On Thursday, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), travelled to Wyoming to rally against fellow Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY). Addressing a crowd of several hundred, Gaetz said that Wyoming “can do better.”
“How can you call yourself a representative when you don’t represent the will of the people,” said Gaetz. “That’s what all the neocons ask about the Arab dictators. I figure maybe we ought to ask the same question of a beltway bureaucrat turned fake cow girl that supported an impeachment that is deeply unpopular in the state of Wyoming.”
“The truth is that the establishment in both political parties have teamed up to screw our fellow Americans for generations,” said Gaetz. “The private insider club of Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Nancy Pelosi and Liz Cheney, they want to return our government to its default setting: enriching them.”
Gaetz also tweeted after the event, telling Cheney to “come to Wyoming sometime.”
This massive crowd turned out to support my call to defeat @Liz_Cheney in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Liz, you should come to Wyoming sometime. It’s beautiful here! pic.twitter.com/OOJAcbY4sV
— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) January 28, 2021
Earlier this week, Cheney’s office released a statement after Gaetz announced his plan to rally against her, saying “Rep. Gaetz can leave his beauty bag at home. In Wyoming, the men don’t wear make-up.”
This “feud” comes in the aftermath of Cheney’s decision to join Democrats and nine other House Republicans to impeach President Donald Trump.
While such a decision will clearly cause a fracture within the Republican party, with support of the former president standing as a binary test, the brutal fact is that none of this infighting is in any way helpful.
If anything, it’s potentially disastrous.
While Republicans made impressive gains in the House of Representatives in the 2020 election, they should remember that they lost both the White House and the US Senate in what should be seen as a massive letdown for the GOP.
Similar to the notion of supporting the formation of a third party, it makes no strategic sense for any Republican to be actively working to drive further divides within the movement they claim to advocate for. While comparatively petty skirmishes may be politically profitable for individual politicians, what advantage is gained for those who care about principle over personality if the result aids our ideological enemies?
This is not, of course, to say that there aren’t legitimate subjects of disagreement within the conservative movement, and that various factions can’t have a healthy debate over such issues. This is to say, however, that the primary focus of every Republican — if they are genuine in their desire to promote American conservatism — simply must be to return a Republican president to the White House in 2024, and regain control of the House of Representatives and US Senate as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, despite being immeasurably more fractured than the Republican party, the Democrats are masters at focusing on the big picture. They showed that in Georgia, with the Jewish Jon Ossoff happily campaigning alongside vocal anti-Semite Raphael Warnock. The Republican party has nowhere near the same level of ideological radicalism or internal division that the Left is grappling with, and yet they are attempting to out-purge each other in pursuit of individual victories to the detriment of conservatism more broadly.
Win back the White House. Win back the House of Representatives. Win back the Senate. Then we can talk about “neocons” and “fake cowgirls” and “beauty bags.”
Ian Haworth is an Editor and Writer for The Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter at @ighaworth.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.