One year after Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, former Vice President Dick Cheney joined his daughter Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney on the floor of the House to take a lonely position commemorating the anniversary.
The Cheneys were greeted warmly by Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then took their seats on the Republican side of the chamber. Looking around, they quickly realized they were the only Republicans there. The former vice president was stunned.
“It’s one thing to hear about what’s happening in our party, but to see it, like this, in such stark terms,” Dick Cheney told his daughter, according to her 2023 memoir.
Later that day, when reporters asked Dick Cheney what he thought about how Republican leadership had quickly reversed course and folded to Trump, he said: “Well, it’s not leadership that resembles any of the folks that I knew when I was here for 10 years.”
The episode is illustrative of the seismic shift inside the GOP since Trump became its standard-bearer, and the story of how Trump expelled former party leaders who broke with him after he attempted to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
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