This is an adapted excerpt from the Dec. 18 episode of "Deadline: White House."
On Tuesday, House Republicans issued a report recommending the FBI investigate former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney for her role in investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, President-elect Donald Trump, who has called for Cheney to be jailed before, reacted to the report on Truth Social, writing that the former Republican congresswoman “could be in a lot of trouble.”
Now, let’s not get caught up in the weeds here. We need to understand that, as Cheney has said before, Trump is petty, vindictive and cruel. This is not about the law for him; it’s not about providing a predicate for the FBI; it’s simply about his desire for revenge.
Trump wants to take the moral universe and turn it on its head, as he has done over and over again.
Republicans’ case against Cheney has no legal merit and no lawyer or judge should take it seriously, but there are two goals Trump and his allies are trying to accomplish with this threat.
The first involves Trump's pledge to pardon the rioters who stormed the Capitol, including those who violently attacked police officers. By pardoning those involved, Trump wants to turn things upside down and make the rioters, the people who tried to overturn the election, heroes. Then he wants to turn the tables on the truth-tellers, the people who tried to get to the bottom of what happened on Jan. 6, and make them villains. Trump wants to take the moral universe and turn it on its head, as he has done over and over again.
The second goal also involves something we've seen from Trump before. For the president-elect, fear is the point. Trump wants people to be afraid. It doesn’t matter whether there’s any legal merit to charge Cheney or the other individuals he’s threatened. In fact, the more absurd some of these lawsuits are, the scarier they are because there’s no protection. He wants people to believe it’s dangerous to criticize him.
To that end, it's also important to ask, why people are afraid right now. It’s because they don’t think the guardrails will hold. They don’t think that Trump can be stopped. They don’t have confidence in Congress. They don’t have confidence in the courts. They don’t have confidence that independent agencies will remain independent under Trump’s watch. That’s the real danger here. Americans have lost faith in the methods that, under normal circumstances, could hold someone like Trump accountable.
Allison Detzel contributed.