A Steely Liz Cheney, at Harris’s Side, Calls It ‘Our Duty’ to Reject Trump

A Steely Liz Cheney, at Harris’s Side, Calls It ‘Our Duty’ to Reject Trump

The former congresswoman and Republican exile stumped for Kamala Harris in Ripon, Wis., the birthplace of the G.O.P., calling on conservatives to shun Donald Trump’s “depraved cruelty.”

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By Erica L. Green and Katie Rogers

Erica L. Green reported from Ripon, Wis., and Katie Rogers from Washington. They are White House reporters covering Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

It was an exercise in unsubtle and unlikely campaign optics: a Democratic vice president who is running for the presidency. A Republican former congresswoman who is the daughter of a staunchly conservative vice president. A small city known as the birthplace of the Republican Party in the middle of a battleground state.

On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris and former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the most prominent Republican to endorse her campaign, traveled to Ripon in central Wisconsin where meetings in 1854 helped form the Republican Party. Just a mile away from a one-room schoolhouse where those gatherings were held, the pair tore into former President Donald J. Trump for his role in igniting a riot at the Capitol, and they warned of the threat he poses to democracy should he return to power.

Ms. Cheney said that, in November, putting patriotism ahead of partisanship should not merely be an aspiration — “it is our duty.”

Her remarks, delivered with an air of somber restraint, were as much a public indictment of Mr. Trump as they were an endorsement of Ms. Harris. Calling his candidacy “a threat unlike any we have faced before,” she called on conservatives to join her in an “urgent cause” to elect Ms. Harris and to reject what she called the former president’s “depraved cruelty.”

“I know that she will be a president who will defend the rule of law,” Ms. Cheney said of Ms. Harris, “and I know that she will be a president who can inspire all of our children and, if I might say so, especially our little girls.”

The joint appearance was one of the starkest examples to date of how Ms. Harris has endeavored to pitch herself as a unifying president who values pragmatism over partisanship. Her overarching goal is to win over moderate and independent voters who will be crucial to delivering her a decisive victory.

The event took place at Ripon College, where hundreds of people gathered on a lawn near the campus’s main building, which was adorned with American flags and posters that read: “Country over party.” At several points in the program, the crowd cheered, “Thank you, Liz” and “Ka-ma-la.”

Both women spoke about the significance of the site where the Republican Party’s founding leaders first met, bonding over their opposition to slavery. “Liz Cheney stands in the finest traditions of its leaders,” Ms. Harris said.

The vice president said that Ms. Cheney’s endorsement held “special significance,” and that while the two politicians might not agree on much, they shared a love of country and democratic ideals. Repeating her promise to be a president for all Americans regardless of party, Ms. Harris said she had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution six times in her career as a prosecutor.

“The president of the United States must not look at our country through the narrow lens of ideology or petty partisanship or self-interest,” Ms. Harris said. “The president of the United States must not look at our country as an instrument for their own ambitions. Our nation is not some spoil to be won. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised.”

She added, “And so, in the face of those who would endanger our magnificent experiment, people of every party must stand together.”

Ms. Harris’s campaign has used Ms. Cheney’s endorsement, and those of a stream of other Republicans, in assailing Mr. Trump as a threat to the republic, and in blunting accusations by his campaign that the vice president is a “radical liberal.”

The Trump campaign blasted the records of both women afterward.

“Liz Cheney is a stone cold loser who is so desperate for relevance and attention, she has debased herself by campaigning with a weak, failed, and dangerously liberal in Kamala Harris,” Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, said in a statement. “The both of them are made for each other — proponents of endless wars, killers of Social Security, and enemies of American workers.”

Ms. Harris’s campaign has sought to recast her political image as a left-leaning Californian by downplaying or abandoning some of the progressive positions she held when she first ran for president in the 2020 race. During this campaign, she has branded herself a “pragmatist” and a “capitalist,” and has spoken more openly about issues that appeal to the conservative base, like gun ownership. She has also suggested that she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet, if elected.

In a presidential race that may be won by razor-thin margins in November, Wisconsin appears to be a near tossup between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump. President Biden won the state by only 20,600 votes in 2020, and a recent poll by The New York Times and Siena College showed Ms. Harris with 49 percent support among likely voters, versus Mr. Trump at 47 percent.

Ms. Harris’s decision to appear alongside Ms. Cheney, a Wisconsin native, signals that her campaign is hoping to appeal to Republican voters who have been repelled by Mr. Trump’s style of politics. The two women agree on little politically beyond their distaste for Mr. Trump. They had next to no relationship when they overlapped in Congress, though they did speak on the phone about Ms. Cheney’s decision to endorse the vice president.

Ms. Cheney was a onetime critic of Ms. Harris. In an August 2020 interview on Fox News, shortly after Mr. Biden chose her as his running mate, Ms. Cheney called Ms. Harris ’s voting record in the Senate “to the left of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.” She added, “It’s very clear, she is a radical liberal.”

But after the Capitol attack, Ms. Cheney set partisan labels aside. She became the top Republican on the House committee that investigated Mr. Trump’s role in the riot. Suddenly an outcast in her party, she later lost her seat to a Trump-backed challenger.

Ms. Cheney’s appearance for Ms. Harris on Thursday was also striking because of the timing: On Wednesday, a 165-page brief from the special counsel, Jack Smith, laid out new evidence of how Mr. Trump tried to remain in power despite losing the 2020 election.

During her speech, Ms. Cheney brought up the fresh details, including Mr. Trump’s apparent nonchalance when he was implored to ensure the safety of his vice president, Mike Pence, whom rioters had threatened to hang on Jan. 6, 2021.

“So what?” the former president said, according to the brief.

Ms. Cheney told the crowd, “We have a responsibility, all of us, to remind people that our institutions don’t defend themselves.” She added, “We the people defend our institutions.”

Calling Mr. Trump “vindictive,” Ms. Cheney said “any person who would do these things can never be trusted with power.”

Ms. Cheney first said she planned to vote for Ms. Harris at a conference last month in North Carolina. It was a major step in a long turnabout for a staunchly conservative former lawmaker, who is pro-gun, anti-abortion and hawkish on national security issues.

Days later, her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, said that he would also vote for Ms. Harris.

On Thursday, Ms. Cheney made clear that she had not strayed from her traditional, Republican bona fides. Her campaign work started at age 10, she said, when she helped seal envelopes for President Gerald Ford’s re-election campaign. She cast her first vote for a presidential race in 1984, she went on, and referred to herself as a Reagan Republican.

“I was a Republican even before Donald Trump started spray-tanning,” she jabbed.

Mr. Trump, for his part, held a rally on Thursday in Michigan, where Ms. Harris will campaign on Friday. During his speech, he continued to claim that he won the 2020 election.

Nicholas Nehamas and Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting from Washington.