Keith Parsons: Review of OATH AND HONOR by Liz Cheney
Guest essay on Wednesday, 27 March 2024
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: My respect for Keith Parsons has always been high but keeps getting stronger. When he submits a fresh guest essay, it is always, like this one, a thought-provoking delight. We’ve already ordered this book based on what he wrote—and if you’d told me five years ago that I’d want to read the words of Dick Cheney’s very conservative daughter, I’d’ve laughed.
OATH AND HONOR
A review by Keith Parsons
Liz Cheney’s Oath and Honor is the most frightening book I have ever read. It opens with this terrifying sentence: “This is the story of the moment when American democracy began to unravel (p. 3).” Unlike horror fiction that you read for pleasure, this horror is real. Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to this country—to all of us. Many books have been written about the pathologies of his personality and the reprehensibility and criminality of his actions. However, Oath and Honor was written by an eyewitness who was inside the Capitol during the attack of January 6, 2021. Cheney also witnessed first-hand the active connivance or cowardly acquiescence of Republicans of the House and Senate. One of the most disturbing elements of Cheney’s narrative is her account of the role of Trump’s enablers, those who know what he is and the threat he poses, yet who will not take a stand against him for fear of harming their party or themselves.
Their party? What are we now to make of the Republican Party? Cheney put that question to Kevin McCarthy, leader of House Republicans:
“Kevin,” I said, “this is about the Constitution. Think of what Trump did. Think how appalled any of our previous Republican leaders would be about this. How would Reagan have reacted to this? How would Bush have reacted? Think of my dad.”
A large portrait of Ronald Reagan hangs in Kevin McCarthy’s office, but he apparently no longer believed in the conservatism of our 40th president.
“This isn’t their party anymore, “ Kevin said (pp. 165-166).
An amazing admission, but it does not go far enough. The Republican Party is now best understood as a cult, or as Rick Wilson, cofounder of The Lincoln Project, puts it, a shell corporation for funneling money to Donald Trump.
When Bush 43 was president, Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney’s father, was his vice president. Frankly, I despised the man. I saw him as largely responsible for the campaign of lies (Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent WMD’s) that sank us into another bloody quagmire. I loathed him and the entire Bush administration, and I think for good reason. Yet, Dick Cheney and his daughter live in a completely different moral universe than Donald Trump and his enablers. The difference is very simple: Are there some principles that you are prepared to stand by even to the detriment of yourself and your party? If you take an oath to defend the Constitution, do you abide by that oath, even when it costs you? The difference is the difference between honor and dishonor.
Future historians will find Oath and Honor to be an indispensable text. The book is in no way a rant or a polemic. From beginning to end it has only one agenda—to tell the truth. It is not an inflammatory J’accuse. The straightforward and matter-of-fact style make it all the more powerful and convincing. She lets the facts speak for themselves, and the facts are truly damning. For instance, she shows us the unprincipled vacillation of Kevin McCarthy as he condemned the insurrection when it happened, and a week later was at Mar-a-Lago doing obeisance to Donald Trump. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell displayed a similar case of rapidly evaporating outrage. Immediately after the attack, his words were strong and eloquent, expressing no doubt about the heinousness of the event and who was responsible for it. Cheney reports that he strongly agreed that Trump needed to be impeached. However, he refused to call the Senate back into emergency session for the impeachment trial, and so delayed the proceedings. In the end did not vote to convict. [N.B., McConnell has just recently announced his support for Trump’s candidacy for a second term.]
Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and it was not close. Joe Biden won the popular vote by more than seven million votes. The Electoral College count was 306 for Joe Biden and 232 for Donald Trump. Yet Trump immediately declared that he was the real winner and that massive fraud had deprived him of his victory. Though Trump was told that he had lost by his campaign advisers, his Justice Department, and his senior staff, and though witnesses have testified under oath that he privately admitted that he had lost, he doubled down on his Big Lie and amped up the volume. Trump appointee Chris Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security, declared that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.” Trump fired Krebs. Trump and his allies filed sixty-one lawsuits challenging the election results and lost sixty of them, even when the presiding judges were Trump appointees. The next trick was to create slates of fake electors composed of Trump loyalists who intended to replace the certified electors in battleground states where Trump had lost. This illegal scheme to steal the election also failed.
His tricks and schemes having failed, Trump’s last recourse was violent insurrection. On the morning of January 6, Donald Trump and other speakers delivered incendiary speeches to a crowd of True Believers including violent extremists such as the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters. The effect was like pouring an accelerant on a fire. The mob’s anger became incandescent and their intent homicidal.
One of the lies Trump had told them was that Vice President Mike Pence had the option of refusing to permit the count of the votes of the officially certified electors. Such an action would violate Pence’s constitutional duty. The twelfth amendment to the Constitution states that: “The President of the Senate [the vice president] shall, in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted...” When Pence performed his constitutional duty, Trump tweeted to the mob that Pence had betrayed them. They began to chant “Hang Mike Pence.” Arriving at the Capitol they attacked and overwhelmed the defending police and forced their way into the building. One memorable image was a rioter in the Capitol rotunda, carrying a Confederate flag. In four years of civil war, the armies of the South never achieved that.
Cheney’s account of the January 6 attack is harrowing. Members of Congress huddled with their staffs while a howling mob pounded on the barricaded doors and broke the glass. Mike Pence and his family had a narrow escape. Valiant but vastly outnumbered police did their best to protect them. Over a hundred were injured. Cheney reports that one officer later told her that he had fought in Iraq but had never experienced violence like that day. While this mayhem occurred, Donald Trump was back at the White House watching it unfold on TV. He ignored pleas from staff and family to intercede to stop the violence. Finally, after enjoying his bloodsport for over three hours, Trump tweeted the rioters, telling them how much he loved them and asking them to go home. Shaken, but unwilling to surrender to mob violence, Congress reconvened that evening and finally ended the tumultuous day at 4:00 A.M.
The physical damage to the Capitol was soon repaired, but the damage to the American self-image may be permanent. Over two hundred years of the peaceful transfer of power had come to an end. Throughout history, those who sought a throne would wade through blood to get it. A peaceful transfer of power was a precious and beautiful thing. Donald Trump took that precious thing and defecated on it.
Another lasting effect of Trump’s Big Lie was that millions believed it. Cheney estimates that between thirty and forty million people are immovably convinced that Trump actually won the 2020 election. Cheney recounts how former supporters turned bitterly against her because they believed Trump’s lies. Her patient efforts to disabuse them failed to penetrate their shell of invincible ignorance.
What is this mesmerism, this witchcraft, that gives evil people such power over people’s minds so that they will abandon all of their previous values, and even friends and family, to follow their tin pot messiah? It can happen on a small scale, as with Charles Manson, or a huge scale, as with Hitler. It certainly happened with Trump. Consider the overwhelming support that Trump has had from white evangelical Christians, despite the fact that Trump checks the box for all of the seven deadly sins:
Rage: Check
Sloth: Check
Pride: Check
Gluttony: Double Check
Avarice: Check
Envy: Check. Trump clearly envies dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
Lust: There are not enough checks in the world.
But haven’t we all succumbed to these at some time or other? Yes, but for most people sinning is a moral lapse. For Trump it is a lifestyle. When asked about their loyalty to so brazen a sinner, evangelicals will reply that God often sends imperfect persons to lead his people. As a recent Doonesbury comic asked, what then would someone sent by Satan look like? Nancy Pelosi, I guess.
A bipartisan committee of representatives and senators with equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans was proposed to investigate the causes of the attack on the Capitol, just as such committees had investigated Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attacks. However, the Republican-controlled Senate nixed the idea, leaving the House to form its own select committee. Nancy Pelosi asked Cheney to serve on the committee, and she and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois were the only Republican members. Kevin McCarthy had been asked to nominate five Republican members, but two were rejected, Trump sycophants Jim Jordan and Jim Banks. McCarthy then withdrew all his nominees, and spread the lie that they had all been rejected.
In her opening remarks before the committee, Cheney distills the issue:
There is a reason why people serving in our government take an oath to the Constitution. As our founding fathers recognized, democracy is fragile. People in positions of public trust are duty-bound to defend it—to step forward when action is required. In our country we don’t swear an oath to an individual, or to a political party. We take our oath to defend the United States Constitution. And that oath must mean something. Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain (pp. 279-280).
In Nazi Germany, all members of the military and civil servants had to swear an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler—not to the nation or the constitution or the German people, but to Adolf Hitler. Such an oath should be considered an abomination and utterly foreign to the ideals of this country, but Trump’s enablers have de facto declared their dedication to one man.
Cheney’s account of the testimony before the committee shows that the witnesses abundantly confirmed the horrific violence of the January 6 attack, Trump’s responsibility for inciting the attack and his refusal to call it off, and that Trump was fully apprised by numerous authoritative sources that he had lost the election. The witnesses were not hostile Democrats or “never Trumper” Republicans. They were people, like Pat Cipollone, who had been Trump’s White House Counsel and had defended him in his first impeachment trial. The witnesses had worked closely with Trump and had served him loyally, but, like Liz Cheney, were appalled at a violent violation of the Constitution. The complete report of the committee and supporting evidence is available here:
Oath and Honor will convince any rational person that Donald Trump is a grave danger to this country and should never again be placed in any position of public trust. Of course, the key qualifier here is “rational,” and that means that the book will have no impact upon many who most need its message.
Pundits still argue about whether Trump is an idiot or a genius. I think he is both. The man’s ignorance is astounding. Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig report in their book A Very Stable Genius (pp. 169-170) that on a visit to the U.S.S. Arizona memorial Trump seemed to know nothing about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet he is a demagogue of genius. He knows just how to play to the deepest resentments and darkest passions of his audience. He knows just which buttons to push to motivate fanatical loyalty and obliviousness to all contrary facts. The astonishingly supine and complicit media allow his narratives to flourish, such as the charge that Joe Biden is senile. Overabundant attention is paid to Biden’s gaffes, yet Trump blathers incoherently every time he opens his mouth—and the media hardly blink.
Oath and Honor shows that January 6, 2021, was an unprecedented disaster for this country. Cheney’s terrifying epilogue makes clear that if Donald Trump is given a second term, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We cannot let him have it.
Cheney’s book needs no correction or emendation. Writing it was courageous and patriotic. Buy it and read it. It will scare you. It should.
I will end with just a few thoughts of my own. There is nothing “natural” about a free society. They are deliberate creations that require vigilant maintenance and protection. As Cheney says, democracy is fragile. In a free society, each generation must commit itself anew to upholding the ideals of freedom. In the context of history free and open societies are very rare. Generally, societies were ruled by a small clique of powerful men who arranged everything for their own benefit and ruthlessly exploited the masses. If the exploited could stand it no longer and rose in revolt, they were crushed with extreme brutality.
Then, about three hundred years ago, a few advanced thinkers began to imagine something different. In his Second Treatise of Government John Locke boldly declared that a government is legitimate only if it exists for the benefit of and by the consent of the governed. Further, absolute monarchy was not just a bad form of government but no form of government at all. Those subjected to its arbitrary rule had the right to free themselves by any means necessary. Nearly a century later, those ideas pervaded the Declaration of Independence of the United States.
It is hard for us to imagine how radical these ideas were at the time. For Locke’s contemporary, the “Sun King” Louis XIV, who believed that he reigned by divine right, such ideas would have been both treasonous and blasphemous. Any subject voicing them would soon have been parted from his head. In much of the world today those working for such ideals are in great danger, as we have recently seen with the murder of Alexei Navalny. One of the most alarming trends in our world is the recrudescence of authoritarianism and the decay of democracy in places like India, Turkey, and Hungary. Meanwhile the strongholds of unfreedom like Russia and China only tighten their grips.
We think America is different. Steeped in a democratic tradition and inculcated with republican virtues, we are the Land of the Free. We are John Locke’s vision made real. Autocracy can find no home here. Our values, institutions, and traditions forbid it. Nonsense. It COULD happen here. Values, institutions, and traditions are good only so long as they matter to the people in power. Donald Trump has shown that many millions of Americans are just as susceptible to the insidious appeal of a strong man as people anywhere. Strong men will hurt your enemies, and when you want to hurt your enemies more than you love your freedom, you will sacrifice the latter to have the former. Many millions of Americans are ready to make that sacrifice.
Oath and Honor shows that we came very, very close to the precipice in 2021. Had Mike Pence succumbed to Trump’s pressure and refused to permit the counting of the Electoral College votes, there was no established procedure for moving forward. The resulting chaos could easily have turned violent and the issue might have been settled in the streets. What are YOU going to do to keep us from falling off that cliff?
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Just ordered a copy.