Cheney: Trump’s comments must be taken ‘literally and seriously’

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is arguing that Americans cannot just brush off former President Trump’s comments, but must take his words “literally and seriously.”

“I think we have to take everything that Donald Trump says literally and seriously,” Cheney said in an interview on ABC News’s “This Week,” set to air on Sunday.

“And I think that we saw, frankly, what he was willing to do already after the 2020 election in the lead up to Jan. 6, after Jan 6,” she continued. “People need to remember that when Donald Trump woke up on the morning of Jan. 6, he thought he was going to remain as president.”

She added, we saw the extent to which he was willing to attempt to seize power when he lost an election.”

The former president sparked concern earlier this week when he refused to shy away from the idea that he could operate a potential second term like a dictator. During a town hall with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday evening, he raised even more alarms saying one wouldn’t lead an authoritarian regime “other than day one.”

“He says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’ I said, no, no, no — other than day one. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator,” Trump said during the event in Davenport, Iowa.

His allies also pushed back on the reports, defending Trump’s comments as jokes.

Cheney disagreed, calling it “wishful thinking” to believe the former president would ever “abide by the rulings of the courts or be stopped by the guardrails of our democracy.”

The former lawmaker, one of only two Republicans on the House panel investigation the insurrection, reupped her case that a second Trump White House would be worse than the first.

“It would be worse because he has had practice and because those people who were around him who actually did stop the worst that he was trying to do, would not be around him again,” she told ABC host Jonathon Karl. “I mean, our institutions don’t protect themselves. It’s the people who do.”

Cheney, who lost her House seat in 2022 and has emerged as one of Trump’s most vocal critics, argued that his circle of influence would also be bad for the country.

“The craziest and least stable of the people that are around Donald Trump, those are the people that he will put into the most important, highest offices in the land,” she said.

The Wyoming Republican has been making the rounds on the media circuit this week after the release of her new book, “Oath and Honor.”

The former president has taken swipes at Cheney’s memoir, calling her words “unhinged” and accusing the former congresswoman of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”