Liz Cheney trashed for denouncing Trump supporters — after she supported him

Liz Cheney might be positioning herself as the Republican hero who stood up to Donald Trump, but she can't erase history, a New York Times columnist wrote Thursday.

While Cheney has said over and over in her well-publicized book, "Oath and Honor," that it’s up to Republicans who have seen through Trump to convince his base not vote for him in 2024, writer Carlos Lozada reminded her that Trump's history didn't start on January 6.

He pointed out that Cheney was behind Trump pre-Jan. 6, even voting for him in 2020, despite much of what she's warning about now having been already more than evident.

Rather than delve into her decision to vote for the former president in 2020 — when Trump had already raised fears of authoritarianism — or to vote against his first impeachment, Cheney criticizes fellow conservatives who did not distance themselves from him after the riots at the U.S. Capitol, Lozado notes.

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“History did not in fact begin with that day of violence at the Capitol nearly three years ago,” Lozado writes. “Trump’s unceasing deceit, his disdain for the norms of his office and his assault on the institutions of government spanned his presidency, not just its closing weeks.”

“Cheney once believed in the staying power of the country’s constitutional principles, she writes, ‘but all that had changed on January 6 of 2021,’” Lozado writes.

“Did nothing change for Cheney before Jan. 6? Not anything at all?”

He went on, “It is largely correct to write, as Cheney does, that ‘no amount of evidence would ever convince a certain segment of the Republican Party.’ It is also largely unhelpful.”

Lozada critiques “Oath and Honor” as “overly narrow” and sometimes “curiously uncurious” about why it took Cheney, among Trump’s most vocal conservative critics, so long to change her mind about a President who received her vote.

Lozado values Cheney’s warning, “that America can no longer count on a body of elected Republicans to protect our republic,” but demands more from her in a concluding line with an eerie reference to Trump’s recent dictatorship rhetoric.

“Just as the history Liz Cheney tells in ‘Oath and Honor’ should go back further than the lies about 2020 and the scandal of Jan. 6,” Lozado writes, “the damage of a second Trump term would extend far beyond whatever measures he might inflict on day one.”