During a June 4 talk radio discussion in which she denied that U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) was booted from House leadership because she wasn’t loyal to Donald Trump, Colorado Republican Party leader Kristi Burton Brown said that the media has fabricated the idea that Republican leaders and others need to be loyal to the former president.
“I just think a lot of people love to talk about, the GOP has a loyalty test,” Brown told KNUS host Peter Boyles, who scoffed at her statement. “And the media makes it into a loyalty test. I don’t actually, and I go to the RNC meetings. I talk to the national head people. We don’t actually have that kind of test.”
Burton Brown went on to say that the media perpetuates the notion that Republicans won’t tolerate anti-Trump elements in their party because the media want Republicans to lose elections.
“The media want to make it a circus because they don’t want Republicans to win in ’22 and ’24,” Burton Brown told Boyles. “Our party is a lot more diverse and a lot more focused on ideas than the media would have people believe.”
Most news outlets reported that the vote to oust Cheney from the GOP’s House leadership came after she’d criticized Trump for spreading misinformation about the election and other matters. She was among 10 Republicans who voted to impeach the former president.
The Associated Press reported last month that the “backlash against Cheney underscores the fealty to Trump among Republicans, particularly in the House, despite his role in inciting the Capitol riot and his recitation of baseless claims of election cheating.”
Not a single Republican elected to a state office in Colorado said they opposed Trump prior to the last election, and most political observers say a Trump critic cannot win a statewide primary in Colorado.
