Rep. Liz Cheney’s uphill battle to keep her seat in Wyoming’s GOP primary on Tuesday underscores how Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party is tightening even as the former President’s legal challenges are mounting. That dynamic poses stark choices for the thin band of Republican elected officials and voters resistant to his dominance within the party.
If Cheney loses Tuesday, as expected, the result will place an exclamation point on a summer that has seen Trump-backed candidates, almost all of whom echo his falsehoods about the 2020 election, win most hotly contested party primaries. …
“There is no lane in the Republican Party that is viable for [a] Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, or Mike Madrid,” Madrid, a long-time strategist who has become one of Trump’s sharpest Republican critics, told me. “The party is never going to go back to what it was.” And that means, in the near term at least, there’s a hard choice facing the leaders and voters in the GOP coalition who view Trump as a threat to American democracy. Do they continue to support a party that remains in thrall to him or launch a more direct attack against his influence, even if that helps Democrats in the 2022 and 2024 elections? CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, CNN
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