Liz Cheney Doesn't Rule Out 2024 Run Against Donald Trump: 'Whatever It Takes'

The Wyoming Republican has been at the center of an intraparty split over the former president

Rep. Liz Cheney, newly ousted from Republican leadership over her criticism of Donald Trump, said Thursday she will do "whatever it takes" to keep the former president out of office again — and she did not rule out running for the White House herself.

Cheney told the Today show on Thursdally that she feels it's her mission to both keep Trump, 74, away from the White House and to try and drag the Republican Party away from the former president's divisive grip.

"I'm going to do everything that I can," she said, while noting she wasn't going to become an independent.

Tensions between Cheney, 54, and her Republican colleagues boiled over this week as the party's members in the House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted her out of her No. 3 spot in the House caucus on Wednesday morning.

The vote, which had been expected for days, was in response to Cheney's anti-Trump position in the GOP including denouncing his efforts to delegitimize the November election.

Trump, who has repeatedly teased a potential 2024 run for president, "must not ever again be anywhere close to the Oval Office," Cheney said on Today.

(Trump celebrated Cheney losing her leadership position by calling her a "bitter, horrible human being" and a "warmonger.")

"I won't let a former president or anyone else unravel the democracy — whatever it takes," Cheney told Today's Savannah Guthrie.

Still, she would face an uphill road in mounting a campaign against a figure who remains robustly popular with the party's base. (Other Republicans likewise challenged Trump for the nomination in 2020; none even came close.)

Rep. Liz Cheney. Tom Williams/getty

Cheney told Guthrie that moving on from Trump's brand of conservatism is "the most important issue that we are facing right now as a country," adding that she feels his grip on the Republican Party is "very dangerous."

She said on Today she plans to run for re-election and wasn't fazed by threats of a Trump-backed primary challenge.

"It's a cult of personality," she said. "People were betrayed and misled by him."

The Wyoming lawmaker, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is one of only a handful of leading Republicans opposing Trump since the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

Since Cheney and nine other House Republicans voted to impeach him after the insurrection, she has been censured by her state's Republican Party and has faced repeated criticism from Trump and his GOP allies.

While she survived an earlier Republican vote against her leadership, other conservatives increasingly split with her because, in their words, she would not move beyond Trump's election lies.

"The notion that 5 percent of the Republican Party is going to eviscerate the influence of President Trump in the party never was plausible," North Carolina Republican Rep Dan Bishop sad, according to The New York Times. "It's not good for the Republican Party. It's not good for the country."

Rep. Liz Cheney. Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty

Last month, Cheney called for a 9/11-like commission review of what transpired on Jan. 6 in order to determine who is responsible for the riot, which killed five and injured scores of others, while lawmakers were temporarily forced into hiding.

Cheney wouldn't say on Today whether she thinks Trump should be charged for his role in the riot, instead saying that's something the Justice Department should decide.

She did tell Guthrie that anyone who did what Trump did has "got to be investigated criminally," however.

She also expressed disappointment with other GOP leaders, such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who have reached out to Trump or have gone to visit him at his private Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida since the attack.

"Leader McCarthy's visit to the former president at Mar-a-Lago was really stunning given what the former president did," Cheney said. "He provoked an attack on the Capitol — an attack on our democracy — and, so, I can't understand why you would want to go rehabilitate him."

Trump, Cheney said is "unfit" to ever hold office again as he continues to falsely claim he didn't lose the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.

"I think the leaders of my party have decided to embrace the lie, have decided to ignore it, and I think that's really dangerous," she said. "My view is that we have an obligation to speak against it."

"I'm certainly going to continue to do that," she said.