National media organizations intent on pillorying Donald Trump are painting my home state as a one-dimensional political landscape inhabited by Trump troglodytes who are poised to toss the former president’s lead critic — U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney — out of office.
It’s a topsy-turvy world when a Republican congresswoman becomes a candidate for enshrinement on Mount Rushmore because she is committed to carry out the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack’s mission.
I can easily remember 20 years ago when Cheney was regarded by the media as a whack job whose antics fit neatly into a media narrative casting her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, as Darth Vader.
Even as she works with fellow committee members to unveil in exacting detail Trump’s central role in the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, Cheney is battling for reelection in Wyoming against attorney Harriet Hageman.
As quoted in the Deseret News, Hageman said she won’t believe the “lies the Democrats and Liz Cheney’s friends” told about Trump. That’s an interesting remark given that the Casper Star Tribune noted that Cheney voted 93 percent of the time on the former president’s proposals.
A Wyoming journalism stalwart, the Tribune knows too much about Wyoming to buy into Hageman’s rhetoric. The paper noted Hageman is ahead in polling, but it quoted observers who cautioned that a lot can change politically in the weeks leading up to Wyoming’s Aug. 16 Republican primary.
The paper also took a dim view of “outside influences” wading into the congressional race; specifically Florida U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz’s trip to the state to stump for Trump and rail against Cheney.
“He flew into Wyoming for a day, having never been here before,” quipped a Tribune editorial.
That skeptical view of outsiders encapsulates the proud parochialism that defines Wyoming’s 581,900 residents. I speak with authority on the subject as a fourth-generation Wyoming native. My family opened businesses, started families, buried relatives, lost money, made money, built homes, hiked, fished, and hunted in Wyoming.
My late father could drive you deep into Big Horn County to visit the Medicine Wheel or over to Spanish Diggings to do some prospecting.
You can drive across Wyoming and quickly realize the Wind River Reservation is different from Yellowstone National Park and the Big Horns bear no resemblance to the country around Rock Springs.
Wyoming only has one vote in the U.S. House of Representatives compared to nine for Massachusetts. But the federal government is a dominating presence in the state with its regulatory impact on national park policy, water use, oil and coal extraction rules, and military presence.
My guess is that Wyomingites in a month from now are going to positively assess Cheney for the courage of her convictions and her commitment to representing the state’s interests.
Wyoming voters may like Trump’s politics, but their real interest lies in protecting their state from what the Star Tribune described as “outside influences.”
