Liz’s defeat was a stunning rejection of incompetent politicians – anti-Trump GOPers should beware

Outgoing US Representative Liz Cheney didn’t just lose her congressional seat in the state’s Republican primary on Tuesday.

She got annihilated. She lost two-to-one. In numbers, that’s 66.3% to 28.9%.

Much will be made of former President Donald Trump’s successful quest to dislodge the po-faced Cheney. But onlookers should see the vote for what it is: A stunning rejection of the incompetent and abusive political establishment.

Plenty of Beltway Republicans are terrible. What makes Cheney different is her near-perfect embodiment of the political machine.

That ultimately is what got her fired by Wyoming voters — and ought to be a warning to other GOP crybabies who whine about the New Right Trump has created.

Start with Cheney’s warmongering.

If it were up to her, America would be at war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Ukraine — the type of forever combat that repels voters. When Trump modestly downsized America’s endless commitments in Middle East backwaters, including one in hopeless Syria in 2019, Cheney called it a ‘catastrophic mistake,’ adding that, ‘terrorists thousands of miles away can and will launch attacks against America. . .’ They haven’t.

When the Democrat-run Congress bizarrely impeached Trump after leaving office, Cheney sided with progressives.

She dismissed the many Americans who were understandably upset with irregularities in the 2020 elections, including millions of ballots sent out unsolicited by mail and counted without verifying identities. Of Trump’s attempts to contest the questionable outcome, she said he was ‘attempting to unravel the foundations of our constitutional republic.’

In fact, Cheney has done much to harm that constitutional republic.

Her eager participation in the McCarthyite kangaroo court that is the January 6 Committee is intended to give a bipartisan veneer to what is plainly a leftwing vendetta against Trump.

She has expressed little concern about the weaponization of the FBI and other parts of the national security bureaucracy to spy on and persecute Trump supporters and other skeptics of the establishment. Even as federal spending and deficits have gone from merely reckless to insane and helped spark inflation, Cheney has called for more and more to be spent on the military and intelligence bureaucracies.

In a way, Cheney is just being true to her own people and her home — her true home, in McLean, Va. That leafy suburb of Washington, D.C., is home to the CIA and adjacent to the Beltway bandits that comprise the military-industrial complex of which Dwight Eisenhower warned.

Cheney grew up there and embodies the place perfectly. She only moved back to Wyoming when it was time for a promotion to Congress, and even then avoided the heartland city of Casper that was her father’s home and political base. She opted for fancy Jackson Hole instead.

Ski chalets and art galleries are more splendid to Cheney than ranches, which, after all, can take on a particular manure stench if you’re standing in the wrong place and have people who ask pesky questions about Washington’s failures.

Unlike many incumbents who lose elections by an unprecedented margin, Cheney needn’t worry about her next job. Long before her fate was sealed, an adoring leftwing media was plotting her next move: a “Republican” who can challenge Trump and take some of the load off Democrats in their uphill battle to retain the White House in 2024.

It’s not just Trump whom Cheney opposes, but anyone from the New Right who is willing to take on the establishment and refuse to play by the rules set by the Democrats and the media.

Of the highly popular governor of Florida — possibly a more disciplined and effective version of Trump — Cheney said, ‘I think that Ron DeSantis has lined himself up almost entirely with Donald Trump, and I think that’s very dangerous.’

Cheney seems likely to run as an establishment candidate in the Republican primaries in 2024. When that fails, she may run as an ‘independent’ candidate in an effort to drain votes from the Republican and keep a Democrat — and the establishment — in the White House.

Unfortunately, for Cheney, voters in the other 49 states are likely to join those in Wyoming who said ‘no thanks’ to further employment of a dangerous and incompetent establishment that has run America into the ground.

Christian Whiton is a former senior advisor in the Trump and George W. Bush administrations.