Wyoming didn’t just vote against Liz Cheney to express support for Donald Trump. Like President Trump, Harriet Hageman is not a politician. She is a fighter for the country. She ran because there is a big job to be done and she is a big enough person to step up and take it on.
Hageman, the woman who on Tuesday trounced U.S. Representative Liz Cheney in the Wyoming Republican primary, is one of the nation’s top water and land rights lawyers, able to notch her belt with major wins against the EPA and radical environmental groups on behalf of ordinary people. She knows the administrative state for the monster that it is and has ideas about how to stop it from devouring our freedoms and our Constitution.
She was able to beat the powerful Cheney-Bush machine for the same reasons that Donald Trump won in 2016, 2020 and will win again in 2024. Hageman loves America. She is unafraid and incorruptible. She fights to win. She thinks out of the box and goes on offense. She had a positive and optimistic message based on America’s strengths. She is also a much harder worker than her opponent. And she is a smart person offering practical, common-sense policies that will return us to freedom and prosperity.
Sounds like Donald Trump himself, doesn’t she?
As a pampered child of the political elite, Cheney completely underestimated that a non-politician on a budget campaign would be a formidable—indeed unstoppable—opponent.
Cheney offered nothing but NeverTrump hatred. Wyoming voters—and I am one—rightly turned on her for her delusional beliefs in a January 6 “insurrection.” We didn’t care for the stench of her self-righteous love of power.
But we did more than that. We know we live in perilous times. This isn’t a horse race; it is a fight for America’s destiny. We are sending to Washington a top-flight representative to stand for our interests. She’s someone who can be a key helper to Trump when he cleans house of the deep state—the biggest challenge facing our nation. Hageman was not just fighting the Cheney-Bush cartel. She is fighting for America.
Think Wyoming is unimportant cowboy country? Think again. Wyoming is one of the top 10 states crucial for our national prosperity. It is the working heart of America, an America that elites ignore, but can’t survive without. Wyoming is our No. 2 energy powerhouse, right behind Texas. It produces more coal than the next six coal-mining states combined. Wyoming’s Powder River Basin is one of the greatest coal fields in the world, but Americans have never heard of it.
If Wyoming stopped producing coal, natural gas, and uranium, 30 states would go dark.
It is one of the largest states in the nation, the emptiest and most wild—and most regulated. Half the state is owned by the federal government—U. S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and national parks. Mining and ranching, the mainstays of the state’s economy, require federal permission for much of what they do. Wyomingites understand Washington’s bureaucratic tyrants. And they understand the importance of fossil fuel to run the modern world.
As Hageman would say in her campaign speeches, she will not only represent Wyoming, she is Wyoming.
What does this mean?
It’s basic. Hageman grew up differently than most Americans, a childhood familiar to her voters. Harriet learned to drive when she was 4 years old. She would steer the family pickup across open ranchland, avoiding bumps and ditches, while her Dad stood in the back throwing out bales of hay for the cattle. Her childhood had more freedom, more responsibility, and more hard work than city and suburban families can imagine. It harks back to an earlier century. These are real Wyoming credentials. These are also values and the strengths the country needs, and needs badly.
To the self-annointed Uniparty, country people like Hageman are supposed to be dumb hicks. Ha! Harriet is smart—really smart, not ordinary smart. She is not self-conscious about being a powerful personality nor having a brilliant mind. She expects her audience to share this attitude of rolling up your sleeves to drill down into the problems to overcome, no matter how challenging. She can be surprisingly wonky on the campaign trail, educating her campaign audiences on what she calls “Regulation without Representation.” It is a deep dive into the deep state, which she understands as well or better than most people in Washington.
This approach was lighting up the audience one evening when I heard her speak—the audience was nodding and at times groaning or laughing out loud.
You wouldn’t guess Hageman grew up outside of a town of 350 people 100 miles north of Cheyenne. Her family met the normal challenges of ranch life—a mountain lion killing stock, her father bucked off his horse and breaking his back. In other ways, her family was exceptional. Hageman tells me:
[My parents] sent all six of their children to college, they adopted or took legal guardianship of three other children, and they took in over 40 foster children over a 25-year period. They believed in public service and instilled their beliefs in all of us. I’m eternally hopeful and optimistic. We can solve these problems if Wyoming can pull our constitutional rights back from the feds to control our own destiny. My message—why launder money through D.C. when we can improve things right here at home for our own citizens? Washington does not have Wyoming citizens’ interests in mind. If we could keep even 30 percent of the money Washington takes from our state in taxes and fees, we could do a better job than the feds. We have to get away from a central planning model.
With a Harriet Hageman victory, the GOP Congress would be getting another spine implant.
America needs Wyoming’s voice. America needs Harriet Hageman’s voice. It needs to hear from Wyoming on energy, on how to win free from federal overregulation, on Wyoming’s lived principles of personal responsibility—helping neighbors and taking care of one’s own family. America needs more of Wyoming’s old-fashioned individualism. Hageman has the potential to be that voice on the national stage.