Much has been written about Liz Cheney and her motivations for blowing up her congressional career over a seemingly psychotic obsession with Donald Trump.  But there are aspects to the analyses that are missing the larger point that Cheney was not motivated by high principles and a quest to save our country.  She was motivated by hatred, self-interest, and vengeance.

In a Wall Street Journal column entitled "I Don't Donate to Politicians, but I Will to Liz Cheney," frequent contributor Joseph Epstein displayed his anti-Trump bias through a vapid argument about Cheney's "principled stance against Trump," jumping to conclusions based on meaningless anecdotes and unsubstantiated inferences about Cheney's motivations for her self-interested positions.  Although he never met Cheney, Epstein justified his conclusions on his "pleasant history" with her parents.

Unlike Epstein, I have met Liz Cheney (and her parents) and have an actual basis on which to question her ethics and political motivations.

After I sat next to her at a luncheon about a year into Obama's first term, she invited me to an intimate and private dinner with two of George W. Bush's former national security advisers.  The four of us spent several hours discussing Iran, Iraq, al-Qaeda, and Israel, and it was clear that Cheney was preparing to launch her political career, for which she had high aspirations.  She asked me to write a white paper on why Israel is a strategic asset to the United States and offered to pay me $2,000 for my product.  I spent one month thoroughly researching the 6,000-word paper, which was edited by a highly respected former NSA official, foreign policy expert, journalist, and conservative thinker. 

After receiving the final paper from both of us in separate emails, Cheney never responded.  She went completely MIA.  To this day, I have no idea if she ever used the paper in her campaign or work in Congress.  She never thanked me, never paid me, and never reached out to me again.  I would call that rude, unprofessional, and certainly unethical.  It showed a lack of character and morals, but it also showed hubris — the kind we often see from politicians like Obama and Hillary, who not only believe themselves above the law, but believe they are entitled to their power and the rest of us are here to serve them.

What Epstein and others who blindly believe that Cheney is motivated by upstanding morality and principles are missing is that Trump Derangement Syndrome, from which she clearly suffers, is a psychological illness.  It has led to formerly sane, smart, respectable individuals flying off the handle into irrelevance and disreputability while they pursue destructive and delusional agendas motivated by animus and hate.

Cheney's former colleague at the Emergency Committee for Israel, Bill Kristol, whom I also had met and spoken with many times prior to his TDS, and the destruction of The Weekly Standard as a direct result, is another example.  When Cheney and Kristol founded ECI in 2010, their message was that the Obama/Biden policies presented an emergency that required immediate attention in order to help Israel survive in the face of a dangerous U.S. administration.  A decade later, these same individuals supported Biden in 2020 despite his record on Israel and obsession with joining a nuclear deal with an Iranian regime that continually threatens Israel's annihilation.

Did Biden's danger to Israel simply vanish, or did TDS blind Cheney to the real dangers facing our country and our allies?  For Cheney, the emergency committee on Israel morphed into the emergency committee to destroy Trump, who she now claims presents the greatest danger to our republic.  And we're supposed to take her seriously.

Never mind the axis of Russia, China, and Iran taking hold across the world (following our disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan), threatening our national security.  Who cares about fatwas issued against former Trump officials who are no longer safe without being surrounded by Secret Service.  Biden handing Iran nuclear weapons (and $1 trillion!) in the midst of all of this is no longer a concern for Cheney.  A woke military that can no longer recruit soldiers at required levels, let alone maintain its readiness to fight our enemies as Democrats continue to weaken its strength and resolve, is small potatoes for this congresswoman singularly obsessed with destroying the former president. 

Never mind our open southern border, where drug- and human-traffickers, warlords, terrorists, and millions of illegal aliens are flying across, setting us up for more 9/11s; crime on our streets; fentanyl overdoses; tent cities; and taxes required to pay for all of the free stuff and services provided to noncitizens.  Cheney does not see a threat to our nation from all of this.

Never mind a lawless federal government, which, coupled with the Resistance movement that began the minute Trump came down the escalator, set out to destroy a duly elected president.  Never mind that justice is not blind and that conservatives are treated as threats to the republic, while liberals and progressives walk free without punishment for their crimes.  Threats to conservative Supreme Court justices?  Silence from Cheney.  Black Lives Matter protests that destroyed our cities?  No investigations from Cheney.  Soros-funded prosecutors, bail reform, and criminal-friendly laws that threaten everyday Americans as they walk down the streets, simply trying to live their lives safely?  No action by Cheney.

Never mind a Democrat party that has been hijacked by progressives who seek not just to transform our country into a socialist, Marxist banana republic, but also to brainwash our children in order to form an army of Marxists that will not be easily reversed.  Cheney has no problem with Democrats' promises to end the filibuster; pack the Supreme Court; pack the Senate with four additional Democrat senators from the new states of Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.; and kill the Electoral College while passing election reform legislation that will ensure Democrat rule for eternity.  And yet we're supposed to believe her that she is the savior of the Republican Party.

The threats to our democracy are seen everywhere but even more so since Biden entered office, yet Cheney psychotically is singularly — and proudly — obsessed with destroying Trump.

This would be bizarre if we ended there, but there is a deeper reason why Cheney has made her raison d'être to "ensure Donald Trump is never again anywhere near the Oval Office."  This is personal.  Trump upended the Republican establishment that created Bush/Cheney empires that would have led to Cheney achieving what Hillary Clinton was unable to accomplish.  Trump didn't just prevent Hillary from becoming the first female president.  He prevented Cheney from becoming the first female president, and for both of those women, it was their entitlement.

Dick Cheney filmed an ad for his daughter in which he bizarrely claimed, "In our nation's 246-year history there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump."  Wyomingites are far smarter than the Cheney family, who, along with the Bushes, have not hidden their disdain for Trump (who also upended Jeb Bush's quest for the White House), and Liz has been marinating in anti-Trump animus and lies alongside them for years.

But that animus is because Daddy Cheney's plans for his mini-me's political future were destroyed by an outsider undeserving of the position.  The Republican establishment has never accepted Trump as president and continues to fight him with contempt, ire, and hate because its plans were sidelined by a non-establishment deplorable who "stole" its power.

The problem is that Cheney's war on Trump is not limited to Trump.  Because of her political entitlement — she was the true heir to the Republican establishment — Cheney is seeking to destroy the Republican Party as well.  While mini-me Cheney calls the Republican Party "sick," Bush/Cheney insider and former CIA director Michael Hayden agreed that Republicans are the most "nihilistic, dangerous and contemptible" political force in the world today.  How in the world are these people supposed to help the GOP when they rant ad nauseam about their disdain for Republicans to anyone who will listen?  

Would that Cheney, et al. understood that the evolution of the Republican Party is a direct result of the establishment's ignoring the needs and concerns of the average American, who didn't grow up in a life of privilege on a ranch in Wyoming or Texas.  But they don't understand or care, so they join forces with the elites in the Democrat party, notwithstanding what this means for our futures.  It's not about the country; it's about their power.  And people who believe psychotic fantasies or harbor animus due to personal entitlement should never hold the reins of power.

Some suggest that Cheney has developed delusions of grandeur, and while anyone who has the audacity to compare herself to Abraham Lincoln can easily be considered delusional, there is more at work here.  Cheney was bred to achieve what her father did not — the highest office in the land — and it began long ago.  She is furious that Trump interrupted her march to the White House, and she is seeking revenge.

Cheney may truly believe she is following in the footsteps of Lincoln, but for most Americans who aren't psychologically blinded by irrational hatred of a great (but flawed) president, Cheney is the one who is a danger to our nation.

Image: NBC News via YouTube.