Hostages of Trumpism

Liz Cheney, in a file image SAUL LOEB / AFP

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• Trump consummates his dominance over the Republican Party after defenesting Liz Cheney for her criticism

A majority of Republican legislators on Wednesday managed to remove Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her position in the leadership of the party group in the United States House of Representatives. His only political crime is refusing, forcefully, to spread and cackle the greatest of Donald Trump's lies: that some kind of conspiracy stole his electoral victory last November. For this reason, Cheney voted in favor of the second

the former president, while his colleagues hid behind a technicality to avoid the obvious. What happened is a revealing episode of the disturbing inability of Republicans to leave behind one of the most shameful episodes in their history, such as denying the legitimacy of an electoral result.

The fear of upsetting Trump supporters is what keeps the Republican Party paralyzed. Most of his elected officials have come to the conclusion that only unqualified adherence to the former president guarantees the position. Despite the challenges of the moment, the party is anchored in blind loyalty to a character who has now decided to label the 2020 election "the big lie." Cheney has refused to spread this slogan and has also condemned it on social media as "poison for democracy." Is right.

Republicans can get out of the way with Cheney, but they can't escape the unraveling that loyalty to Trump threatens to produce in the party. For the next round, the legislatures of 2022, the Republican candidates find themselves in a quagmire: you cannot stand out and raise money without embracing the Trumpist madness; and at the same time, it is very difficult to win elections in the real world when living on the planet Mar-a-Lago. The tension between the Republicans has led a hundred of its members, according to the press, to consider creating a third party in which they can be conservative without being conspiratorial. The Republican Party must now begin to escape the Trumpist trap that prevents it from thinking and acting, or it faces a bleak future.