Beggars can't be choosers. Trump is their option. The goal should be to give them better options who address their grievances, not fight a losing struggle to convince ~75 million people to back the failed Republican agenda of the last 20 years.

I was a big supporter. It failed. It's time to move on.

And this is exactly what the NeverTrumpers and the old guard of the Republican establishment never even intended to do. They were never genuinely invested in the policy priorities of their base, they tried to pacify them by giving them as little crumbs as possible, while actually turning their votes into Wall Street tax cuts and foreign wars. The situation isnt much different from what the "corporate Democrats" have been doing with voters on the left.

I'm genuinely surprised how you and Black are refusing to see the reality of the situation.

Cheney voted to impeach Trump because he lied for 2 months about the election being stolen, worked to steal the election himself, called for his supporters to protest Congress accepting the results on Jan. 6th, and spoke to the mob before they invaded the Capitol.

That's why she is facing political backlash. Not because she supported big business tax cuts that Trump signed. Not because she wasn't tough enough on immigration or trade policy. Not because she's more interventionist than Trump. She faced backlash not because she voted against some Trumpist right-wing populist policy, but because she voted to hold him accountable for his post-election actions.

I'm honestly not sure if you guys are being willfully obtuse or you genuinely can't understand what's happening here. This has nothing to do with policy... it has everything to do with disloyalty to the cult leader. Which, if you care about actual policy, seems a weird thing to be defending.

This post was edited by IceMage on Jan 31 2021 03:14pm

Big tax cuts for corporations/rich people, mishandling a national catastrophe, and leaving your predecessor to pick up the pieces is about as "failed Republican agenda the last 20 years" as it gets.

"It's all about policy with these Trump voters!!!"

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/liz-cheney/

Liz Cheney votes in line with Trump 92.9%.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/rand-paul/

Rand Paul votes in line with Trump 68.9%.

What matters most to Trump voters is aligning with Trump the man, not Trump's policy.

Nobody cares about Liz Cheney on a personal level. What people care about is that she is the embodiment of the swamp demons who ruled the GOP before Trump's hostile takeover, and that these same figures are now trying to push the GOP back to its old ways, away from not just the person of Donald Trump, but also from the direction he stands for.

It was always inevitable that there would be a civil war within the GOP over the future direction of the party once Trump is gone. Everyone knew this fight was coming, everyone was prepared for it. It seems crystal clear to me that a lot of trial balloons were started in the days after the Capitol riot, figures like Cheney and McConnell tested the waters to see whether there would be enough momentum to get the party to officially break with Trump and everything he stands for. For example when McConnell was initially very open to impeachment. Essentially, the internal struggles over impeachment have become a proxy for this fight over the future direction of the GOP. Making an example out of figures like Cheney is just one maneuver within this ongoing intraparty battle.

When polls made it clear that an overwhelming majority of the GOP voters still were with Trump, these efforts mostly fizzled out. A few Republicans like Rob Portman or Pat Toomey announced the end of their political career, others like Cheney tried a last ditch effort to get things rolling for their side.

Dude, Trump does not have a direction that's distinct from the GOP. The GOP civil war that's happening or getting ready to happen is not about policy, it's about aesthetic. Trump did not govern in a meaningfully different way from other Republicans, with the exception of being totally inept and unable to take a loss with grace. He didn't pull out of the endless wars, he didn't stop the drone campaigns, he didn't lower tensions with anybody except NK and even in that interaction he got played like a fiddle, he didn't propose a healthcare plan despite promising for 5 straight years, he didn't bring back coal jobs, he didn't do shit with China except some relatively minor tariffs that cost us more jobs than it created, etc. etc.

Trump is NOT about policy on any level. It's about whether or not the right will keep its hatred under the table or just say the stuff you're supposed to whisper.

This post made me lol.

This is a Goomshill-like recreating of reality to override the inconvenient fact that most Republican voters are simply part of a personality cult around Trump. There's no greater struggle between the good forces of right-wing populism and the bad forces of neocons... it's simply a question of whether someone supports Trump, regardless of what he does.

Liz Cheney won her primary and general election contests easily in 2020. She would've exerted way more influence in the party had she not developed a conscience for a moment. But it's hard not to look at you and Bogie refusing to accept reality as part of the story of the radicalization of the right these past years. It's not just the QAnon folks... it's pretty much all of you.

This score is quite silly as long as bills are not weighted according to their importance. Cheney voting with Trump against "a ban on tabacco flavored products" is given the same weight as her vote in favor of his impeachment. Cheney agreeing with Trump on "expanding private care options for veterans" is treated as equally important as voting against his general foreign policy when it came to the Defense Authorization Act. Also, it's quite obvious that members of Congress are often times voting the party line out of political self-interest, even when it's clear that their personal beliefs and preferences lie somewhere else. This is immediately evident by the way Cheney started breaking with Trump more and more in her votes as soon as his power began to erode.

Rand Paul is an idiosyncratic case; when he votes against Trump's policies, it's usually because he deems them not conservative enough. Disagreement out of "being even more conservative" is obviously treated differently by the base since it doesnt indicate agreement with Democratic positions on the substance of the bills. Similarly, people like Bernie Sanders or AOC will end up with a lower Biden Score than the average member of their respective caucus.

Yes... Trump voters have a sophisticated calculation they do in their heads on these votes. It's not as simple as "Cheney supported the vast majority of his policy but then voted for impeachment, thus she's forever soiled"... it's much more complex than that.