so here's the thing about tonight's show. i disagree with liz cheney about everything. my whole adult life on everything in politics i would

not just say that liz cheney and i were on different proverbial teams. i would say we were from different proverbial planets. and they are planets that are mostly at war with each other. and she's a politician. i'm not a politician. i'm just a person. but i am definitely a liberal and she is definitely a hardcore conservative. and i disagree with liz cheney on -- like really on everything you can think of. on the environment, on abortion rights, profoundly. i think she's not just wrong on abortion, she is capital w wrong on abortion in a terrible way. i disagree with her vehemently on voting rights and on the iraq war and the afghanistan war and our relationship or lack thereof with iran and our approach to terrorism and torture and guns and like mining and intellectual property and the rules of the house of representatives. honestly, i once even got mad at

liz cheney about fishing. and it's the one thing you'd think we have in common. right? even on fishing i got mad at her about something. we are opposites. and it is not like a casual thing, either. here, for example, is just one indication of the scale of this as an obsession for me. my differences with liz cheney. before the plan to meet her here this evening liz cheney and i have met exactly one previous time. which she will not remember. it was in 2010. so it was 13 years ago. and even three years after that one brief 2010 meeting i was still on this show in 2013 playing clips of that meeting because i was still fixated on it. i was still wanting to interview her about all of the many and

profound ways in which we disagree. i have not been back to cpac since then because that year i think i was a little scarred. i was scarred with disappointment by a very, very disappointing encounter that i had at cpac with liz cheney. >> hi. rachel maddow. how are you? >> i think that was it. i don't know what she said. she smiled at me. >> what i said was i would love to interview you sometime if you would ever want to do it. and she said oh, hi, rachel. and i asked her if she would call and she never called. i would still love to interview you. i know you will never call. but still. i would love to interview you sometime. that interaction was 13 years ago. i was still talking about it, still begging for an interview with her three years after that like two-second interaction. and of course she was never

going to say yes because why on earth would there be any advantage, right? in talking to someone who disagreed with absolutely everything you stood for in public life and politics. why would you want to do an interview like that? and again, in some ways this is funny and dumb. but it is also, i have to tell you, in being truly honest, it has been a serious thing to me. it has been part of how i understand myself in my political time as an american that i am someone fundamentally opposed to the politics of liz cheney and her father, dick cheney, who was white house chief of staff and defense secretary before he was vice president in what i still believe was the fundamentally disastrous george bush administration in which liz cheney also served. i literally started writing books in the first place more than a decade ago because i had so much to get off my chest about what i thought was wrong with the cheney family approach to war and foreign policy. the first book i ever wrote was

inspired by dick cheney's minority report in the iran contra scandal during the reagan administration. that first book i ever wrote is literally dedicated to him. to former vice president dick cheney, oh please, let me interview you. and that feeling extended to his daughter, who is his political descendant both literally and proverbially in every way. you want one more level of it? there's one more level of it. as dedicated as liz cheney is to her father, dick cheney, they are profoundly close as father and daughter. she is profoundly loyal to him. there's not room for a piece of paper to slide between them on policy. as close as they are, as much as she reveres her dad, i feel the same way about my dad. i wear one piece of jewelry. i wear my dad's high school ring. my dad is brilliant and kind, and as far as i can tell he is right about absolutely

everything. he's an air force veteran. he's a very careful lawyer. and my whole life my dad was kind of the soul of moderation when it came to politics. until liz's dad. the dick cheney vice presidency had the effect of an almost religious conversion on my own dad, moving his politics what seemed to be about 50 points west of where they had ever been before, so vehemently did he object, as did i, to cheney-brand republicanism during the george w. bush era. so it's weird. like there's a big -- i think the cheney family is the biggest touchstone that i have in american politics in my lifetime. it is a funny thing but it's also personal and real and it is a thing that matters to me. and i say this tonight not for the gee whiz factor of me having liz cheney here tonight, not

having someone here you'd never p expect pi say this not just for the man bites dog weirdness of it. i say it because in civic terms, in american citizenship terms it's important how much we disagree. it's important how far apart we are on every policy issue imaginable. and it is important that liz cheney is infinity and i am negative infinity on the ideological number line. it's important because that tells you how serious and big something has to be to put us, to put me and liz cheney together on the same side of something in american life. i mean, i'm sure like noah had a hard time convincing the mice that they should get on the same boat with the snakes. right? or the gazelles that they should hop on board the ark with the lions. but normal combat, normal willingness to chomp on each other or run or defend yourself from each other, yields to the

imperative of the world-destroying flood where all land animals face the same fate and all the old fears and rules have to be put on hold because now we're either all going down or we're all in the same boat. on the january 6th investigation in congress you'll remember that the chairman was the gentleman on the left here, mississippi democrat bennie thompson. during their investigation he told liz cheney, the vice chair of that investigation, that he looked forward when it was all done to going back to our corners and resuming our earlier fights. i know exactly what he means by that. i feel the same way. but for now, for tonight because of where we are as a country, liz cheney is here to talk about bigger than the fights i have imagined having with her my whole life. and she's sacrificed a lot to have earned the right to have that conversation. she had the number three job in republican leadership in

washington. republicans voted her out of it. she was primaried and voted out of her seat in congress. major republican fund-raising committees raised money off attacking her. again, who was the number three republican in washington. she voted to impeach former president trump for trying to overthrow the government by force and stay in power after he lost re-election. with congressman bennie thompson she led the blockbuster congressional investigation into trump's plot against the country, showing us all who did it and how. as a conservative, as a republican one dynamic that i think makes it particularly valuable for people like me, democrats and liberals at least, to hear from her, to know what she knows, is that her life experience is so different and her colleagues are so different, her milieu is so different, her sight lines are different than mine. and i guess maybe from yours. she doesn't hear from liberal constituents cheering her on for taking on the would-be dictator

in washington. she hears from her congressional constituents in wyoming, which gave the single largest margin of victory to donald trump of any state in the country in 2020. i mean, even as a lot of the country is repeatedly struck by the insanity of what's been happening in republican politics, where she lives and among the people she serves and who elected her, it's all believed and earnestly so. and seeing that helps us understand how dangerous it is, makes it more explicable. here's an example of what i mean. this is from her book. this is about the infamous rudy giuliani hair dye press conference in the aftermath of the 2020 election. she says, "transfixed by the hair dye dripping down his face, it was challenging to focus on what rudy giuliani was saying. but as he introduced sidney powell he made this attention-grabbing pronouncement. he said, i don't think most americans know that our ballots get calculated, many of them,

outside the united states and it's being done by a company that specializes in voter fraud. according to giuliani, america had used, quote, largely a venezuelan voting machine in essence to count our vote. if we let this happen we are going to become venezuela. what was he talking about, i thought. was sidney powell going to provide evidence for this claim? powell stepped um to the microphone and explained to america he its entire election system had been hacked by dom yoin voting smnz and smart smatic software which she said was created in vendswella by hugo chofz. she described an algorithm that switched votes from trump to biden and that had, quote, trashed trump votes. acovereding to sidney powell we learned about this only because trump got so many votes in 2020 that the whole system broke. but we needed to be aware, she warned, that the same sinister source code resided in voting machines all across the country. her voice breaking with emotion, sidney powell said this was all

stunning, heartbreaking, infuriating and the most unpatriotic act i can even imagine for people in this country to have participated in. she claimed that president trump won by a landslide. we are going to prove it and we are going to reclaim the united states of america for the people who vote for freedom." cheney says, "the whole performance was too bizarre for words. my daughter, who had been following the litigation closely and was increasingly disgusted by what trump's lawyers were doing, texted me that night. she said, mom, i think it's safe to say rudy giuliani's hair dye dripping down his face today was an act of god. but the damage had already been done. millions of americans including tens of thousands of my own constituents believed these lies. and they believed in the people telling them. one constituent called the performance "clear-eyed and determined." this person said sidney powell struck her as forthright. she said that the trump lawyer had been, quote, shaking with righteous anger. quote, very persuasive.

then she added, of course the talking heads will dismiss them. f them. cheney says, we were in dangerous territory. the president president and his legal team were making outlandish and false claims that struck at the heart of our electoral process. millions of americans believed them, and the trump campaign continued to send e-mails and run ads spreading these same falsehoods all over the country. donald trump was doing it nearly every time he spoke publicly. i knew how perilous this was. i knew it had to stop. the next day, november 20th, i issued a statement calling on president trump to put up or shut up." elsewhere in the book here's cheney talking about the kind of thing she was hearing from her constituents fwhak wyoming and where they were getting their information. she said, quote, i also found that many of those in wyoming who were the most upset or angry were unaware of the violence on january 6th. they believed the day to have been almost entirely peaceful. they read the epic times, a quote news website that presents extremely slanted reporting in the guise of a straightforward

media outlet. they believed what they saw often herr social media feeds. they watched almost exclusively fox news or newsmax or oan. as a result they were completely unaware of what had actually happened. more than a few believed that i should be pressing for joe biden's removal from office and donald trump's reinstallation as president. it's a valuable perspective, right? those are valuable sight lines for any of us who've been struggling to understand the kind of grip this anti-democraticic authoritarian movement has on our fellow americans. liz cheney is seeing it because, i mean, in my own life i feel like it's because she's so different than me. i mean, she got just as many votes from those folks in wyoming in 2020 as donald trump did. so she knows them. and they thought they knew her. it's also valuable to have a conservative republican member of congress writing about something we can't see from the outside, what's going on among conservative republicans behind closed doors while they're

giving in to this anti-democratic plot. we learned, for example, on page 124 of liz cheney's new book that a senior republican staffer on the rules committee wrote in the republican staff memo on impeachment less than a week after the january 6th attack on congress, this is the republican staff memo, the person wrote that trump had committed impeachable offenses, calling what trump did, quote, a serious act political in nature, that corrupted or subverted the political process and threatened the order of political society. that's the republican staff memo on impeachment after january 6th. previously unreported. we learn on page 74 that the day before january 6th kevin mccarthy's general counsel, the top lawyer for the top republican in the house, told congressman mike johnson that the effort he was organizing to get house republicans to sign on to trump's efforts to overthrow the election was an effort that was wildly unconstitutional in its basis. quote, later that night i heard

from kevin mccarthy's chief counsel mikayla carr. she told me she had made clear to mike johnson that his letter was wrong. she said he knew it was. she said he pushed back very strongly -- excuse me. she said she pushed back very strongly when they discussed it that afternoon. and then cheney quotes from an e-mail. he knows he is wrong on the fundamental constitutional principle and his argument that he has some sort of power to individually determine absent due process of any sort that a state didn't meet their constitutional obligation and then that the remedy should be that without any process whatsoever the federal congress gets to overturn the will of the people is astonishing. astonishing. that's the top lawyer serving the top republican in the house. telling him that what he's doing is unconstitutional as he's doing it. mike johnson, of course, is now no longer just an anonymous back bench member of congress. he's now the leader. he's now the republican speaker

of the house. page 32 of her book liz cheney describes communications with senior republican staffers on capitol hill about the court filing that mike johnson in fact led as part of the election challenge complaining he might personally have ethical issues as a lawyer as in with his professional accreditation for making factual assertions to the court in that brief about things he didn't actually have factual information about. as you know, lots of trump lawyers have faced professional punishment for lies they told on trump's behalf after the election. liz cheney in her new book effectively asserts that the house speaker mike johnson might be one of those lawyers. on page 228 she says congressman jim jordan, who was very nearly speaker himself, she says he may need the assistance of a criminal lawyer for sorting out the conflicting claims he made during congressional testimony about his communications with former president trump while the

january 6th attack was under way. on page 18 of her book jim jordan gets this from liz cheney. quote, jordan did make a memorable pitch to me to join the group. it went something like this. would you consider joining the freedom caucus? we don't have any women and we need one. cheney says tempting as this offer was i took a pass. on page 153 here's liz cheney's good-bye to congresswoman elise stefanik. quote, other members said they were upset that my impeachment vote had caused them trouble at home. they thought i should have provide themd cover for their votes against impeachment. i had heard this complaint from an angry elise stefanik of new york. she told me that because of my vote to impeach people were writing letters to the editor of her local newspapers criticizing her and asking why she hadn't taken the same principled stand that i had. cheney says, quote, that seemed less my problem than hers. many of us who had known elise stefanik since before she abandoned all principle were

curious about how she had lost her sense of right and wrong. cheney says a number of the men who spoke in favor of removing me from leadership said they didn't like my tone. i wasn't contrite enough, nor had i learned my lesson. ralph norman of south carolina kept repeating that his problem with me was my attitude. you've just got such a defiant attitude. a couple of my male colleagues were so enraged by my unwillingness to apologize that they got themselves really worked up and seemed on the verge of tears as they lectured me. i tried to follow what the most emotional members were saying, but it wasn't always easy. mike kelly of pennsylvania, for example, seemed angry because i had released a statement before i voted. in an effort to describe how upset he was mike kelly said, it's like you're playing in the biggest game of your life and you look up and see your girlfriend sitting on the opponent's side. cheney says, these were grown men. this was 2021. i was standing at the podium at the front of the auditorium

thinking you've got to be kidding me. other female members started yelling, she's not your girlfriend. yeah, i said, i'm not your girlfriend. she really isn't. truly. and they're so upset about her tone and about her not taking their feelings into account. but she doesn't take their feelings into account. she is relentless about what she sees is going on and who's failing and how in real time and why it's important. she is blistering, blistering throughout this book, particularly about people like speaker mike johnson and about people like senator josh hawley, who she says deserved all the ridicule that he got during the january 6th hearings for running away after bravely showing his fist to the mobs that were about to attack the capitol. she's blistering about ted cruz, who she says committed, quote, one of the worst cases of abandonment of duty for personal ambition i've ever seen in washington when he proposed a

multiday delay on certifying the election results, a strategy that liz cheney says cruz coordinated with the trump white house. liz cheney in her new book takes the bark off former speaker kevin mccarthy again and again and again. kevin mccarthy and mitch mcconnell are two men who cheney plainly describes. each had the opportunity personally as individuals to stop donald trump's threat to the country. neither of them did so. both failed. mccarthy she's just unsparing about. she reminds us that mccarthy rescued trump before january 6th, the day the tape came out of trump's call to georgia officials. this is from page 65 of the book. quote, when i saw reports about the call i assumed the audio of trump pressuring state officials to violate the law and overturn the election would mean the end of most of the objections to the electoral count in the house. i couldn't imagine members would continue to do trump's bidding. a short time later after what we all assumed was significant

pressure from trump kevin announced that he would be voting to object. i was certain that kevin did not believe the objections were constitutional nor that they could be justified by any genuine fraud in the election. his chief counsel clearly did not think so. but this had never really been about principle for kevin. that's when mccarthy saves trump the first time. then mccarthy saves trump a second time after the violent attack on the government to try to keep trump in power. when mccarthy went to florida and visited trump and was photographed smiling with him. cheney says on page 147, "i went to see kevin when he got back to d.c. mar-a-lago? what the hell, kevin? he tried to downplay the whole thing. he said he'd been in florida anyway when trump's staff called him. they're really worried, he said. trump's not eating, so they asked me to come see him. what? you went to mar-a-lago because trump's not eating? yeah, he's really depressed. i'm still trying to process p

unexpected rationale when kevin added, he keeps trying to talk to me about january 6th and i tell him we can't, we're under oath. kevin said we're under oath in the present tense as if he had already been sworn in as a witness. i assumed one of kevin's lawyers had warned him not to talk to trump about january 6th because they thought trump might be in serious legal jeopardy. apparently, kevin was trying to say back to me what he had been told by his lawyers? the truth was pretty simple. kevin mccarthy went to mar-a-lago because his ability to raise money had dried up after january 6th, when nearly every major corporate donor announced it would stop making campaign contributions to republicans who'd voted to object to electoral college votes. kevin's sflnt our conference was derived largely from his fund-raising ability. he was not a policy expert or a natural leader and now his strength was gone. kevin needed money. trump had lists of small dollar donors but kevin would have to go beg trump for them. and in order to use those lists kevin would have to help donald

trump cover up the stain of his assault on our democracy. it was a price kevin mccarthy was willing to pay. every time kevin mccarthy has faced a decision of consequence he has done the wrong thing. i told you she takes the bark off him. and that's like a tenth of it. with mitch mcconnell, republican senate leader, she is more kind in her tone, if i may say. but she also pretty much puts him on the down escalator in terms of where he's going to be ending up paying for his actions for oat errant. she says she, quote, never stopped wondering why mcconnell had opposed the creation of a 9/11 style bipartisan commission to investigate what had happened january 6th. she said senator mcconnell was wrong to vote against convicting trump in his impeachment, especially because that one decision by that one man in that one moment might have ended all of the peril for our nation. page 162. leader mcconnell, who had made a career out of savvy political calculation and behind-the-scenes maneuvering, got this one wrong.

i had known mitch mcconnell for more than 20 years. and i had respected him. few could match mcconnell's mastery of the tactics of political leadership. but i thought he had made a number of serious mistakes in this case, including not agreeing to call the senate back into session for the impeachment trial and not voting to convict. mcconnell had been telling me that he expected trump to fade away. i knew that would not happen. liz cheney is republican royalty to the extent we have that in this country. she is now the sharpest thorn in the side of the republican party. and she is naming names, quoting e-mails, producing phone records and explaining the stakes. she is taking zero prisoners. in an effort that she says is aimed at nothing short of saving the country, making sure that this next election is not our last. she says if trump is re-elected in 2024 it is likely that he will not leave powe

in her new book, "oath and honor: a memoir and a warning," liz cheney says at the end on page 365 that if trump is re-elected to the white house he will in her words dismantle the republic. and what that means is that everybody who wants us to remain a republic has to put every other thing aside and work together urgently right now to stop that from happening, which means specifically to keep him from regaining power. how does she propose we do that? she's devoting her political life to this cause. her book is out tomorrow, or tonight at midnight. "the new york times" describes it as a five-alarm warning. i second that. and i never thought i'd say this, but liz cheney is right in issuing that warning. i believe it. and miracle of all miracles, she is here joining me live, next. i.

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so the book is called "oath and honor: a memoir and a warning." its author is former wyoming congresswoman liz cheney. liz cheney. wow. thanks for being here. >> thank you. >> nice to meet you. >> really nice to meet you. >> is this as weird for you as it is for me? >> it's pretty weird, yeah. it certainly is. your intro brought back a lot of memories. and -- but i think that this is a real symbol of how grave this danger is. but i also was thinking about watching it, the power of the

fact that somebody who is where you are on the political spectrum and somebody who's where i am on the political spectrum are able to say this is a five-alarm fire and we have to put that aside and say what are we going to do? >> the fights that we righteously and in good faith and vehemently could have together can wait. because part of what we're defending -- >> but i want a rain check to come back. >> we can do like a day on abortion, a day on mining, a day on fishing. >> jgs security. >> several days on national security. let me ask you about a moment in your book that happens on january 4th. as described in chapter 9 of your book and you describe listening in on a call in which trump lawyers are briefing what we call surrogates, that's basically people who are going to go on tv and talk about the protrump side of things. and on that call trump lawyer jenna ellis describes what they're envisioning for january 6th. she says -- the way you write it

is in the scenario ellis described when pence was presiding he could either refuse to open or refuse to count the electoral vote. they don't necessarily know you're not this call. you're listening in. >> right. >> two days before january 6th. was that the moment when it really became clear to you in detail what they were going to try to do? >> yes. you know, i had heard, obviously there had been talk of we're going to have these electors meet. i think stephen miller had been talking about that. but it wasn't clear to me what the contours of this particular part of the plan were until i dialed into that phone call. and listening to them describe how these fake electors were going to be used and the fact they anticipated that vice president pence was going to use them to refuse to count the legitimate electors was certainly a moment of intense concern. and as i got off that call i ran

into the capitol, into the office of the parliamentarian of the house to say wait a minute, this is what i'm hearing is going to happen. what do we do about it in the joint session? how do we stop this? and it was very clear that there were not a lot of good answers to that because i knew, i learned later through the investigation, that vice president pence and his counsel were having discussions with the senate parliamentarian and that the vice president ultimately of course did his duty bravely. but if you're in a joint session of congress, you know, you're not in a position where there are a lot of legislative steps that you can take except to basically move to adjourn. so it was a very dangerous and chilling moment. >> i feel like a lot of the last seven or eight years has been me trying to figure out crazy versus dangerous and i finally realized that crazy and dangerous very much can overlap, they can be the same thing. >> yeah. >> in that moment when it started to become clear to you what might happen, did it strike

you as an insane thing they were going to try, which therefore might create a chaotic situation, or did it strike you that this is something that might actually succeed in effectively toppling the government? >> you know, i had been getting these hints, you know, through the months after the election of sort of glimpses into things that they were attempting to do. and each time sort of i saw something come up and i kept thinking, and i think a lot of us kept thinking he's going to bring these court challenges but of course once the courts have ruled he will concede and we'll move on. and each time you thought we were at an end we weren't really at an end. so i think this was probably the most chilling moment where it was suddenly real that, you know, this wasn't just sort of a pr effort to suggest that he hadn't lost the election, it was a very real plan to stop us from counting legitimate electoral votes. and frankly that realization,

that recognition, it was nauseating because it was so scary. wait a minute, this is what they're going to try to do. >> liz cheney is our guest. the book is called "oath and honor: a memoir and a warning." we'll be right back. stay with us. ht back. stay with us ready? everywhere you look beautiful people. oh my gosh! eva. eva, love the dress. -thank you. -what do you think? mommy's going to steal the show, right? she steals everything especially money. she steals my friends. she steals from everyone. ball ball attack your friends and steal their coins. play now. children are the greatest joy and our best hope for a better future. friends, they are the future. but did you know that millions of kids right here in our own backyard are facing hunger every day without healthy food it's harder to grow, to thrive, to feel their best.

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with us once again is former wyoming congresswoman liz cheney. her new book is called "oath and honor: a memoir and a warning." comes out tomorrow, or midnight tonight for those of you counting at home.

liz, you focus very early on in the book that trump two days after he lost the election, he fired the defense secretary. why do you think he did that? why is that important? >> well, first of all, to have a situation where a president who's lost the election and so we should be going to a transition. and a transition is a period of time when the united states is particularly potentially vulnerable, especially if it's the defense department. you have to have a non-partisan transition. you have to have a situation where people are very focused on what is the good of the country. and people recognize we may have lost the election but those politics should not be part of any kind of decisions that are being made, especially during the transition period. and so to see donald trump fire his defense secretary, and we know now of course much more of what was happening at the time. i was very concerned at the time. he was also replacing other senior leaders at the

department. we know now, for example, that he had told johnny mcentee at one point to ensure that the secretary of the army and chief of staff of the army knew that if they issued any more statements saying that the u.s. military had no role in our elections that they would be fired. and that's -- when you combine that with the steps we know mike flynn was urging him to take, mike flynn was urging to be taken publicly, things like deploying the military in order to rerun elections in swing states. and i think that's one of the real dangers people have to focus on when we think about a potential second trump administration. you will take those people who were the most radical, the most dangerous, who had the proposals that were the most dangerous, and he will put them in positions of, you know, supreme power. and that's a risk that besimply can't take. >> obviously, he's been playing with the announcement about signing the insurrection act --

or invoking the insurrection act on day one. what are the other things you talked about in terms of a second round and whether or not january 6th was sort of a dress rehearsal or first effort and they'll be better at it the second time around is the prospect that after the 2024 election maybe republicans will still be in control in the house, maybe mike johnson would still be speaker. given what mike johnson did in and around the 2020 election, what is the risk in terms of him potentially still being speaker of the house, him controlling the house of representatives in the aftermath of the next election? >> you know, it's terrifying. and i say that with no pleasure. it pains me that that's where we are. but -- >> you were friends with him. >> i was. we were elected the same year. our offices were next door to each other. and i believed mike to be a man of principle. what i learned was that he was willing to do things he knew to

be wrong in order to placate donald trump. and again, a situation where you have a speaker of the house who, as you detailed at the beginning of the show, so clearly set aside what he knew to be the facts, what he knew to be the law, what he knew to be our obligations under the constitution in order to try to help donald trump in his efforts in 2020, we cannot count on a majority of republicans, on someone like that to do the right thing, to uphold the constitution if, for example, we had an election that was thrown into the house if nobody got 270 electoral votes. so it's really serious. >> or if they needed to certify the electoral count? >> yeah. >> the book is called "oath and honor: a memoir and a warning." we're back with liz cheney right after this. stay with us. right through my glass. so when my windshield cracked, it had to be fixed right. i scheduled with safelite autoglass.

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oh, oh, oh...i'll be the judge of that. oh, that's nice... oh!! searchable, verified reviews. that's better than the ham, and i've never said that. booking.com booking.yeah joining us once again is liz cheney. so liz, you're effectively sounding this alarm. you're telling americans to stand up and try to save the republic. you have cautioned that if trump is returned to power it might be our last election. you're basically telling people to stand up by voting against trump. but when i think about people watching at home, you know, somebody who just got off their third shift or a retired teacher or a college student who's watching on their phone right

now, i don't know that people necessarily feel like that action is enough to respond to the kind of threat that you are alerting us to. what else should people be doing besides casting their vote in the way you see is right to try to defend the country right now? >> well, i think it's about more than -- i think certainly trump is the most significant threat. but i think that, you know, we're facing an emergency across the board. i think people need to think about, first of all, running for office themselves. and i say that with great seriousness. you know, we need -- if you look at the threats our country's facing, we need serious people in office. and i don't care if you agree with me or you disagree with me on any range >> and this last election cycle,

for the first time in my life, i endorsed democrats. these were women i worked with either on the services committee or national security issues. in other ways. we had disagreements that -- they care deeply about this country, and they're running against election deniers. we have to make sure, if you look at the election denialism around the country, you look at the extent of some of the trump voices -- local level up to the presidency, those of us who believe in the constitution are gonna defend democracy -- have to be organized in the same way. and if it means being willing to set aside other issues, then it means we can show that when you cast your vote, you're not doing so through partisanship. and it means educating people, talking to people about how perilous and significant -- >> i feel like what you described as cult of

personality is more likely to emerge on the right than on the left. because i feel like people on the right have been getting told by the republican party my whole adult life that government is the problem. like ronald reagan said. and we need voting restrictions because democrats cheat, and, you know, we need unregulated guns, not just for hunting in self-defense, but because we need to stand up against government tyranny. all the stuff that maybe works in the short term -- radicalism. i think it opens the right more up to a cult of personality than the left. and i know we probably disagree on that strongly. >> we do it disagree on that. but what i would say is the way that i look at it as those of us on the right -- have a particularly great responsibility because this threat has emerged from the right. we can talk about why they was. i think that, frankly, there are millions of people around the country who feel like they

aren't heard. and donald trump managed to convince them that they he would be their voice. which is, of course, a complete lie. but they bought it. and he preyed on that patriotism. but right now, i think it's partly why i have been so disappointed with what i've seen from other members of my party. in there -- i think we had a particular duty to step up. >> you look ahead to a year from now, heading into the next election cycle. if trump wins, if trump is the nominee of the republican party, what is your life like? and what do you think the noble patriotic rich's fight is to save the country at that point? >> i didn't even want to imagine a situation where he has won and i think we have to do everything we can to stop him in terms of the kind of things we've been talking about. working in a very nonpartisan

fashion. but i also think of it, rachel, from the perspective of my kids. there was a moment right after january 6th when i was having dinner with my husband and our two youngest kids who happen to be our sons. and i looked at my sons across the dinner table, and i had this realization. i grew up in a country where i didn't have to wonder if we were gonna have a peaceful transfer of power in the united states and all of a sudden, it occurred to me, maybe they won't be able to say the same thing. and that is why it's so fundamentally important that we ensure democrats and independents and republicans, that we work together, we voted together, we make clear that donald trump is not an acceptable alternative. he's not the lesser of two evils. he's a completely unfit man for office. he can never be near the oval office again. >> sounds like you really don't want to think about what resistance or fighting for your country or trying to hold on to

democracy looks like with him in power. you won't go there. >> well, we're gonna be successful at making sure he's not elected president again. >> let me ask you one last question. and i mean this, i think, coming from the understanding that i think it garnered from your book, from what i started to understand about your spirit about these things. which is that after you got voted out of your republican leadership job in washington, it was clear you are gonna lose your seat in congress as well. and you didn't quit. you decided you are gonna make them vote you out and not make it any easier for them. but it would've made it a lot easier for you to. what did you make that decision? >> i don't think it would've made it easier. because at the end of the day, the question really is, what's more important here? to me, there was no world in which you would say maintaining this house seat matters more than standing up for truth, and

it became clear that in order to stay in leadership i was going to have to tell donald trump's lies. and i wasn't willing to do that. it wasn't a choice for me. frankly, i don't think it's a choice for any american now, given the stakes and how -- >> the book is called oath and honor, a memoir and of winning. liz cheney, what a world. and i know that despite everything, it's not the easiest thing in the world to sit down with me for an hour. i appreciate it. let's keep the conversation going. i want to fight with you on a lot of things in the future. >> me too. good. that's gonna do it for us tonight. for u tonight. tonight. as americans,

there's one thing we can all agree on. the promise of our constitution and the hope that liberty and justice is for all people. but here's the truth. attacks on our constitutional rights, yours and mine are greater than they've ever been. the right for all to vote. reproductive rights. the rights of immigrant families. the right to equal justice for black, brown and lgbtq+ folks. the time to act to protect our rights is now. that's why i'm hoping you'll join me today in supporting the american civil liberties union. it's easy to make a difference. just call or go online now and become an aclu guardian of liberty.

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