Yahoo News Liz Cheney Says Mom’s Friend Was So Devoted to Donald Trump She ‘Threw Away’ a Six-Decade Friendship
Cheney speaks with PEOPLE about her life after Congress and the release of her new memoir, "Oath and Honor"
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty
Liz CheneyFor the people in former Congresswoman Liz Cheney's orbit, politics has been personal — so much so that one of her mother's dear friends abandoned a decades-long sisterhood over their conflicting views of Donald Trump.
"I talk in the book about one of my mother’s oldest friends, someone she'd been friends with since they went to Girls State in Wyoming together in the 1950s," says Cheney, 57, in conversation with PEOPLE about her new memoir Oath and Honor.
According to the Wyoming Republican, that family friend became so "enamored" with Trump that — when the Cheneys became outspoken critics of his election denialism — she "basically just threw away a friendship of over 60 years," prioritizing her loyalty to Trump over her personal relationships.
Cheney — daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and former second lady Lynne Cheney, both 82 — once chaired the House Republican Conference, the third-highest position in House GOP leadership.
But she broke from her party after the 2020 presidential election to urge Trump to respect the electoral process, and she would later co-lead the House's investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, when Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to thwart the election's certification.
Those decisions — plus her vote in favor of impeaching Trump — would cost her a seat in Congress when she lost reelection in 2022 to a pro-Trump candidate.
Speaking to PEOPLE, Cheney acknowledges that the decision to vote for Trump's second impeachment was met with skepticism from her fellow Republicans.
"When it came to the vote to impeach Donald Trump, there were people who said to me, 'How can you impeach a president of your own party? How can you vote to impeach a president when 70% of the people of the state that I represented, Wyoming, voted for him in the election?' "
"And it was so clear to me that your oath and your duty to the Constitution has to come before any partisan politics, but it turned out that not that many people felt that way," she continued.
Related: JFK's Grandson Jack Schlossberg Awards Liz Cheney Profile in Courage
Cheney worked for the State Department before launching a failed Senate bid in 2014. Then, in 2016, she launched another campaign, this time for the House of Representatives, where she was elected with more than 60% of the vote.
By November 2021, however, the tide had changed. Republicans in Wyoming voted to strip Cheney of her party affiliation, following her attempts to hold the former president accountable, and by 2022, she found herself fighting an uphill battle to reelection.
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Still, she did have some in her corner, including her father. "He’s just been absolutely steadfast," Cheney told PEOPLE of the former vice president. "And I think that has also given me a lot of strength. Obviously, I have been a member of the Republican Party for decades, he has been for even longer. His advice, his thoughts, his views about what’s required at this moment have certainly given me strength and been a real example for me."
Of her book, Cheney says it offers a way for her to tell her side of the story, now that she's no longer serving in office. “I felt it was really important for people to know what had happened inside the halls of Congress. It’s a cautionary tale.”
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