Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) has launched a campaign ad in New Hampshire warning 2024 voters against backing former President Trump.
“Donald Trump has proven he is unfit for office. Donald Trump is a risk America can never take again,” Cheney says in a voice-over atop clips of Trump and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Cheney, who was on the House select committee that probed Jan. 6, knocked Trump for his actions around the 2020 election, which he lost to now-President Biden.
“Donald Trump is the only president in American history who has refused to guarantee the peaceful transfer of power. He lost the election and he knew it. He betrayed millions of Americans by telling them the election was stolen. He ignored the rulings of dozens of courts,” she said in the video.
“Rather than accept his defeat, he mobilized a mob to come to Washington and March on the Capitol. Then he watched on television while the mob attacked law enforcement, invaded the Capitol and hunted the vice president,” Cheney said.
NBC News reports that the ad that the video, titled “Risk” and released by her political action committee The Great Task, will air in New Hampshire around Trump’s planned on-air town hall on Wednesday.
Cheney also highlighted Trump’s delay in telling the rioters to leave and asserted that Trump “didn’t care” about warnings that his Jan. 6 plans were illegal. “There has never been a greater dereliction of duty by any president,” she said.
Trump announced after the midterms last year that he’s running to reclaim the White House in 2024. Cheney fueled speculation late last year that she could get in the 2024 ring, but she’s not made clear whether she intends to run at any point.
She was ousted from her House leadership post as the No. 3 Republican in the chamber after denying Trump’s claims of election fraud during the 2020 race. She was later defeated in her midterm reelection bid last year by a Trump-backed challenger, Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.), during Wyoming’s Republican primary.
Hageman said Tuesday that “there is one person who Republican voters wish would go away, and it’s not Donald Trump. It’s Liz Cheney.” She also accused Cheney of a “personal vendetta” against Trump and of launching “ineffective TV ads to settle a personal score.”
Updated at 9:59 a.m.