Former Congresswoman Liz Cheney Weighs In on Trump’s Victory

Former Wyoming congresswoman and Harris campaign surrogate Liz Cheney on Wednesday responded to Donald Trump’s Tuesday night election win.

“Our nation’s democratic system functioned last night and we have a new President-elect,” Cheney said in a statement hours after Trump was projected to win the presidential election.

“Americans are bound, whether we like the outcome or not, to accept the results of our elections. We now have a special responsibility, as citizens of the greatest nation on earth, to do everything we can to support and defend our Constitution, preserve the rule of law, and ensure that our institutions hold over these coming four years.

“Citizens across this country, our courts, members of the press and those serving in our federal, state and local governments must now be the guardrails of democracy.”

Over the years, Trump and Cheney have clashed on a multitude of issues, perhaps culminating in Cheney having taken a leading role in the House Jan. 6 committee that made accusations against the former president and now president-elect.

She lost her 2022 congressional reelection bid during the Republican primary, bringing an end to three terms in the House. After leaving the House, she continued to be critical of the former president.

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During the 2024 presidential election, Trump is projected to win Wyoming by more than 40 percentage points.

And earlier this year, Cheney announced she was backing Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and often stumped for her on the trail. Around the same time, her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, also endorsed Harris for president.

About a week before the election, Trump criticized Cheney as a “war hawk” who has backed U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts. He then suggested that if Cheney were in a combat situation, she wouldn’t have the same feelings.

“You know, when the guns are trained on her face. You know, they are all war hawks when they are sitting in Washington in a nice building,” he told Tucker Carlson.

In response, Cheney wrote on social media platform X that Trump’s comments were authoritarian. However, members of the Trump campaign said that the Harris campaign, Cheney, and media outlets took Trump’s comment about Cheney out of context and did not focus on his broader message about U.S. involvement in wars.

Aside from the presidential election, the GOP had a good night in the Senate, flipping multiple seats and gaining control over the congressional chamber. Republicans defeated Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), according to projections.

So far, President Joe Biden and Harris have not publicly commented on Trump’s win.

“I said that many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” Trump told supporters in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Wednesday morning. “And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness, and now we are going to fulfill that mission together.”

Also in his speech, he said that “it is time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us. It is time to unite, and we are going to try. We have to try.”