WASHINGTON — Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming waded deeper into Republicans’ identity crisis on Sunday, warning her party on the eve of a Senate impeachment trial not to “look past” former President Donald J. Trump’s role in stoking a violent attack on the Capitol and a culture of conspiracy roosting among their ranks.
In her first television interview since fending off an attempt by Mr. Trump’s allies to oust her from House leadership over her vote to impeach him, Ms. Cheney said Republican voters had been “lied to” by a president eager to steal an election with baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. She cautioned that the party risked being locked out of power if it did not show a majority of Americans that it could be trusted to lead truthfully.
“The notion that the election had been stolen or that the election was rigged was a lie, and people need to understand that,” Ms. Cheney said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We need to make sure that we as Republicans are the party of truth, and that we are being honest about what really did happen in 2020 so we actually have a chance to win in 2022 and win the White House back in 2024.”
She added that Mr. Trump “does not have a role as a leader of our party going forward.”
The remarks made plain that Ms. Cheney, a leading Republican voice trying to push the party back toward its traditional policy roots, had no intention of backing off her criticism of the former president after two attempts last week to punish her for her impeachment vote. In Washington, her critics forced a vote to try to oust her as the chairwoman of the House Republican conference, but it failed overwhelmingly on a secret ballot. And on Saturday, the Wyoming Republican Party censured her and called for her resignation.
Answering that call, Ms. Cheney said on Sunday that she would not resign and suggested that Republicans in her home state continued to be fed misinformation about what had taken place. It came a few days after she privately rebuffed a request by the House Republican leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, to apologize to her conference for how she handled herself around the impeachment vote, according to two people familiar with the exchange, which was first reported on Sunday by Axios.
“People in the party are mistaken,” she said on Fox News of the Jan. 6 attack, which, together with nearby protests, killed five people, including a Capitol Police officer. Referring to the Black Lives Matter movement, she added: “They believe that B.L.M. and antifa were behind what happened here at the Capitol. That’s just simply not the case, it’s not true, and we’re going to have a lot of work we have to do.”
