Cheney, one of the few House Republicans who voted last year to impeach Trump, appears headed for defeat on Tuesday when she faces her Trump-backed opponent, attorney Harriet Hageman, in one of the most hotly anticipated primaries matches of the year. On the surface, Cheney’s position is not entirely unique. Most of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump either lost re-election this year or chose not to run for re-election. But the race has symbolic value for Trump and his relentless effort to purge the Democratic Party of one of its staunchest conservative critics. “More than anybody else, he wants Cheney gone,” said one former Trump aide. “I think with him politics is always personal, but the Cheney thing — I think he finds it even more important because he didn’t just vote to impeach him, right? Try to destroy him.” Another Republican source exposed the former president’s particularly keen interest in the Cheney ouster effort. His team spent months meeting potential primary challengers and whittled down the list of Trump loyalists in the race to ensure a united Republican front against Cheney. The former president also met personally with some potential challengers before landing on Hageman as his preferred candidate. Trump even maintained an alliance with the conservative Club for Growth, a key player in the GOP primary that also backs Hageman, despite rifts with the group over its involvement in other Republican nomination contests, including the Senate primary in Ohio. “I think he was definitely more involved than in a lot of other primaries,” the second source said. The latest poll in the Wyoming race looks bleak for Cheney. A survey conducted early last month by Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy for the Casper Star-Tribune found Hageman with a 22-point lead over Cheney. Since then, there are signs that Hageman’s advantage has widened. A University of Wyoming poll released last week showed Cheney trailing by a staggering 29 points. But despite Cheney’s bleak political outlook, the Wyoming congresswoman has not softened her attacks on the former president and his current influence on the Republican Party. She used her closing statement in the only first debate to warn against buying into “Donald Trump’s lies” and tell Republicans to “vote for somebody else” if they want a representative who will violate their oath of office. In a campaign ad released earlier this month, her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, accused Trump of being a “threat to our Democracy.” And in a closing video to voters last week, he attacked the former president’s “legacy,” accusing him of lying to the American people, ignoring the rule of law and encouraging violence. “The lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is insidious,” he said in the video. “It preys on those who love their country. It is a door that Donald Trump has opened to manipulate Americans into abandoning their principles, sacrificing their freedom, justifying violence, ignoring the decisions of our courts and the rule of law. This is Donald Trump’s legacy, but it cannot be the future of our nation.” The relationship between Trump and Cheney has not always been adversarial. She supported him in 2016 when he first won her House seat, and even maintained that support as many of her Republican colleagues tried to distance themselves from him because of his vulgar remarks about women. He also voted in line with Trump’s positions about 93 percent of the time during his time in the White House, according to data site FiveThirtyEight, and voted for him in the 2020 presidential election. That all changed, however, in the wake of the 2020 presidential contest, as Trump and his allies spread the false idea that the election was rigged and tried to overturn his election loss, an effort that culminated in a deadly riot at the US Capitol in January. 6, 2021. Since then, Cheney has emerged as Trump’s staunchest Republican critic in Congress. She voted to impeach him for his role in the Capitol attack and continued to dispute his claim that the election was stolen after that, a move that ultimately cost her her job as chairwoman of the House Republican Conference. She is now one of only two Republicans serving on the House select committee investigating the January 6 riot. If Trump gets his way on Tuesday — and polling suggests he will — it will mark the latest milestone in the former president’s effort to rid the House Republican Conference of what he considers disloyal. Four pro-impeachment Republicans — Reps. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), John Katko (N.Y.), Fred Upton (Mich.) and Anthony Gonzalez (Ohio) — are not running for re-election this year, while three others — Reps. Tom Rice (S.C. ), Jaime Herrera Beutler (Wash.) and Peter Meijer (Mich.) — lost their nominations to Trump-backed challengers. Only two of the 10 — Reps. Dan Newhouse (Washington) and David Valladao (Calif.) — survived their primaries, though not by much. Even if Cheney makes it through her primary, Trump’s campaign against her has not left her unscathed. Apple tries again with back-to-office date: Kinzinger report: Trump’s ‘progress’ on FBI probe ‘same as Jan 6’ She has been largely sidelined within the GOP: The Wyoming GOP has already disowned Cheney, she has few allies in the House Republican Conference, and dozens of her GOP colleagues in the lower house have tried to bolster Hageman. More than 50 attended a fundraiser for Cheney’s primary challenger earlier this year. Cheney, however, characterized her campaign as one with a higher purpose. “At the end of the day, if defending the Constitution against the threat it poses means losing a seat in the House, then that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make,” Cheney said in an interview with CNN earlier this month. “I don’t intend to lose, but some things are more important than any single office or political campaign.”
