On January 11, 2017, Donald Trump held his first Presidential press conference following his upset victory in the November, 2016, election. It was anything but Presidential. In perhaps the day’s most notable exchanges, he attacked BuzzFeed for publishing a former British spy’s unverified dossier on his extensive ties to Russia—the news organization, Trump said, was a “failing pile of garbage.” He also singled out CNN and its White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, for particular scorn. “You’re fake news!” Trump raged at Acosta, refusing to take a question from him. It was his first spoken utterance of a phrase that, arguably more than any other, would come to be associated with his Presidency.
It was also, and more to the point, an act of shameless linguistic larceny. In the two months since Trump’s upset win, the “fake news” conversation had been all about the weaponization of falsehoods by Trump and for his political benefit. On November 3rd, a few days before the 2016 election, Craig Silverman—a BuzzFeed reporter who had first regularly started using the term in 2014, in research papers and articles—broke a story about fake-news troll farms in Macedonia that had been spreading lies on Trump’s behalf to American voters on Facebook. When Trump actually won the election, the idea that fake news promoted by hidden forces had contributed to his unlikely victory went viral. In that January press conference, Trump appropriated the phrase for himself, this time as an attack on his critics, a move of political jiu-jitsu that proved to be stunningly effective. I spoke with Silverman the other day about the moment that “fake news” stopped being his label and became Donald Trump’s. “He decided to take it and turn it into his term, and to take ownership of it and use it as a cudgel to beat the media,” Silverman told me. “And I think it proved to be one of his favorite phrases, and probably one of his most effective phrases, too, over the course of his Presidency.”
All week long, I’ve been thinking about that moment four years ago. This Monday, Trump sent out a short statement, the kind that he would have tweeted out before his falsehoods about the recent election got him banned from Twitter. In it, he said, “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!” Soon after that, Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican leader, sent out an actual tweet refusing to accept this Trumpian redefinition of truth. “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen,” she wrote. “Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE.” Anyone who has followed the past four years in the Republican Party, however, can tell you what happened next: the Party did not turn on Donald Trump for his outrageous inversion of truth but on Liz Cheney. Within a couple of days, it had become abundantly clear that House Republicans would soon throw Cheney out of her leadership position for refusing to go along with Trump’s big lie about the Big Lie.
Trump has learned the lesson of previous demagogues: the bigger and more flagrant the untruth, the better to prove the fealty of his Party. After all, it actually demands more loyalty to follow your leader into an absurd conspiracy theory than it does to toe the official line when it doesn’t require a mass suspension of disbelief. Back in January, the Big Lie had been rightly affixed to Trump’s preposterous falsehoods about the “rigged election” and his followers’ insurrection, on January 6th, to prevent Congress from certifying the results. His claims were so preposterous that a lawyer who advanced them on Trump’s behalf, Sidney Powell, is now defending herself in court with a filing that states “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.” There was no fraud. Or, as Trump might put it, if he weren’t lying about it, “NO FRAUD!” And yet Trump has successfully proved throughout the past few months that the repetition of these lies over and over again—even without accompanying evidence—is more than enough to get millions of Americans to believe him. He has run this play before. He knows that it works. Fake News indeed.
The striking difference is that, this time, Liz Cheney has chosen to fight him on it. If Trump does manage to reinvent “the Big Lie” in service of his own corrupt ends, Cheney will at least have forced members of her party into admitting, on the record, that they are making a choice between truth and Trump’s untruth—and choosing the latter. There is no hope among her supporters and advisers that she will win the fight, when the House Republican Conference votes, likely next week, to boot her. Instead, there is a recognition that Cheney has finally decided to do what most of the Trump skeptics within the Party were reluctant to for four years: publicly challenge not only Trump’s lies but the enablers within the G.O.P. who give his lies such power. “It’s all got to do with fealty to Trump and the Big Lie and the fact that Liz is a living reproach to all these cowards,” Eric Edelman, a friend of Cheney’s who served as a national-security adviser to her father, former Vice-President Dick Cheney, told me.
Cheney’s rupture with the House Republican Conference has become all but final in recent days, but it has been months in the making. Edelman revealed that Cheney herself secretly orchestrated an unprecedented op-ed in the Washington Post by all ten living former Defense Secretaries, including her father, warning against Trump’s efforts to politicize the military. The congresswoman not only recruited her father but personally asked others, including Trump’s first Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, to participate. “She was the one who generated it, because she was so worried about what Trump might do,” Edelman said. “It speaks to the degree that she was concerned about the threat to our democracy that Trump represented.” The Post op-ed appeared on January 3rd, just three days before the insurrection at the Capitol.
Little noticed at the time was another Cheney effort to combat Trump’s post-election lies, a twenty-one-page memo written by Cheney and her husband, Phil Perry, an attorney, and circulated on January 3rd to the entire House Republican Conference. In it, Cheney debunked Trump’s false claims about election fraud and warned her colleagues that voting to overturn the election results, as Trump was insisting, would “set an exceptionally dangerous precedent.” But, of course, they did not listen. Even after the storming of the Capitol, a hundred and forty-seven Republican lawmakers voted against accepting the election results. When Trump was later impeached over his role in inciting the insurrection, Cheney was one of just ten House Republicans to vote in favor of it.
Revealingly, it is not Cheney’s impeachment vote that now looks like the move to get her bounced from the Party’s leadership. It is her refusal to shut up about it and embrace the official party line of forgetting about Trump’s attack on democracy and moving on—which is the approach of all but a handful of prominent Republicans. Even former Vice-President Mike Pence, who was forced by a pro-Trump mob to flee for his life on January 6th, after he refused Trump’s demand that he block congressional certification of the election results, is back to public deference. At an appearance last week, Pence called his service to Trump “the greatest honor” of his life.
So, too, is Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, who made a frantic phone call to Trump on January 6th seeking his help in stopping the mob. McCarthy was angry enough days later that he gave a speech on the House floor saying unequivocally that Trump “bears responsibility” for the Capitol attack. But McCarthy, like Pence, has returned to his safe space of Trump sycophancy. In recent days, McCarthy has made clear that the effort to dump Cheney has his support, as well as Trump’s. Various media accounts have suggested that he was personally angered that Cheney had not been more grateful when he intervened to help save her leadership job following her impeachment vote. The bad feelings are clearly mutual in Cheneyworld. “You have to surround the Big Lie with a bodyguard of lies,” Edelman told me, of McCarthy, paraphrasing Churchill.
Four years ago, back when Trump was turning “fake news” into his own hypocritical rallying cry, Cheney and other members of the conservative Republican establishment were in what appeared to be hold-their-noses-and-deal-with-him mode. Most of them went on to become vocal Trump cheerleaders. A few others, such as former House Speaker Paul Ryan, decided to leave the public stage altogether rather than take Trump on. The loudest anti-Trump voice in the G.O.P. in 2017, the Arizona senator John McCain, died of brain cancer the following year. Mitt Romney, who won election to the Senate from Utah a couple of months after McCain’s death, became essentially a lone Republican voice of public opposition to Trump on Capitol Hill. Cheney, from the rabidly pro-Trump state of Wyoming, stayed largely silent until the outrages of 2020 began to pile up.
It took a long time, but arguably Liz Cheney today is McCain’s heir. She is, at the last, willing to call a lie a lie. She applied “the Big Lie” to Trump’s crimes against American democracy long before Trump sought, this week, to steal the phrase for his own destructive purposes. But there is one matter about which I must disagree. In a scathing opinion article she published on the Post’s Web site Wednesday night, Cheney wrote that she will not back down from this fight because it is a “turning point” for her party, which will show whether Republicans “choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution” or the “dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.” She is wrong about this one. The choice has already been made.