Iraq War architect endorses Kamala Harris
Former US Vice President and lifelong Republican Dick Cheney has said that he is going to vote for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, not Donald Trump, in November’s presidential election.
The former vice president supported Trump when he ran for office for the first time in 2016. However, Cheney has become a harsh critic of the former president since then.
In his statement on Friday, Cheney claimed that “in our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.”
The Republican presidential nominee “can never be trusted with power again” because “he tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,” he claimed, referring to the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021 and Trump’s refusal to concede defeat to his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.
“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for vice president Kamala Harris,” the 83-year-old wrote.
The former vice president endorsed Harris a day after his daughter, former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, announced that she was backing the Democratic nominee.
Cheney, who was vice president under President George W. Bush, played a crucial role in planning and overseeing the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein. Before the conflict, he had repeatedly said that the Iraqi government possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to Al-Qaeda, which had attacked the US on September 11, 2001. Both claims later turned out to be false.
In 2022, when Liz Cheney ran her re-election campaign in Wyoming, her father called Trump “a coward” in one of the ads. She failed to win her fourth term as the state’s representative in Congress, losing to Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman in the Republican primaries.
Trump hit back at the Cheneys later on Friday in a post on his Truth Social platform, saying that “Dick Cheney is an irrelevant RINO, along with his daughter, who lost by the largest margin in the history of congressional races.” RINO is an abbreviation which stands for “Republican in Name Only”.
The Republican presidential nominee also attacked Liz Cheney over her role as the Vice Chair of the House January 6th Committee, which looked into the Capitol riots and Trump’s alleged role in provoking the unrest.
“What Liz Cheney did with the Unselect Committee of Political Losers is unthinkable. She and her Unselects deleted and destroyed all evidence and information - it’s gone,” he wrote. “Cheney and the others should be prosecuted for what they did, but Comrade Kamala is even worse.”
