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Republicans must ‘make sure’ Trump isn’t our presidential nominee: Trump critic

One of Donald Trump's fiercest conservative critics is pushing to make sure that he is not the Republicans’ presidential candidate in 2024.

“I think we have to make sure that he is not our nominee,” Representative Liz Cheney said on ABC news TV on Sunday, citing what she said were “millions of Republicans out there, and independents and Democrats as well” opposed to the former president’s ambitions.

The GOP has “no chance at winning elections if we are in a position where our party has abandoned principle and abandoned value and abandoned fundamental fidelity of the Constitution in order to embrace a cult of personality," said the member of Congress, who last week lost a Republican primary election in Wyoming to try to keep her seat, beaten by Trump-backed candidate Harriet Hageman.

Decrying’s what she called Trump’s “post-truth” movement, Cheney blasted his denial that President Joe Biden won the fall 2020 election, saying he rejects “the fundamental function and principle … at the center of our constitutional republic” of the peaceful transition of power.

Cheney, as a member of the bipartisan congressional investigation of the violent Jan. 6, 2021 effort to block Biden’s official Electoral College vote count, has emerged as a vocal critic of ex-President Trump, even as the rest of her party closes ranks on the false election denialism claims.

Like Cheney, many of Trump’s critics have been blocked from seeking reelection as Republicans, or have retired, though there is speculation she may challenge Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination.

‘Great moral test’

Stating that she accepted the results of her vote to impeach Trump last February for encouraging the Jan. 6 insurrection, Cheney said winning her primary may have “required embracing the lie about the election, would have required enabling that and I just simply wasn't willing to do that … I knew that I had to do what was right.”

Saying that many of her Republican colleagues have failed a “great moral test” in refusing to confront Trump, Cheney added that she has “no regrets … There's just never been any question about what was the right way to operate here and the right thing to do.”

Pence to testify on Jan. 6?

She underlined that she hopes former Vice President Mike Pence testifies before the Jan. 6 panel that she serves on, a prospect Pence has said he would consider.

Citing Pence’s “critical role” that day in presiding over the ceremonial vote count, she said “if he had succumbed to the pressure that Donald Trump was putting on him, we would have had a much worse constitutional crisis.”

Trump publicly pressured Pence to derail the count and block Biden from becoming president, in violation of the Constitution.

On the FBI search of Trump's Florida home earlier this month, seeking to retrieve classified materials Trump allegedly took from the White House without authorization, Cheney said she is ashamed of Trump and her Republican colleagues for attacking the FBI agents who carried out the search warrant.

She criticized “the former president of the United States, my colleagues, stoking the flames of that instead of saying we need to learn to facts, we need to learn the evidence, we need to learn the information about what happened.”

Cheney added that she has not seen any evidence so far that the judge-approved FBI raid was politically motivated.

“That's a very serious thing. I think that when you think about the fact that we were in a position where the FBI, the Department of Justice, felt the need to execute a search warrant at the home of a former president – that's a really serious thing for the nation," she said.

Violence, threats follow FBI search

After FBI agents searched Trump's home at the Mar-a-Lago resort on Aug. 8, some Republicans compared the lawful raid to Nazi “Gestapo” tactics and claimed it was a politicized move.

Days later, in the US state of Ohio, a gunman was shot dead by police after attempting to enter a local FBI building.

Amid other threats to FBI agents, media reports highlighted how the gunman criticized the Mar-a-Lago search on social media and urged his followers to take up arms.

In recent years, with Trump’s encouragement, more people identifying as conservatives or Republicans have said the use of force is justified to advance their political aims.

Source: Anadolu Agency