Cheney says she won't do anything that 'helps' Trump as she weighs White House bid

Former Rep. Liz Cheney — one of the most vocal GOP critics of Donald Trump — is staying mum about her 2024 plans, but she said in an interview Tuesday that she has no intention of taking any steps that would help the former president return to office.

“I’m not going to do anything that helps Donald Trump,” Cheney told NBC News’ Lester Holt at the Aspen Ideas Festival. "I’ll make a decision about sort of what I do and what comes next later on this year.”

Cheney, who represented Wyoming in Congress for six years before she lost in the GOP primary last year to a Trump-backed candidate, was also asked whether she would run as a Republican or a third-party candidate if she were to launch a White House bid.

“The way that I’m thinking about where we are and what has to be done is much less about, you know, what should I do in terms of am I going to be a candidate or not ... and much more about stopping Donald Trump, whatever that takes,” she said.

After she lost her primary in August, Cheney said she would decide on her 2024 plans "in the coming months."

Cheney became a frequent target of Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill after she was one of a handful of Republicans to vote to impeach Trump. That cost her the No. 3 post in House GOP leadership. She drew even more GOP criticism when she helped lead the congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, with a heavy focus on Trump's actions.

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Third-party candidates haven’t performed well overall in recent presidential elections, but they can sometimes affect the margins in battleground states.

In the 2016 election, 6% of all voters cast ballots for third-party and write-in candidates, with the proportion dropping to 2% in 2020. Some Democrats have argued that the difference made it easier for Trump to win in 2016.

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Trump is ‘unfit’ to be president, Liz Cheney says

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Cornel West, a political activist and professor, announced his candidacy for the People’s Party presidential nomination this month. In his announcement, West criticized both Democrats and Republicans, calling Trump a “neo-fascist and President Joe Biden a milquetoast liberal.”

In remarks Monday at the 92nd Street Y in New York, Cheney sidestepped a question from moderator David Rubenstein about whether she would consider running as an independent if she knew doing so would hurt rather than help Trump.

“What we’ve done in our politics is create a situation where we’re electing idiots. And so I don’t look at it through the lens of like, you know, is this what I should do or what I shouldn’t do. I look at it through the lens of how do we elect serious people, and I think electing serious people can’t be partisan," she said.

In Tuesday's interview, Cheney said she was committed to helping elect other "good" candidates down the ballot.

"We really we need to make sure that everybody is active and engaged and involved, and I'm certainly going to be doing everything I can to support serious candidates," Cheney said.