‘Lincoln Project Liz’: Republicans guffaw as anti-Trump Congresswoman Liz Cheney mulls possible run for president in 2024

US Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) is reportedly considering running for president in 2024, a prospect that has many Republicans mocking the embattled politician rather than lining up to support her candidacy.

“I can only assume this means that Lincoln Project Liz is planning a primary challenge to Joe Biden for the Dem nomination because God knows she'd be lucky to break 5% running in the 2024 Republican primary,” Donald Trump Jr., son of former president Donald Trump, said Monday on Twitter. The Lincoln Project is an anti-Trump activist group led by current and former Republicans.

The younger Trump was among many Republicans who found it preposterous that Cheney said in an interview with the New York Post that she isn't ruling out a presidential bid. She went on to say that Republicans who fought the certification of Democrat Biden's election victory, such as Senators Ted Cruz (Texas) and Josh Hawley (Missouri), should be disqualified from consideration for the GOP's 2024 presidential nomination. And she told the Washington Examiner that the elder Trump shouldn't be – and likely won't be – the party's nominee.

“I think it's important that it not happen, given what he did,” she said.

Cheney, speaking to various reporters at a House GOP retreat in Florida, didn't appear likely to curry support from pro-Trump voters. She declined to say whether the former president should be prosecuted in connection with the January 6 Capitol riot, suggesting that the Biden administration's Department of Justice should make that decision.

And she broke from other party leaders by saying that the House commission that's investigating the Capitol riot shouldn't broaden its probe to include other political violence, such as the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots that plagued America's cities last summer.

“I think that what happened on January 6 is unprecedented in our history, and I think that it's very important that the commission be able to focus on that,” she told reporters. “I am very concerned, as all my colleagues are, about the violence that we saw, the BLM, the Antifa violence last summer. I think that's a different set of issues, a different set of problems and a different set of solutions.”

Cheney, daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, is the third-ranking Republican in the House and helps lead the neocon wing of the party, which fell out of favor as Trump swept to power with his America First agenda in 2016. Her feuding with Trump escalated to a new level when she voted in January to impeach Trump for allegedly inciting the Capitol riot.

The backlash was swift, with the Wyoming GOP censuring Cheney, but conservative Republicans failed in an attempt to vote her out of her House leadership position. A poll done in late January found that just 10% of Republican voters said they would vote to re-elect her to her House seat in 2022. One of the rivals who has lined up to challenge her in the GOP primary, State Senator Anthony Bouchard, leads Cheney 54-21 in a head-to-head matchup, the poll showed.

“If Liz Cheney dares to run in 2024, it better not be as a Republican,” said former GOP congressional candidate Lavern Spicer of Miami.

Former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh, a radio host who ran against Trump in the 2020 GOP primaries, said it’s “silly” to think that Cheney could seriously challenge for the party's nomination. “No one who opposes Trump and Trumpism has a prayer to be the GOP nominee in 2024,” Walsh said. “No one. Not Liz Cheney, not [John] Kasich, not [Mitt] Romney. No one. It's now the Trumpy party, and you gotta be really Trumpy to win, period.”

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