At Glenside event, Liz Cheney and former Trump staffers urge voters to support Kamala Harris

Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney and three women who worked in the Trump administration told a Montgomery County crowd Wednesday night that the former President Donald Trump is unfit to serve in the oval office again.

“Anyone who has attempted to overturn an election and seize power like that is simply too dangerous,” said Cheney, who served as vice chair of the committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack.

Cheney was the No. 3 Republican in the U.S. House until 2021, but she broke with the bulk of House Republicans in supporting Trump’s second impeachment for incitement of insurrection after his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s election.

Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, has remained an outspoken critic of Trump after losing her position in House GOP leadership and her 2022 primary. She has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris and campaigned with the Democratic nominee in Wisconsin last week.

She headlined the Glenside event Wednesday, interviewing three women — Cassidy Hutchinson, Alyssa Farah Griffin, and Sarah Matthews — who worked in Trump’s administration but became critics, following Trump’s false claims of election fraud in the lead-up to and aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack.

“Trump has betrayed what it meant to be a conservative,” said Griffin, who resigned from her role as White House director of strategic communication in December of 2020 because of Trump’s lies about election fraud.

The event was hosted by Democracy First, an organization which urges political candidates to condemn misinformation about elections and commit to accepting results.

All four women have endorsed Harris and campaigned for her, specifically urging Republican voters to put character and the protection of democracy ahead of partisan politics and policy. While Montgomery County has voted for Democrats in presidential elections since the 1990s, the collar county still has a significant number of GOP voters.

Cheney and the former staffers encountered a friendly crowd and a standing ovation at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside, where several carried signs and wore clothes supporting Harris’ campaign.

Four years after the 2020 election, Trump has continued to falsely claim he won the race. Ahead of November’s election he and his allies have falsely claimed that non-citizens, specifically undocumented immigrants, will vote en-masse and steal the election for Democrats.

Reminiscing on their personal experiences in the White House and in the U.S. Capitol on January 6, the panel framed Trump as a unique threat to democracy. They said Republican elected officials who support him are complicit.

Asked how to bring conversations of democracy back into a nonpartisan space, Cheney urged the study of the history of democracies.

“That history teaches us that democracies fall. And they fall at the hands of strong men. They fall that the hands of populists. They fall at the hands of people who do what Donald Trump has done,” Cheney said.