Liz Cheney’s memoir “Oath and Honor” is a warning about the Republican Party : NPR

Republican Liz Cheney has made no secret of her criticism of former president Donald Trump. It’s what made her an outcast in her own party and cost her her job in Congress last year.

The former Wyoming representative was one of just ten Republicans to back his second impeachment in 2021. She became one of two Republicans on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, for which she explicitly blamed Trump.

Cheney’s vocal and sustained criticism of the former president led to her losing her leadership role as the No. 3 House Republican and, eventually, her primary campaign for reelection.

Now, with Trump leading the polls in the 2024 Republican primary, Cheney is ramping up her efforts to keep him out of the Oval Office. She tells NPR’s Morning Edition she hasn’t ruled out her own presidential run in 2024 for that reason.

“I look at it very much through the lens of stopping Donald Trump,” she said. “And so whatever it will take to do that is very much my focus. I think the danger is that great that that needs to be everybody’s top priority.”

This week Cheney releases Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, a no-holds-barred accounting from inside the Republican party of the days before and after Jan. 6, Trump’s efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election and her often-lonely role in trying to thwart them.

Cheney name-checks members of GOP leadership too, including former and current House speakers Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson.

Cheney tells Morning Edition‘s Leila Fadel that the dangers she describes in the book are ongoing, from Trump’s defiance of the institutions meant to check him, to the Republican politicians who she says put their own career ambitions ahead of their duty to the Constitution.

“People really, I think, need to understand and recognize the specifics, the details of what he tried to do in terms of overturning the election and seizing power and the details and the specifics of the elected officials who helped him,” she said. “I do think it’s very important for people to understand how close we came to a far greater constitutional crisis — and how quickly and easily — in a way that is, frankly, terrifying.”

Cheney does credit a handful of brave Republicans in state and federal offices from stopping “the worst of what could have happened.” But she says many of those people won’t be there the next time around. The stakes for the country, she adds, “couldn’t be higher.”

“All of these things that we know Donald Trump and those who enabled him did before, they will do again,” she said. “And people who are willing to abide by that, including Republicans in Congress, can’t be trusted with power. And that’s something that voters need to have at the forefront of their minds when they go into the voting booth in 2024.”

This story will be updated.