Back in December, my friend Mark Loper texted me asking whether or not I'd be interested in going to a speaker forum to be held at Wake Forest University's Wait Chapel. He had two tickets available, but Karla, his wife, was unable to attend.
So he thought of me.
The two scheduled speakers on the program were Liz Cheney and Jon Meacham.
Holy cow, I thought. This is great.
"I'm very interested," I texted Mark. "Thanks."
Cheney, of course, served as Wyoming's at-large U.S. representative from 2017 to 2023. She was the House chair for the Republican Conference, making her the third-ranking person in the Republican House leadership.
She also lived through the January 6 insurrection (which makes her an eyewitness to history) and has since served as a vocal and dedicated thorn in the side of Donald Trump.
More pointedly, she served as Vice Chair of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
Meacham is a presidential historian and a Pulitzer Price winning author of several No. 1 New York Times bestsellers and who sits in the Rogers Chair of American Presidency at Vanderbilt University. He often appears as a thoughtful, witty and knowledgeable commentator on MSNBC, especially on matters of politics or religion ("I am probably one of the last six Episcopalians left in the United States," he joked last night).
Meacham more or less served as the interviewer, asking Cheney numerous probing questions and follow-ups about her experience on Jan. 6. Some of the questions were direct and some were philosophical, which required Cheney to pause and think hard before answering.
What most of us in the audience probably came away with, if we couldn't have guessed already, is that Cheney is guided by a deep and abiding passion for the U.S. Constitution. Sensing that American democracy is under fire by Trump and his authoritarian minions as it hasn't seen since the Civil War, she warned of the dangers of a potential autocracy that lie ahead. Although she hesitated and would not commit when asked if she would vote for Joe Biden for president in November, she said she would never vote for Trump.
As the program neared its conclusion, Meacham acknowledged Cheney's courage in the face of Trumpian retribution, thanking her for standing by her principles and not for temporal power. That brought the 2,200-member audience (probably the largest gathering of left-of-center voters in the state at that particular moment) to its feet in an ovation that clearly touched Cheney.
Mark and I left the forum feeling satisfied by what we heard. It had been a while – decades actually – since I set foot on a college campus for an intellectual moment of stimulating thought that did not include Civil War study.
It felt good.
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