In ‘Oath and Honor,’ Liz Cheney is both eloquent and evasive

In the end, however, it was the substance that mattered. We forget how cautiously, even reluctantly, the Justice Department had been moving to investigate figures in Donald Trump’s inner orbit and how many of the key witnesses were uncovered by Cheney.

Cheney has much to say, no surprise, about the Jan. 6 attack in her new book, “Oath and Honor,” but she also has pressing things to say about what led up to it and what may still lie ahead. Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman, has a prosecutor’s orderly, meticulous mind, and the subtitle, “A Memoir and a Warning,” if awkwardly phrased, is an accurate description of the two potential books she has neatly fused into one readable whole.

It is the memoir part, with its expertly timed leaks, that has captured media attention and sent the book to the very top of Amazon’s sales charts. Cheney offers scathing portraits of colleagues she holds in utter contempt. There is Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) seeking absolution from the sun god at Mar-a-Lago on the pretext of babying Trump through the various stages of “grief” after President Biden was inaugurated, when in fact McCarthy was panicking because the “biggest corporate donors” had said they might have to shut off the spigot “to Republicans who had voted to object to the Electoral College votes,” and his leadership of the House GOP was tied to his fundraising skills. Now “Kevin needed money,” Cheney reports, and there was only one place to turn: “Trump had lists of small-​dollar donors.” To get the lists, “Kevin would have to help Donald Trump cover up the stain of his assault on our democracy.”

The “plague of cowardice” infected almost the whole of the Republican House caucus, and the Senate was nearly as bad, for the same reason. They all “knew the truth about what Trump had done,” Cheney says, and privately admitted as much but wouldn’t speak out — fearful of death threats, of being primaried (as Cheney herself was in 2022), of falling out of favor with “the Orange Jesus,” as one colleague “sheepishly” said.

Others, like Cheney’s former friend Mike Johnson (R-La.) — they had adjacent offices — were “especially susceptible to flattery from Trump and aspired to being anywhere in Trump’s orbit.” Johnson concocted a spurious amicus brief for a suit filed by Texas contesting the election results in four states won by Biden, a “gimmick” that was bad enough. But worse, “Mike knew” that the case he was making was baseless, Cheney writes, “… but he did not care.”

What of the “warning” half of Cheney’s book? This is where she has more to say — or should, if only because she has indicated that she might run for president herself and fulfill her father’s, Dick Cheney’s, injunction, which she relates early in the book: “Defend the republic, daughter.”

But defend it from what, exactly? While Cheney, like so many others, worries that Trump and Trumpists have laid siege to “our democracy,” she also knows, and is on surer ground when she speaks of, the actual peril, which is the growing contempt in America for “the rule of law” — a different thing from democracy itself, and in some ways opposed to it. This is the paradox, fully intended, in our system. The possible dictatorship Trump personifies gains its energy not, as we so often hear, from his hatred of “our democracy” but from his ability, verging on genius, for stirring the democratic passions in their lowest form. His idea of leadership, so often called authoritarian, is closer to “Caesarism” or “mob government.” It begins in what Max Weber described, a century ago, as “plebiscitary democracy,” its dominant figure the “charismatic” leader who attracts followers through a demagogic “personality.” The essay setting forth that analysis was written in the early days of the Weimar Republic, but the examples Weber cited came from the party politics of 19th-century England and the United States.

In places, Cheney’s argument brings us close to this idea. She shrewdly quotes Abraham Lincoln’s remarkable Lyceum Address, delivered in 1838, when he was all of 28 but already sensed growing disregard in the land for America’s “political institutions.” When the threat arrived, Lincoln predicted, it would come not “from abroad” but from “worse than savage mobs” stirred up at home.

It was this mood in antebellum America that led the American historian David Herbert Donald to describe the “excess of democracy” (at least among those who had the vote) in the 1850s that led to the Civil War. It was a period of intense “religious revivalism” as well as “hysterical fears and paranoid suspicions.” Never, wrote Donald, “was there a field so fertile” for “the propagandist, the agitator, the extremist.”

What brought about these changes? Not the oppression we might suppose, but its opposite, the new “unrestricted liberty” in pioneer America, which gave citizens many new opportunities but also unmoored them and made them “increasingly unable to arrive at reasoned, independent judgments upon the problems that faced their society.”

In such conditions, “institutions” lost their authority. The same is true today, also a time of transformation — of frightening new technologies and expanding information frontiers but also of new dangers that traditional institutions seem ill-equipped to solve. This is why many speak disparagingly or fearfully of the “deep state,” by which they mean the government itself and the “government within the government”: the electoral college, the state legislatures and courts, the secretaries of states who collect ballots and tabulate votes. The distrust extends to the federal government, the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS and more. This is why Trump and his supporters now talk of commandeering the whole of the executive branch, or large parts of it, and remaking it into the instrument of presidential will — and whim.

Cheney’s term for this new version of the GOP is the “anti-Constitution party.” Others have begun using this term, in recognition that what confronts us is not merely one unhinged actor but a movement. Better than some others, Cheney grasps that this movement has arisen on the ashes of previous failures. “George W. Bush and my father were the last Republican candidates to win the popular vote in any presidential election, and that was two decades ago, in 2004,” she points out. “And it was no wonder why.”

But what, exactly, is the why she means? She doesn’t say. She is eloquent on the evils of Trump and the craven, ever-widening “orbit” of his flacks and enablers — including her own former colleagues — as well as QAnon followers she has met in Wyoming and some “40 to 50 million” Americans convinced, some of them “absolutely,” thanks to the poisons of social media and internet disinformation, “that their nation had been stolen from them by election fraud.”

Fifty million is a lot, but nowhere near enough to elect a president in 2024. Trump in defeat got some 74 million votes in 2020, and could get even more in 2024, if current polls are reliable. Surely not all of those voters are waiting to join what Cheney calls “the party of QAnon.”

So who are they? This is the question Cheney struggles to answer, because it leads to places that she and many others seem uneasy about exploring, though the answer can be found in publications such as the American Conservative, American Affairs and Compact, not to mention the op-ed pages of the nation’s premier newspapers. There we find writers, many of them young, some of them erudite, who are not necessarily pro-Trump but who argue that he candidly speaks to issues such as the destabilizing costs of the globalized economy and anxieties around immigration policies, not to mention the “nation building” crusades with which the Cheneys, father and daughter alike, have long been closely identified. “Exceptional,” a book the two wrote in 2015 calling for a return to muscular foreign policy, included what one reviewer called “a relentlessly militaristic to-do list.”

“Oath and Honor” shows how deeply enmeshed Liz Cheney remains in that world, and how much she still embraces its assumptions. She describes the campaign she organized to “mobilize” no fewer than 10 former secretaries of defense to warn against Trump before Jan. 6, a period when he persisted in denying the facts about the election. The list of signers began with her father and his great friend Donald H. Rumsfeld and also included Leon Panetta. “Like my dad and Secretary Rumsfeld,” she writes, “Panetta had been a congressman and White House chief of staff as well as secretary of defense.”

All belonged to what in another country — England or France — might be identified as the governing or ruling class. Liz Cheney belongs to it as well — except when she has found it convenient to indicate otherwise, like when she was first elected to the House in 2016, the same year Trump was elected president. They ran on similar platforms: support for fossil fuels coupled with aggressive climate change denial. In Wyoming, it was widely assumed that Cheney’s views on these matters had lent credibility to Trump’s success there.

There is nothing about this in “Oath and Honor.” Neither does Cheney seriously address her part during Trump’s first impeachment, beginning in 2019, when she stridently sided with Trump and her GOP colleagues in the House. In the book, she writes that it was a mistake for Democrats not to subpoena Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, who could have provided clinching evidence, and implies that this was the reason she opposed it. In fact, she called the proceedings “shameful,” and as the Republican in charge of House “messaging” during the 2020 election relentlessly drove the accusation home. But there was much additional evidence — including Trump’s infamous “perfect” phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky and testimony from officials who came under extortionate pressure from Trump of exactly the kind Cheney’s hearings later exposed — that showed that Trump had acted precisely as Alexander Hamilton, the framer who gave most thought to the role of the chief executive and to the grounds of removal, had feared. As Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow wrote at the time in The Washington Post, Hamilton “would most certainly have endorsed the current impeachment inquiry.”

One has the strong feeling that Liz Cheney and many of her colleagues “all knew the truth” in 2019, just as she says they did after Jan. 6. Had they acted on it the first time, “the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office,” as she calls Trump, would probably not now be closing in on the GOP nomination and a possible second term.

Sam Tanenhaus, a Book World contributing writer, is the author of the prizewinning biography “Whittaker Chambers.” His biography of William F. Buckley Jr. will be published next year.

Little, Brown. 372 pp. $32.50