Mitt Romney discourages Liz Cheney from running for president after she lost Wyoming primary

As talk of the 2024 Republican Primary heats up, former presidential nominee Mitt Romney discussed the potential candidates from his party, including Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney. 

Romney spoke at the South Valley Chamber of Commerce in Sandy, Utah on Thursday and told the audience he believes Cheney would have no chance of winning the presidency.

While Cheney has spoken recently about running, Romney asserted ‘I don’t know if she really wants to do that. She would not become the nominee if she were to run. I can’t imagine that would occur.’

‘I’m not going to encourage anyone to run for president. I’ve done that myself, and that’s something I’m not doing again,’ said the Senator from Utah, who lost the presidential election in 2012 to Barack Obama.

Cheney was handed a massive 37-point defeat in her primary against Harriet Hageman, who was unsurprisingly backed by former president Donald Trump after Cheney and Trump’s consistent feuding. 

Cheney earned only 28.9 percent of the Republican primary vote on Tuesday versus Hageman’s 66.3 percent. 

Romney supported Cheney in that primary run, but admitted to Business Insider that a victory was unlikely: ‘I recognize that in the time of Trump that may not be possible,’ he said. 

Romney turned out to be correct, and while Cheney has not formally declared a campaign, she has said she is ‘thinking about’ running to stop Trump from taking back the Oval Office. 

‘I believe that Donald Trump continues to pose a very grave threat and risk to our republic,’ she told NBC’s Today Show. 

‘I think that defeating him is going to require a broad and united front of Republicans, Democrats and Independents, and that’s what I intend to be a part of,’ she continued. 

Romney, flanked by fellow Utah Senator Mike Lee, went even further at the event and indicated he believes Trump will likely win back the presidency. 

‘President Trump’s voice is the loudest and the strongest and bucking him is something people will do at their peril,’ he said. 

Romney said he hopes more candidates will challenge for the nomination at some point: ‘My party has changed a great deal over the last decade. It will change again over the next 10 years. I can’t tell you how, but I think we’ll have more voices than one at some point.’

 He said he feels the nominee will not be someone who is ‘outside the Trump circle’ given the former President’s popularity. 

‘If he doesn’t run again, I think it’ll be people who either were supporters of his or people who didn’t say much about him and then would be open to become the nominee,’ he said. 

Both Romney and Cheney are known enemies of Trump, and the pair backed his impeachment after the January 6 Capitol Riot while pushing back on his claims the 2020 election was stolen.

Cheney, a three-term congresswoman for Wyoming’s at-large district, placed the blame for her 37.4-point loss Tuesday night solely on former President Donald Trump, who backed Hageman.

She joins other Republicans who have been ousted for not openly supporting former president Trump, including Rep. Peter Meijer of Michigan and Rep. Tom Rice of South Carolina.  

While Cheney won her last primary by 73-points, she is now paying the price for turning against Trump, which also led to the Wyoming GOP censuring her and House Republicans booting her from her Conference chairwoman post.

‘Abraham Lincoln was defeated in elections for the Senate and House before he won the most important election of all,’ Cheney noted in her concession speech. 

Cheney spoke about how she had won her primary two years ago by 73 points. ‘I could easily have done the same again – the path was clear,’ she said.

All she had to do, she said, was peddle former President Donald Trump’s election fraud lies and enable his attacks on the democratic system.

Trump was overjoyed by Tuesday’s election results after making it his revenge mission to get Cheney voted out of her House seat, and claimed that her defeat paved the way for the dissolution of the January 6 select committee. 

‘The people have spoken!’ he said on his Truth Social account, and added the primary was a ‘referendum on ending the witch hunt.’

‘I assume that with the very big Liz Cheney loss, far bigger than had ever been anticipated, the January 6th Committee of political Hacks and Thugs will quickly begin the beautiful process of DISSOLUTION?’ he posted. 

Cheney’s next confirmed move will be launching a group focusing on threats to America’s government system – mainly focused on keeping Trump from winning another term in the White House.

‘In coming weeks, Liz will be launching an organization to educate the American people about the ongoing threat to our Republic, and to mobilize a unified effort to oppose any Donald Trump campaign for president,’ Cheney spokesperson Jeremy Adler told Politico.

The group doesn’t yet have a name, but it will be Cheney’s primary political group as she considers a 2024 White House bid of her own.

Cheney has become the most prominent House Republican critic of Trump – currently serving as vice-chair of the House select committee on January 6.

The daughter of the former Republican vice president has remained steadfast in her criticism, saying in a campaign ad last week that her party’s embrace of Trump’s ‘big lie’ – his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him – is a ‘cancer.’ 

‘The lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is insidious,’ she said in the video. 

She added that the false claims are a ‘door Donald Trump opened to manipulate Americans to abandon their principles, to sacrifice their freedom to justify violence, to ignore the rulings of our courts and the rule of law.’ 

‘Because of threats to her safety, Cheney’s campaign events are never publicized, and reporters are only selectively alerted. Security is heavy and paranoia runs deep in Cheney World, probably for good reason,’ wrote This Town author Mark Leibovich in The Atlantic last week.

She travels with an armed Capitol Police guard, the New Yorker also reported. 

Hageman had been doing the more typical gripping-and-grinning associated with winning an election – it worked.