Cheney: Trump’s reported insistence he would stay in White House ‘affirms the reality of the danger’

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said in an interview that a report about former President Trump insisting that he would stay in the White House after losing the 2020 election “affirms the reality of the danger” of trying to overturn its results.

A new book to be published next month by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman reportedly reveals that Trump told aides he would remain in the White House after President Biden’s inauguration, CNN reported early Monday.

“I’m just not going to leave,” Trump reportedly told an aide. “We’re never leaving. How can you leave when you won an election?”

When asked about the book’s revelation, Cheney said she wasn’t surprised by Trump’s reported comments but said it exposed an issue of people believing his efforts to overturn the election “wasn’t as dangerous as it really was.”

“And when you hear something like that, I think you have to recognize that we were in no man’s land and territory we’d never been in before as a nation,” Cheney told anchor Jake Tapper in an interview set to air Sunday evening as part of a CNN documentary titled “American Coup: The January 6th Investigation.”

“And if you have a president who’s refusing to leave the White House, or who’s saying he refuses to leave the White House, then anyone who sort of stands aside and says someone else will handle it is themselves putting the nation at risk, because it’s clear that, when you’re at a moment that we faced, everyone’s got to stand up and take responsibility,” Cheney said.

“It’s not surprising that those are the sentiments that he reportedly expressed,” Cheney added. “I think, again, it just affirms — affirms the reality of the danger.” 

Cheney, who lost her bid to retain her congressional seat in Wyoming last month, has been a frequent critic of Trump and is the co-chairwoman of the House select committee investigating the Jan 6., 2021, attack at the Capitol.