The only two living former Republican presidents are taking opposite sides in the nasty intra-GOP battle to oust Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming from Congress.
Former President George W. Bush will headline a fundraiser for Cheney on Oct. 18 in Dallas, a Republican source familiar with the event confirmed to Fox News on Wednesday morning.
Cheney is the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who served as Bush’s vice president during his two terms (2001-2009) in the White House.
Bush’s appearance at the event – he’s listed on the invitation as a “special guest” – is his first helping fellow Republicans running in the 2022 midterm elections. Word of the fundraiser was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
But Bush’s move puts him at odds with former President Donald Trump , who has launched a full court press to defeat Cheney as she runs next year for a fourth two-year term representing the entire state of Wyoming in the House.
Stepping up his efforts, Trump backed one of the candidates hoping to defeat Cheney in next year’s election. The former president endorsed lawyer and former gubernatorial candidate Harriet Hageman, writing in a release put out by his political action committee that “Harriet is all in for America First.”
And Trump slammed Cheney as “RINO,” which stands for “Republican in name only.” And Trump charged that Cheney, who has followed in her father’s footsteps as a strong advocate for a muscular U. S. national security and military stance overseas, was a “warmonger and disloyal Republican.”
Cheney, a longtime vocal GOP critic of Trump, was the most senior House Republican to vote to impeach the then-president on a charge of inciting the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U. S. Capitol by right-wing extremists and other Trump supporters, who aimed to disrupt congressional certification of Trump’s presidential election defeat to now-President Biden.
Cheney immediately came under verbal attack by Trump and his allies, but in February she easily crushed an effort by Trump loyalists in the House to dump her from her leadership position as House Republican Conference Chair…. (Read more)
