True to his nature, Donald Trump put revenge against the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the top of his list. But he made it his personal business to put Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming out of office. He even went as far as to personally interview potential challengers, ultimately settling on a former Wyoming Republican National Committee member, Harriet Hageman. Despite being dramatically outspent, Hageman routed Cheney by a nearly 2-to-1 margin in the state’s Aug. 16 primary. Barring a complete meltdown, she’s likely headed to Congress; her Democratic challenger, Native American activist Lynette Grey Bull, is running in a state where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by almost 7-to-1.
Hageman is part of a long list of never-Trumpers who have transformed into ardent Trump worshippers. In 2016, she helped lead a last-ditch effort to force a vote on the convention floor in St. Paul between Trump and Ted Cruz, and slammed Trump as “racist and xenophobic.” But now? She hails him as “the best president of my lifetime.”
But what’s really telling about Hageman is what she hasn’t said. In the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen as of this writing, Hageman has mostly remained silent about the stomach-churning discovery of highly classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. From where I’m sitting, Hageman seems to be okay with Trump doing what she claims Cheney did: Betraying the people “who hired him.”
Hageman’s first ad set the tone for her campaign, branding Cheney as someone who was disloyal, who abandoned Wyoming.
Dripping in turquoise, Hageman referred to a portion of the “code of the West” that calls for good cowboys to “ride for the brand.” As the ranch hands who introduced the video said, “riding for the brand” meant loyalty to whoever hired or paid them. The message? By opposing Trump, Cheney had broken her word to the outfit that hired her: the people of Wyoming.
She drove the point home further in an op-ed for Cowboy State Daily, in which she claimed Cheney was actually aiding and abetting the Biden administration.
Now that we in Wyoming are suffering the consequences and travesty that is the Biden administration, I’d wager that President Trump is even more popular in Wyoming than when he received 70 percent of the vote in the last election. But Liz Cheney has gone the other way.
Far from riding for the brand, Cheney has left the bunkhouse, run across the road, jumped into the gulch, and thrown her lot in with the rival outfit – you know the kind.
But for all of her newfound loyalty to Trump, Hageman might as well have been describing him here. After all, by the time she penned these words, we knew that Trump had betrayed the American people—the outfit who supposedly hired him—too many times to count. He utterly mishandled the worst peacetime crisis that this nation has ever faced. He tried to bully a foreign country into joining a politically motivated investigation of one of his reelection opponents. He didn’t even attempt to reach out to those who didn’t vote for him in 2016. And, of course, he ranted and raved about nonexistent election fraud when ample evidence from the published record shows that he damned well knew he had lost. And that’s more than enough, even before we learned about his willful decision to take highly classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, apparently because he thought they belonged to him instead of the American people.
Despite this, Hageman’s silence has been deafening. Since her primary victory, she has tweeted a grand total of nine times, without a word about the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago. Never mind that the Justice Department filings portray a man who broke his word to the American people and betrayed the brand. Instead, he left the bunkhouse, ran across the road, jumped into the gulch, and cast his lot with his own outfit—not the outfit that hired him. And that’s the best-case scenario.
On the surface, she may be following the lead of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who still wants Attorney General Merrick Garland to prepare for Star Chamber-style hearings if Republicans reclaim a majority in November.
As I write this, this tweet is still pinned to McCarthy’s Twitter profile. From where I’m sitting, McCarthy has also “left the bunkhouse, run across the road, jumped into the gulch, and thrown his lot in with the rival outfit.” And after six years, we all know his kind.
But it’s really telling that Hageman hasn’t seen fit to speak up about the trove of classified documents after she made so much hay about being loyal to those who hired you. Trump has shown that, at best, he’s only loyal to himself. Hageman's silence is so deafening that I can hear it … even though I’m two time zones away.
Granted, Hageman already gave us a good idea of who she was when she appeared on Steve Bannon’s show earlier this year; she called Biden a human trafficker. No, this isn’t snark.
You’d be forgiven, dear reader, for thinking that Hageman sounds like a clone of Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. That moment alone proves that Hageman is poised to join the cabal of zealous MAGA members in the House Freedom Caucus—a club that includes the likes of Reps. Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, Ronny Jackson, Jim Jordan, and others.
This is one of the few times when what someone doesn’t say is more telling than what they do say. By not having the integrity to condemn Trump’s reckless and potentially treasonous conduct, Hageman is telling us who she really is: a woman with absolutely no integrity. And we’d best believe her. Given that she’s all but punched her ticket to Congress by beating Cheney, we cannot chance her being empowered if the Republicans get the majority.
Sometimes, the best defense is a good offense. Democrats are heading into a difficult midterm defending a very narrow majority in the U.S. House. Republicans need to flip just five seats to take control, and we're defending a lot of vulnerable members. Might you toss $3 or more towards that fight?