AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
- Rep. Liz Cheney compared Trump's comments about US to the Chinese Communist Party.
- Cheney said that the former president's words only serve to undermine confidence in US elections.
- The congresswoman also blasted Kevin McCarthy for meeting with Trump after the Capitol riot.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming recently compared President Donald Trump's false election claims to the Chinese Communist Party, blasting his rhetoric as "dangerous and damaging."
In an interview with former White House senior advisor David Axelrod on CNN's "The Axe Files," Cheney said that Trump's comments only served to undermine confidence in the election system.
"When you listen to Donald Trump talk now, when you hear the language he's using now, it is essentially the same things that the Chinese Communist Party, for example, says about the United States and our democracy," she said. "When he says that our system doesn't work … when he suggests that it's incapable of conveying the will of the people … those are the same things that the Chinese government says about us.
She added: "It's very dangerous and damaging … and it's not true."
Cheney's remarks come nearly a month after she was ousted as the House Republican Conference Chair, the third-highest ranking position within the GOP caucus, due to her continued public admonishment of Trump for his role in the deadly January 6 Capitol riot.
That day, violent insurrectionists breached the Capitol building in an attempt to stop the certification of President Joe Biden's win over Trump in the 2020 election.
In January, the conservative congresswoman was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for "incitement of insurrection" over his role in the riot.
In announcing her vote to convict, she gave a blistering indictment of Trump's conduct.
"None of this would have happened without the president," she said at the time. "The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution."
While Cheney continued to criticize Trump for relitigating the election, GOP leaders including House Minority Whip Kevin McCarthy of California and Steve Scalise of Louisiana lost confidence in her ability to help steer the party's message heading into the 2022 midterm election cycle.
After a vote last month, Cheney was replaced on the leadership team with Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York.
During the interview with Axelrod, Cheney condemned McCarthy for meeting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club after the January 6 riot.
"I was stunned," she said of McCarthy's visit. "I could not imagine any justification for doing that. And I asked him why he had done it, and he said, well, he had just been in the neighborhood, essentially."
She added: "The idea that a few weeks after [Trump] did that, the leader of the Republicans in the House would be at Mar-a-Lago, essentially, you know, pleading with him to somehow come back into the fold or whatever it was he was doing, to me was inexcusable."
Dit artikel is oorspronkelijk verschenen op z24.nl