On Monday, as Trump swept the polls in Iowa, Liz Cheney spoke at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. was baptized and later served as a pastor. Her warning about the threat of a second Trump term was met with resounding applause.
Cheney’s Warning
“A former president refuses to acknowledge that he lost,” Cheney said in her speech. “He threatens the foundations of our nation and everything Dr. King persevered to save.”
Singular Task
Cheney posted a video of her speech on X, “This year,” she wrote,” Americans must rise above our policy differences to ensure we defend our Constitution and defeat Donald Trump and his allies in Congress.”
Star-studded Speeches
Sen. Raphael Warnock, also a senior pastor at Ebenezer Church, urged the audience to “stand up and vote!” “If your vote didn’t count,” he continued, “why are folks trying so hard to keep you from voting? Stand and use your voice. Stand up and use your vote. Speak up!”
Personal Connection
Bernice King, MLK’s daughter, also spoke. “Our humanity is under attack,” she warned. However, she argued that her father’s lesson to the world was that “we can defeat injustice and ignorance and hold people accountable at the same time without seeking to destroy, diminish, demean, or cancel them.”
Popular Words
All speeches were met with frequent and fierce applause. Cheney’s exhortations were particularly popular, earning the former representative a standing ovation.
Repeating the Message
Cheney has, since 2020, been one of the loudest anti-Trump voices in the Republican Party. In December, she warned that Americans were “sleepwalking into a dictatorship” by underestimating the threat Trump poses.
End of Democracy
Electing an authoritarian like Trump, Cheney argued, would mean “the end of the constitutional republic.” While acknowledging that the threat was challenging for many to grasp, she urged people to take it seriously.
No Comparison
“There are some conservatives who are trying to make this claim that somehow Biden is a bigger risk than Trump,” Cheney said in early January. “I disagree with a lot of Joe Biden’s policies. We can survive bad policies. We cannot survive torching the Constitution.”
Party Problem
Cheney has also argued that the entire GOP must be voted out. “I say as someone who’s been a lifelong Republican,” Cheney said, “Republicans cannot be in the majority in the House of Representatives come January 2025. People across the country have to recognize that we have to vote for people who believe in the Constitution and reject election deniers.”
Specific Example
Cheney has singled out House Speaker Mike Johnson in particular, calling him “dangerous.” By leading the effort to overturn the 2020 election, Johnson demonstrated that he “was willing to set aside what he knew to be the rulings of the courts, the requirements of the Constitution, in order to placate Donald Trump,” Cheney explained.
Important Lesson
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience and comfort,” Dr. King once said, “but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
Prophetic Words
In 1967, amidst the chaos of the Vietnam War and reactionary backlash to Civil Rights, Dr. King said that America was “now experiencing the coming to the surface of a triple-prong sickness that has been lurking within our body politic from its very beginning. That is the sickness of racism, excessive materialism, and militarism. Not only is this our nation’s dilemma, it is the plague of Western civilization.”
Little Progress Made
“This does not imply that all White Americans are racist, far from it,” Dr. King said. “However, for the good of America, it is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country, even today, is freedom and equality while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists.”
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