May 31, 2022 |
The biggest event in Wyoming over the Memorial Day Weekend was not a barbecue or a rodeo. It was a political rally. The Republican primary race for the state’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives kicked off with thunderous rally in Casper Saturday afternoon.
Before a packed house inside the Ford Wyoming Center, former President Donald Trump urged supporters to vote Liz Cheney out of office.
The former president said Cheney hates Republican voters and is working against them.
Cheney is seeking election to a fourth term in the U.S. House. At one point during Trump’s one hour and 20 minute speech, the former president shared a meme on the large screen above the stage. The portrait showed Cheney’s page-boy hair style and blue glasses morphed together with the facial features of former President George W. Bush.
The comical send-up made a powerful political point: The Cheney family is part of a powerful elite pushing for the U.S.A. to police the world while allowing the nation to crumble at home.
The post 9/11 wars have failed our country, Trump said. In the audience was Royce McCollum, the sister of Lance Corporal Rylee McCollum, the U.S. Marine from Jackson Hole who was among the 13 American service members killed during the ill-planned exit from Afghanistan last summer.
While the rally was upbeat, and the crowd wildly enthusiastic, the sub-text of Trump’s speech was somber and serious. The nation is under attack, he said. The enemy is within. Trump said the country has lost its way and “gone crazy” under President Biden as the champions a far-left agenda that attacks God, family, the Constitution, oil and secure elections.
The fight to win back the country, Trump told the crowd, begins by voting Democrats and RINO Republicans out of Congress.
Trump, who was in Casper to support Harriet Hageman in her race against Cheney, said Wyoming’s U.S. House race is the most important one in the country. He said Hageman would not betray conservative values as Cheney has.
For her part, Hageman delivered a simple and to the point stump speech. In a 10-minute summation of all that has frustrated conservatives, she fired up the crowd for Trump with a laundry list of things Wyomingites are “fed up” with from Washington. The list included, boys competing as girls in sports, vaccine mandates, the CDC, the NIH, the WHO, corruption in the FBI, the CIA, NSA and Homeland Security, Anthony Fauci, the January 6th committee and Democrats in general. The list was impressive for not omitting a single hot-button issue. It ended with the obvious parting salvo.
Cheney has not responded to any of the remarks made about her by Trump or Hageman during Saturday’s rally.
A poll released Thursday by a group supportive of Hageman, Club for Growth, shows that Cheney has sunk 30 points behind Hageman in the primary race. Hageman garnered 56 percent support, while Cheney only earned 26 percent, a 30 percent difference. The poll was conducted with 400 likely Republican primary voters in Wyoming from May 24-25. The margin of error is +4.9 percent.
Three other candidates are running in the Republican primary. Three House candidates have filed to run in the Democrat primary.
