Republicans who have turned against Trump have little choice but to jump ship now that their nemesis is once again consolidating the vote to be nominated for president.
And one person who could help make that happen is former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), wrote Jennifer Rubin for The Washington Post.
The former House Republican Conference chair and Trump critic, who was instrumental to the work of the House January 6 Committee, is unlikely to endorse President Joe Biden right now, given that alternative candidates to Trump like former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley are still in the race, Rubin wrote.
But the time is drawing near that Trump will be accepted as the inevitable nominee.
"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," wrote Rubin, herself a former conservative who turned against the GOP in the Trump years. "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."
Cheney has already been pushing back on the efforts of other Trump-skeptic Republicans to make excuses to fall in line, Rubin noted. “There are some conservatives who are trying to make this claim that somehow [President] Biden is a bigger risk than Trump,” Cheney said on The View recently.
“My view is I disagree with a lot of Joe Biden’s policies. We can survive bad policies. We cannot survive torching the Constitution.”
Moreover, Rubin continued, it wouldn't simply do to sit out the race, or to vote third party.
"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," she wrote. "It would be essential to form a broad coalition, from the center-right to the left, in defense of democracy."
Only once the GOP has been defeated utterly, could reformist conservatives like Cheney think seriously about a future vision for conservatism in America, wrote Rubin.
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"Perhaps a new party could tolerate more diversity on issues. A constructive Republican Party has been missing from national politics for so long that the prospect of policy innovation and debate sounds a bit strange but rather exciting!" she concluded. At the end of the day, though,
"Cheney is inarguably right in one respect: Unless a large, ideologically diverse pro-democracy alliance defeats Trump, conservatives won’t have a democratic system in which to hash out policies. Cheney’s highest calling now might well be to impress on her fellow citizens the urgency of that effort."
