Liz Cheney Lovefest

January 6 Hearings Hero in Sonoma

By David Bolling

Liz Cheney, the daughter of America’s most polarizing modern vice president, the conservative former Member of Congress who represented uber-conservative Wyoming’s single seat in the House of Representatives, and the most visible Republican hero of the House Select Committee hearings on the January 6 Capitol attack, came to liberal Sonoma on January 12 and had a lovefest.

A special presentation of the Sonoma Speaker Series (SOS), Cheney’s appearance at the Hanna Center auditorium sold out within four minutes of ticket sales opening online. The Cheney frenzy was so fevered that Speaker Series CEO Kathy Witkowicki arranged for the event to be recorded in a multi-camera video shoot, that was then edited in less than a day and shown to a second sold-out audience at the Sebastiani Theatre the following night.

Cheney mixed and mingled with a sold-out VIP crowd during a reception before the main event and a 20-minute line of admirers patiently waited one-by-one to have their photos taken with her.

The Hanna auditorium had standing room only when the event began, a conversation between Cheney and SOS board member and former TV anchor Laura Zimmerman. Right away, Cheney bridged the ideology gap with fond remarks about liberal Democrats.

“My relationship with former Speaker Pelosi – that is a relationship that I would not have imagined. When she was getting ready to make the decision on whether or not to ask me to join the Select (January 6) Committee, one of her staff members went to her with a list, and the list was the top 10 worst things Liz Cheney has ever said about Nancy Pelosi. And I felt lucky it stopped at 10. She took one look at it and she gave it back to this staff member and she said, ‘Why do you bother me with things that don’t matter.’ We were about as far apart as you could be – I represented Wyoming, one of the most conservative states in the country. San Francisco was at the other end of the political spectrum in many ways. But what we shared was a dedication to the Constitution. And we were both willing to put the politics aside to work together. I have enormous respect for her, for her willingness to set partisanship and politics aside.”

And that wasn’t all the loving words Cheney had for Bay Area liberals. Zoe Lofgren, the 30-year liberal Democrat from San Jose, who was one of seven Democrat impeachment managers in the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, has been the beneficiary of Liz Cheney fundraising re-election appeals. On that Monday night in Sonoma, Cheney described Lofgren as, “a wonderful representative, one of the most effective representatives in Congress.” Of course, perhaps the most remarkable political backflip of the 2024 election was the public declaration of support (and vote) for Kamala Harris by both Liz and her father Dick Cheney.

But really, the political conversation in 2026 is the conversation about Donald Trump. The violence erupting from and around ICE agents in liberal American cities, the unilateral kidnapping of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, the threats to invade Greenland, the disrespect to NATO allies, and the veiled suggestions that Trump will somehow suspend the 2026  midterm election. How does Liz Cheney interpret these Trumpian traumas?

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” she told the SSS audience. She sees Trump chipping steadily way against the foundations of Constitutional democracy. “Even just the way he is talking about how he feels about the NATO alliance – taking Greenland – is just incredibly destructive,” she said. “People ask me every single day, what can we do, what can we do?” Her answer?

“The responsibility to protect our democracy, to protect our constitutional republic, rests with all of us,” she said.  “I think we have to be very aware of what he’s talking about doing with respect to the 2026 Midterms.”

Cheney pointed out Trump’s recent remarks in a New York Times interview, during which he said he regrets not having the National Guard seize the voting machines in 2020. “We have to be prepared,” she said, “making sure voter turnout is so significant votes can’t be stolen. We’ve never faced the threat to free and fair elections from the president of the United States that we face today. It’s a very real threat, and it’s coming up with the midterms in just a few months. We have to be ready, we have to be prepared, we have to make sure we guard and protect that system.”

Zimmerman asked Cheney, who has had White House visits with the president, if perhaps there was another, more rational Donald Trump, under the hair and red tie. “You’ve been in the Oval Office with Donald Trump,” she said. “How does he come across?”

“I think at this point,” said Cheney, “the country really knows Donald Trump.  There’s not an alternative, thoughtful version. Originally, I really thought he would grow with the job. In 2020, when he made fraudulent claims, some members of the administration came forward and said, ‘That’s not true.’ We need to make the American people understand that this year he will make the same claims – he’s already doing it again. And that’s why all of us, particularly at the local and state level, have to make sure the truth is getting out there.”

Asked about Trump’s frequent threats against Cheney, she said, “My reaction to that is it makes me very angry, and it makes me very determined to protect our country. What comes to mind when I hear that, is the name of the Taylor Swift Song – “The Smallest Man who Ever Lived.”

Cheney didn’t quote the lyrics, but for the record, the closing stanza reads:

And in plain sight you hid
But you are what you did
And I’ll forget you, but I’ll never forgive
The smallest man who ever lived

Trump, explained Cheney, “has very intentionally ushered into our politics an era of violence and threats. It’s very intentional. He is operating outside the boundaries of the law.”

Cheney added, “Too often today, when Republicans are asked about Trump’s comments, they say, ‘Well, you know, we haven’t heard those comments.’ And that brings us back to how do we get beyond this moment in our history, to holding those people to account … Any Republican, and I mean any Republican official who is enabling him, who is sitting silently by, they all have to be held accountable. Because we don’t get to how we are today without those people staying silent.”

She continued, “Anybody who believes that our constitutional republic is a sacred thing, and anybody who believes it’s worth protecting, and anybody who has studied the history of what people in every generation of our country have done to ensure the survival of the republic, we all have to look and say, all right, this is the moment that we’re in, and this is the challenge we face, and we can’t be deterred by those kinds of attacks, and threats.”

Cheney described a holiday dinner with three generations of Cheneys which triggered a painful question In her mind. “My grandson was born the day after my dad’s funeral. There were three generations at the dinner table.  We have all grown up in a country where we knew we didn’t have to worry about the peaceful transfer of power. We took that for granted. I looked at my son and I had the sudden thought – are our children going to be able to say that? That is really what’s at stake.”

Cheney reiterated the point. “The thing that’s very important, especially now, every time you hear Donald Trump, or people in the administration, saying things that suggest they support law enforcement, I really want you to remember the attack of January 6, and I especially want people to remember that Donald Trump sat at the dining room table next to the oval office and he watched the attack on television, he watched the brutality, he watched people on the steps of the capital attack the police officers, he watched it. They had his flag, they were doing it in his name, and he would not tell them to leave the capitol.”

The night of the Capitol riot, after the crowd had been dispersed, Cheney decided to go walk the Capitol Rotunda. “It’s a very special place, to be there late at night, it’s like a cathedral, a cathedral to our democracy,. And I was so angry about the attack, so I walked first into Statuary Hall, and sitting all around, leaning against the wall and against the statues, were all the men and women who had fought that day, members of the SWAT teams, members of the Capital police, and they were exhausted, and they had defended us, so I wanted to walk around and say thank you to them. And I did the same thing walking into the rotunda.

“And again, that isn’t something you ever imagine you’re going to see in the United States of America. It was very emotional, but this was a moment when the Members of Congress were – I would say, nearly unanimous – in expressing our gratitude to the men and women who had defended the capital, who had prevented far worst from happening.”

At one point in the aftermath of the riot, Cheney said, “Kevin McCarthy, then the Republican Leader, said to all of us on a phone call we had, he said that he was going to tell President Trump that he needed to resign. Obviously, that did not happen, and unfortunately that unity did not last.”

“Policy debates,” Cheney concluded, “are really important, but we don’t get to have those if we let our democracy unravel. As a country, we can survive bad policy … But we can’t survive leaders who are willing to torch the Constitution. Change only happens in our country when we are engaged and involved.”

Recalling a powerfully poignant moment with her father, following a New Years celebration in 2021, Cheney said, “He followed me out to my car to say goodbye, and he told me, ‘Defend our Republic, daughter.’ That’s something I take really seriously.”

Photo by Melania Mahoney