Liz Cheney has a book out.

Republican Liz Cheney has made no secret of her criticism of former President Donald Trump. It’s what made her an outcast in her own party and cost her her job in Congress last year.

The former Wyoming representative was one of just 10 Republicans to back his second impeachment in 2021. She became one of two Republicans on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, for which she explicitly blamed Trump.

Cheney’s vocal and sustained criticism of the former president led to her losing her leadership role as the No. 3 House Republican and, eventually, her primary campaign for reelection.

You know…the surprising thing is not that Cheney does this but that more Republicans don’t. At first blush it seems obvious why they don’t, but if you pause to think about it…why aren’t more of them disgusted and horrified at what he’s done and is doing to their party? Being conservative doesn’t have to mean being rude and trashy and disgusting, but with Trump at the wheel, it certainly looks as if it does. You know? It’s like Freethought Blogs. By the time I left that place I was ecstatic to get away from it. It wasn’t “oh damn I’ll miss all those thoughtful careful eloquent people,” it was “ew ew ew ew get me out of here.” Why isn’t it like that for more Republicans?

This week Cheney releases Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, a no-holds-barred accounting from inside the Republican party of the days before and after Jan. 6, Trump’s efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election and her often-lonely role in trying to thwart them.

Cheney name-checks members of GOP leadership too, including former and current House speakers Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson.

Cheney tells Morning Edition‘s Leila Fadel that the dangers she describes in the book are ongoing, from Trump’s defiance of the institutions meant to check him, to the Republican politicians who she says put their own career ambitions ahead of their duty to the Constitution.

I guess that’s one answer to my question. It’s not the party, it’s their careers.

“People really, I think, need to understand and recognize the specifics, the details of what he tried to do in terms of overturning the election and seizing power and the details and the specifics of the elected officials who helped him,” she said. “I do think it’s very important for people to understand how close we came to a far greater constitutional crisis — and how quickly and easily — in a way that is, frankly, terrifying.”

Cheney does credit a handful of brave Republicans in state and federal offices from stopping “the worst of what could have happened.” But she says many of those people won’t be there the next time around. The stakes for the country, she adds, “couldn’t be higher.”

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Cheney isn’t afraid to name names in her book.

Among them: She describes McCarthy, the former speaker, as a coward and hypocrite who knew Trump’s election claims to be false but defended them publicly anyway. She calls Johnson, the current speaker, an election denier who was easily swayed by Trump’s flattery well before he ascended to House leadership.

Many others were simply scared.

Cheney writes that some members of Congress told her at the time that they believed Trump should be impeached but couldn’t vote that way because they were afraid for their security and that of their family. She urged listeners not to gloss over that fact.

“People really need to stop and think about: What does it mean in America that members of Congress are not voting the way that they believe they should because they fear violence instigated by, then, the sitting president of the United States?” she adds, calling that “a place we haven’t been before.”

And she says once her colleagues took that position they were able to rationalize it, which helps explain where the party stands now.

“Once you’ve accepted something that is so indefensible, then it’s hard ever to sort of go back and say, ‘Well no actually, I should have stood against that.'”

So they didn’t, and we’re doomed.