LIZ CHENEY, PROGRESSIVE HERO?

 Liz Cheney just lost her seat in the House of Representatives in a primary challenge to Harriet Hageman by a wide margin.  It was an ignoble defeat for a woman who had easily won reelection in 2020.  What changed, of course, is her support of  former President Donald Trump.  After the January 6th riot at the capitol, Cheney became one of Trump biggest critics, from joining with only 9 other Republicans in the House to vote to impeach him, and disparaging him in the media, to having a prominent voice in the January 6th investigation in the House, Cheney has never missed a chance to criticize the former president.

Lost in all the criticism is the fact that Cheney loudly endorsed Trump in both 2016 and 2020, voted with him over 90% of the time, and reportedly in 2019 even publicly asserted that she was more "Trumpier" than Senate Republican Rand Paul.  So what happened? What turned a Trump loyalist into a critic?  Even if Cheney did not believe that Trump actually won, she could have easily lied about it on the campaign trail, shrugged off the January 6th riot like so many Republicans have, and cruised to a reecletion victory.  But she chose not to, knowing full well that she was turning against the beliefs of the vast majority of Republican voters.  I think the answer as to why she did it lies in her seeing a certain event that triggered her sense of empathy.  

You see, as anyone who's ever argued with someone with opposite political beliefs can tell you, progressives and conservatives experience the world very differently.  Studies have shown that progressives and conservatives brains respond to various stimuli differently, with conservatives responding more to fear, anger  and disgust (which explains right wing media!).  Conservatives also have a harder time expressing empathy for anyone not within their own social circle.  

What does this have to do with Cheney turning against Trump?  I think the exact moment that changed her mind was seeing then Vice President Mike Pence being rushed out of his Capitol office by security as Trump supporters chanted for his death.  And the reason that moment struck so hard for her was because her own father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, once worked in that very office, and it was easy for her to understand the horror that Pence was being subjected to.  It hit home for her because she could imagine her own father in that situation.  

So that was the breaking point in her 4 year support of Trump, it affected her in a way that it didn't to other conservatives, who, unlike her, could condemn the January 6th riot without voting to impeach Trump and then eventually downplay the riot entirely.  Interestingly, her father is also an example of conservative empathy: during the 2004 presidential campaign, when then President George W Bush ran on a platform of adding an anti gay marriage amendment to the constitution, Dick Cheney disagreed and said he supported gay marriage.  He did this because his other daughter, Mary, was a lesbian.  Once again, having a family member affected by something caused him to go against his own party's political beliefs.

Liz Cheney is now said to be considering running for president in 2024, and while I would certainly prefer her to Trump and admire her for standing up to him, I certainly couldn't vote for someone who supported Trump while he was making bigoted statements and separating families at the border.  Just because one dramatic image changed her view about Trump doesn't make her a progressive hero. 

THE MAR-O-LAGO RAID

 For months now, progressives have been wondering if Attorney General Merrick Garland was going to ever formally charge Donald Trump for the crimes he seemed to have committed as president.  The question as to what Garland was waiting for got louder as the Congressional January 6th Committee released its findings, revealing even more corruption from the former president.

Well, yesterday it appears that Garland finally has decided to do something, with Trump himself announcing that Federal Agents had raided his home in Mar-O-Lago while he was out of town.  This is a truly unprecedented move made by the Federal government; such a raid has never been carried out against a former American president, but, then again, no American president has ever been as openly corrupt as Trump was.  And it's important to note that this raid was made by agents who first were granted a search warrant by a federal judge, meaning that they were able to prove a strong belief that illegal materials were in Mar-O-Lago and that only such a raid could obtain them.  So, it was not an action taken lightly by the Justice Department.

Somewhat amusingly, the media has pounced on this story and drawn attention away from congress's successful passage of the Deficit Reduction bill.  Yes, as always, Trump sucks up all the attention, good or bad.

The crazy thing is that this raid may not have anything to do with January 6th; it appears it is in response to him taking classified documents that legally belong to the American public out of the White House and refusing to return them.  Combine this with recent reports that Trump also routinely tore apart, flushed down the toilet or even ate classified documents, and you can see why Garland took action.  And while we may never know just why Trump decided to destroy(or steal) so many documents, it certainly doesn't put him in a good light.

The former president has, predictably, blasted the raid an "attack by Radical Left Democrats."  And, even  more predictably,  Republicans in congress have joined him in piling on, and even darker statements have been made by Pro-Trump right wing media figures, like on the Steve Bannon podcast “Bannon’s War Room,”  when, Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed House candidate in Washington said “This just shows everyone what many of us have been saying for a very long time, we're at war."  

As always, the right wing in this country has no last straw when it comes to Trump; really, why should they?  They stood by him after he bragged about sexually assaulting women, called white  supremacist rioters "very fine people", refused to admit that he lost the 2020 election and incited a riot.  What's a little illegal stealing of presidential documents after all that?

Even more depressing is the possibility that this raid, as necessary as it seems to be, could wind up strengthening Trump's chance of winning if he runs again in 2024, as he most surely will.  Constant complaints about how he has been unfairly persecuted is a big part of his dishonest persona.   What just happened at Mar-O-Lago  could just push his followers to support him even more, as he screams about how unfair it all is, and how it was all partisan.  I hate to think about it, but Donald Trump has so completely rewritten the rules of acceptable political behavior (and decent human behavior), that even having his home subject to a criminal raid may not stop him from regaining the White House, and it could even help him.