With four-time-indicted former president Donald Trump’s expected win in Iowa coupled with the close race for second, the 2024 race may come to resemble the 2016 contest when Republican alternatives divided up the not-Trump vote. Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley’s finish no doubt disappoints establishment Republicans looking for a Trump alternative. So, while the race is not over quite yet, it will be soon enough. Republicans not enamored with a right-wing authoritarian will then face two critical choices:
If Trump is the nominee, will it be time to depart from the Republican Party? And if the answer is yes, what to do in November and beyond?
Former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney, who has become the most articulate voice of sanity on the right, does not want to crush one of the challengers’ chances, no matter how slight. So don’t expect her to do anything to foreclose whatever small possibility remains to defeat Trump in the primaries. That said, Cheney has begun to look ahead.
Last week, Cheney gave her most succinct and clear answer about her outlook on 2024. It bears emphasizing that she is not giving herself or others an “out” by suggesting they all hop on a third-party train to nowhere. Instead, she delivered the hard news: “There are some conservatives who are trying to make this claim that somehow [President] Biden is a bigger risk than Trump,” she said on “The View.” “My view is I disagree with a lot of Joe Biden’s policies. We can survive bad policies. We cannot survive torching the Constitution.”
Votes for a Libertarian, Green or No Labels candidate can only diminish the anti-Trump, save-democracy coalition. Just as we saw in 2020 — when Republicans including former Ohio governor John Kasich; John McCain’s widow Cindy McCain; former senators David Durenberger of Minnesota, Gordon J. Humphrey of New Hampshire and John Warner of Virginia; and a flock of former congressmen and George W. Bush aides endorsed Biden — sober and patriotic Republicans must know that the only candidate in the general election who can beat Trump, if he is the nominee, will be Biden.
If a strongman such as Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco or Jair Bolsonaro were the nominee, no one would dream of throwing their vote away on a fringe candidate. It would be essential to form a broad coalition, from the center-right to the left, in defense of democracy. Any risk that a character prepared to suspend the Constitution could get elected, use the military to suppress dissent and politicize the justice system (among other horrors) would be too great.
We should expect Cheney to join figures such as former congressman and fellow Jan. 6 select committee member Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) in endorsing Biden over Trump. She would not do so because she agrees with Biden’s policies, as she said, but, rather, because she has vowed to do everything in her power to keep Trump out of the Oval Office. She can stand up for still-persuadable fellow Republicans and ex-Republicans to explain the risk a Trump second term would pose not only to American democracy but also to the fate of democracies around the world (e.g., Taiwan, Ukraine) struggling to defend themselves against aggressive dictatorial regimes. The great test for her — and for our democracy — is whether she and like-minded conservatives can pull enough of the Republicans who are anti-Trump or whose support for Trump is merely soft into the Biden camp.
