Deporting the Cheneys: At Last, Wyoming Is Free

How President Trump—and Congressman Matt Gaetz—toppled our domestic dictators

Did the 2024 presidential campaign begin in Wyoming? Chet Strange for The Washington Post / via Getty Images

There’ll be all these thumb-sucking pieces about Trump and Wyoming; Alaska and Sarah Palin.  What does it all mean?

Many of these insights will be written by journalists who have never been to Wyoming or Alaska. On that score, I’ve got them beat. In fact I got married in Alaska. The marriage didn’t last but the memories are warm. If you haven’t been to either, you haven’t breathed the freest, cleanest air in America.

Love Texas though I do, I was never a Texan but a Texas resident. Wyoming, though, is where my heart is because it is where my kin were. I had long fantasized about returning to Wyoming and going all in on the efforts to fight to rout the Cheneys. A sort of reverse mujahideen if you will.

Inshallah, we shall liberate our country from the Cheney crime family, which cashed in to the tune of tens of millions on the Iraq War they started. This is the oil-military industrial complex that ruins our air, kills our children, and enriches our oligarchs. It has to be abolished, obviously. But who will do it?

In their efforts to sell that war, the Cheneys used to say that we had to fight them abroad so that we didn’t have to fight them at home. But where do they make their home, really? They live in McLean, VA — one of the toniest zip codes in America — and for them Wyoming, like Iraq, was just a means to get power. In that pursuit, Liz Cheney sacrificed her own sister whose gay marriage she denounced long after her warmonger father had given the A-OK. And for what? A congressional seat?

Here’s how journalist Ryan Grim describes it.

This is a person who launched a campaign to represent Wyoming in Congress with a Facebook post geotagged McLean, Virginia, her real home. On the trail, a reporter noticed that her hands had turned blue, stained from rubbing them against the brand new blue jeans she’d bought to play the part of cowboy.

Cheney knows lies both big and small. She, with Wallace, was a leading booster of her father’s war. She has shown no remorse or reflection over the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Quite the contrary, it was Trump’s attack on the decision to go to war in Iraq, and later his insistence on exiting Afghanistan, that triggered her most deeply and drove her to work publicly with Democrats to keep the occupation going.

My beloved grandmother, my Grandi — Marian Carlisle — was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming and buried in Arlington National Cemetery. She shot guns and she spoke Sioux and she married a Navy man and never saw the ocean until he set sail.

Grandi was as both Liz Cheney and Sarah Palin both promised. She was Western, defiant, feminine — though Grandi was so well read that she eventually took a job in a book store just to have a place where she could get paid while she was reading. She once told another family member that she never bought a book — even with the employee discount. “We have libraries for a reason.”

When I asked Grandi about which X-men was her favorite, she replied, I don’t know anything about any X-men but I do know that you should work to be a real man. “And where, Grandi, are the real men?,” I’d ask. Wyoming, she’d reply wistfully, from Coronado, California. She lived most of her days mere steps from the Pacific Ocean but she hated the beach, that mountain girl who married a rear admiral.

My Wyoming-born grandmother and Oklahoma-born grandfather on their wedding day.

Years later we’d discover that my grandmother, dying of cancer and living like a church mouse, squirreled away enough money for many of her grandchildren to pay at least some of their college bill. She was the first person to explain to me what investing was and she believed that rights don’t exist unless you’re willing to fight for them. And yes, that did mean with a gun if necessary and so ever since I came of age, I’ve had guns. So stirring is that love of the West that my father teared up after sending me away to school. “You’re a Westerner raised among Easterns,” he said. “You won’t come back.” Save for funerals and some major events, he was right. And but for my country calling me, I’d still be out West where I belong and where — one day — I will return.

Though it has been more than a quarter century since I saw Grandi last I can see her in my mind’s eye, laughing and listening to Rush Limbaugh and drinking fresh squeezed orange justice. She loved candy and her dachshunds and her Episcopal Church, nature, her many guns, and America and, yes, Wyoming. Never forget that it was Wyoming which first gave equal voting and office-holding rights to women—way back in 1869. The state’s motto — “equal rights” — harkens back to it.

Charles Carlisle — her father, my great-grandfather and namesake — spent much of his life in Wyoming. He was, as Marc Andreessen or Peter Thiel might say, “a builder.” No, I mean a real builder. Not the fake stuff, please.

Here it is — that bio that proves Wyoming was ours.

Following his graduation, [Carlisle] was first connected with the irrigation investigations, United States department of agriculture, in the government offices at Cheyenne, where he spent one winter. The following summer he was in charge of a party engaged in surveying government lands. On the 15th of September, 1902, he was appointed as assistant state engineer under Fred Bond and continued in that position (after Fred Bond's death) under Clarence T. Johnston, until 1916 when he made surveys for and prepared a report for a new water works for the city of Cheyenne and immediately after filing the report was appointed city engineer in February, 1917. Among other duties as city engineer, he prepared detailed plans and specifications for the million dollar water works and superintended the installation thereof. He continued as city engineer of Cheyenne until the water works was completed in September, 1912, when he resigned to enter upon the practice of his profession as consulting engineer. with offices in the First National Bank building. He is the only engineer in the state making a specialty of water works, sewers and electric lights. He has been employed as consulting engineer for one or more of the three improvements, viz., water works, sewers or electric lights, for the following cities and towns: Cheyenne, Douglas, Glenrock, Manville, Casper, Thermopolis, Riverton, Hudson, Lander, Wheatland, Laramie, Rock River, Medicine Bow, Burns, Granger, Baggs, all of Wyoming, and Potter, Nebraska.

He successfully passed the examination for and secured civil engineer's licenses in all five grades to practice engineering in Wyoming; also under the revised laws he holds a senior engineer's license. His “hobby” is scientific research and electric phenomena along which lines, during his spare moments, he is studying. He is fond of hunting and is an expert with rifle or revolver.
On the 9th of August, 1905, Mr. Carlisle was united in marriage to Miss Flora May Lee, an alumna of the University of Wyoming. They mow have two children, Alice Laurel and Marian Lee [Grandi].
Mr. Carlisle is a republican in political views and his religious faith is evidenced by his membership in the Congregational church. Fraternally, he is a member of Cheyenne Lodge, No. 1, A. F. & A. M., of which he is a past master; he is also a past master of Rocky Mountain Lodge of Perfection, No. 3, and is a member of Wyoming Consistory, No. 1, A. & A. S. R., and a Noble of the Mystic Shrine.

If you’ve seen the gas starter valve you’ve seen his handiwork. He had quite a number of inventions. I’m not quite a Western chauvinist but my ancestors did invent the modern world. Whatever I may do in my life it will not be as great as my ancestors who took the West and came over on the Mayflower.

The Cheney family has never invented anything but misery.

Let’s be very clear about the Cheney family. They are a crime family and like all crime families they protest too much that others be allowed to crime as they go down. To the extent that they hate Trump it’s because Trump ended their con and grift. Nobody really knows how much money they made off of the destruction of Iraq.

The worst atrocities of the Cheney family are beyond the scope of this piece but they are quite astounding. This one simply fact stood out to me.

“Halliburton’s business with the military has grown substantially since Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney took office,” wrote the New York Times in 2004. “The company rose to seventh-largest military contractor in 2003 from the 22nd-largest in 2000.”

Not quite Liz Cheney.

While President Trump may not have been able to end the occupation of Afghanistan he did end that of Wyoming. Thank you, President Trump.

And thank you, Matt Gaetz, who knew that while the people of Wyoming were under occupation they dreamed of breathing free. I was honored to help him in that endeavor by helping to write his speech. Matt and The Donald helped Wyoming rid itself of the Beltway bandits and for that, they should be immensely proud.

I texted Congressman Paul Gosar — who though he represents Arizona hails from Wyoming — and said simply, “our ancestral homeland is free.”

Of course it was lost on neither one of us that Kevin McCarthy roamed in the Cowboy State with that interloper Elon Musk.

Their time, too, will come, just as the Cheneys did. In the end, all crooks, even the congressional and plutocratic ones, end up where they belong.

I am reminded of that line from The Lives of Others (2006), “Strange it is that we ever let men like you run a country.”

This one was for you, Grandi.

I have some thoughts about who might be next.

Dan “Pirate John McCain” Crenshaw anyone?