On Thursday, Republican war hawk Liz Cheney, having last month endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, joined the Democratic presidential candidate on the campaign trail in Ripon, Wisconsin, birthplace of the Republican Party in 1854.

Liz Cheney is the daughter of the notorious war criminal Dick Cheney, who, as vice president under George W. Bush, oversaw the US destruction of Iraq beginning in 2003. The elder Cheney has also endorsed Harris.

In her speech, Cheney highlighted her decades-long fealty to the Republican Party, noting that she cast her “first vote ever in 1984 for Ronald Reagan,” and that she served “in the State Department in both Bush administrations and I served in the United States House of Representatives for three terms, including as the third highest ranking Republican in the House leadership.”

Cheney said that she had never voted for a Democrat, but as a “conservative, as a patriot, as a mother, as someone who reveres our Constitution, this year I am proudly casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.”

Both Liz and Dick Cheney are ultra-right warmongers, who previously endorsed and supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election. During Trump’s presidency, Representative Cheney regularly defended and advanced Trump’s pro-corporate and pro-war policies in the US House, voting in line with Trump’s position 92.9 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight.

Dick Cheney is one of the most infamous war criminals in the world. As George W. Bush’s powerful and unaccountable vice president, Cheney, along with Bush, Bush’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, spearheaded the illegal invasion of Iraq and occupation of Afghanistan, in the name of the “war on terror” and on the basis of the big lie that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction.”

Under the banner of “national security,” Cheney, along with Bush, Rice and high-level officials in the Pentagon and the Department of Justice, oversaw the creation of a police-state and torture apparatus across the globe in the service of US imperialist ambitions. The network of “black site” torture dungeons included Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Thousands were illegally seized and incarcerated, without a trial or any form of due process and repeatedly assaulted, electrocuted, waterboarded, sexually abused and, in some cases, murdered.

In her speech on Thursday, Cheney, who continues to defend the torture programs pioneered by her father, framed her endorsement of Harris as the highest expression of “patriotism.”

She attacked Trump for violently refusing to accept the 2020 election results. She recalled Trump’s “illegal and unconstitutional” actions in the lead-up to and on January 6, 2021 itself, declaring that on that day Trump “sent the armed mob to the United States Capitol in an effort to stop the counting of electoral votes.”

She said:

As the violent mob attacked our Capitol in Donald Trump’s name, as they brutally beat law enforcement officers, as they hunted the vice president and the speaker of the house, Donald Trump watched the attack on television for hours, for hours.

Sitting in the dining room next to the Oval Office, he refused repeated pleas from his family, from his closest advisers from the most senior officials in his campaign and in our government to tell the mob to leave.

Cheney, citing Special Counsel Jack Smith’s latest legal brief, noted that when a worried aide informed Trump that Mike Pence had been evacuated from his office in the Senate after Trump attacked him in a tweet, Trump replied, “So what?”

Cheney declared that “we must defeat” the “depraved” Donald Trump on November 5.

Cheney, the co-chair of the decommissioned House Select Committee to investigate the January 6 attack, is one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump following the siege of the Capitol. As part of his revenge campaign, Trump has frequently attacked Cheney and other “disloyal” Republicans who voted to impeach him. Of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach, only two are still in the House, Rep. Dan Newhouse (Washington) and Rep. David Valadao (California).

Cheney and Harris are united in their mutual concern over the destabilizing and potentially revolutionary implications of Trump’s openly dictatorial policies and his transformation of the Republican Party into an American-style fascist party. They favor the maintenance of the corporate-controlled two-party system and the traditional trappings of democracy through which the billionaire oligarchs exercise their de facto dictatorship.

Significantly, Cheney in her speech presented the danger of dictatorship as residing exclusively in the person of Trump, the individual. She said nothing about the extensive support within the capitalist state, including the bulk of the GOP and extending to large sections of the judiciary, the media, and the military, police and intelligence apparatus for Trump’s attempted coup and his ongoing and open preparations to violently overturn the 2024 election should he lose to Harris.

What above all brings Harris and Cheney together is their agreement on the war policies of American imperialism, centered on military escalation against Russia. This was spelled out in Harris’s remarks. After Cheney spoke in support of Harris, the vice president heaped praise on her campaign ally, urging on her audience, “Can we hear it for Liz Cheney?!”

Harris thanked Cheney “for your support and your leadership and your courage,” adding:

I do want to say a bit more about Liz Cheney. You all know her leadership, and she has obviously and so importantly been a leader for the people of Wyoming, but she has also been an extraordinary national leader and has served with great honor.

Harris declared that Cheney “really is a leader who puts country above party, and above self, a true patriot and it is my profound honor, my profound honor to have your support.”

Turning to face Cheney, Harris added, with a giant smile on her face, “I also want to thank your father, Vice President Dick Cheney, for his support and what he has done to serve our country.”

Harris then expanded on her, and Cheney’s, fundamental agreement on war until victory against Russia, despite the risk of triggering a nuclear holocaust. Harris said:

Democracy and freedom are not only at stake here at home, they are also at stake around the world. As president of the United States I will strengthen, not abdicate, America’s global leadership.

Drawing applause from Cheney, who was standing behind her, Harris continued:

Last week, I met with Ukraine’s President Zelensky. And the message I delivered was the same message I have shared with him every time I have seen him. I stand with Ukraine and I always will. And I told him as I have before, I want Ukraine to prevail.

“By contrast,” Harris said, “in our debate, Donald Trump couldn’t even bring himself to say he wanted Ukraine to win the war. Couldn’t even bring himself to say that.”

Harris added “that in the global struggle between tyranny and democracy, the president of the United States must always be on the side of freedom,” and that “Liz Cheney stands in the finest traditions of its leaders.”

This from a government that fully supports the Israeli genocide in Gaza and its extension into Lebanon and the West Bank, and that supports a far-right government in Kiev that has suspended elections, is allied to the neo-Nazi Azov Brigade and honors the legacy of Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust.

Speaking to reporters outside Air Force One on Thursday evening, President Joe Biden, unprompted, brought up Cheney’s speech and praised her as well as her father.

Biden said that Cheney “made one of the most consequential speeches I’ve ever heard.” He continued: “She has character, I know her dad, and her dad as well. We argued like hell but I always admired his courage and honesty.”

Biden added that he’d “never been so proud, I really am, really incredibly proud of her.”