. I hope that the Democrats operate responsibly because they could find there's a real tendency for the pendulum to swing very far in the other direction, and that's not good for the country either.
For the most part, the courts have played a responsible role. At this moment where we've needed our branches of government to stand up and defend the rule of law, we’ve seen judges and, in most cases, justices doing that. Although they haven't gotten it all right, for the most part, the courts are playing an important role at this moment too.
Brian Murphy: I do agree with you to a certain extent that these midterms represent a rebuke of Donald Trump and his politics, but I also think that a large part of it is Israel and the United States' war on Iran. And I'm wondering if, in light of the humanitarian atrocities that have taken place in the occupied Palestinian territories as well as the strategically disastrous war on Iran, is there room in the Republicans or Democrats to reexamine the extent of our relationship with that country?
LC: You and I probably have a different view about the U.S.’s relationship with Israel. Right now, the Israelis are going through their own democratic process and Prime Minister Netanyahu's opponent has been asked to form a government. That reflects a sense among the Israeli people that they're not happy with their leadership from a whole range of perspectives.
With respect to the war in Iran, people are seeing high prices for gasoline, high prices for diesel and they know that it's because of the war. I absolutely believe the Iranians can't have a nuclear weapon. That's absolutely true. But what's happening now is that you have a commander-in-chief who's unstable, a commander-in-chief who's unfit for the role. And we were all told back in the spring that the Iranian nuclear program had been decimated, but, now, it seems we're told, “No, we have to continue to work to decimate it.”
When an American president takes the nation to war, he or she owes the American people an explanation, owes them transparency, owes them answers to questions and owes them regular briefings and information. If you look back, for example, to the Gulf War, you had members of the press, in some instances, embedded with the troops. The same in the Iraq War. You had regular briefings going on. None of that is happening now. And, at the same time, you have mass firings going on inside the Pentagon.
And, so, I don't think that you can analyze that war in a vacuum without understanding the very dire consequences of having a president whose decisions are irrational. For example, the Straits of Hormuz were open before this military action was launched, and now, as the president looks around for a way to just simply leave, he could well create a situation where the Iranians are, in fact, the leading power in the Middle East. And that isn't an outcome that is beneficial for the national security of anybody.
So it's a dire situation for a whole range of reasons, and the relationships that we have around the Middle East are clearly being affected by it.
Natalia Calabrese: Now that we have seen the election results, and some anti-Muslim campaigning, I'm particularly curious if you view that as more of self-sabotage now that there's been this huge sweep in kind of ignoring those kinds of messaging.
LC: Whether it's anti-Muslim sentiment, Islamophobia, racism, antisemitism, any of the horrific anti-immigrant language that we've seen, all of it is horrific. This also goes back to the [midterm] results, not just with respect to Islamophobia, but across the board. The vast majority of Americans don't believe those things, and they don't want leaders who espouse those kinds of viewpoints.
But this is also where people in your generation have a huge role to play. We all have this role to play as voters, but particularly younger people need to say, "No, that's not who we are as Americans. This is a nation built on immigrants, and we are not Americans because of our race. We're Americans because we share a belief in these values of freedom and liberty.”
One of the most moving things that I've ever been to is a ceremony where new citizens are sworn in. It's very moving because people are swearing an oath to our Constitution, and, as Americans, we’ve all done that. We should be a country that is proud that people want to come and live here.
Agnes Keough is the assistant features editor and can be reached at agnes.keough@ubspectrum.com
Jacob Wojtowicz is the senior features editor and can be reached at jacob.wojtowicz@ubspectrum.com
