Cheney’s latest attempt to align herself with Vice President Kamala Harris came during an event Monday where she suggested that states that have banned abortion should not have done so.

“I’m pro-life, and I have been very troubled, deeply troubled by what I have watched happen in so many states since Dobbs,” Cheney said. “I have been troubled by the extent to which you have women who, as the vice president said, in some cases have died, who can’t get medical treatment that they need because providers are worried about criminal liability.”

While Cheney is not breaking new ground by aligning herself with the pro-life movement, she is being dishonest about the laws she says are troubling her. In 2021, the former congresswoman was a co-sponsor of the Life at Conception Act, which would have banned abortion from the moment of conception and made the procedure a crime under state and federal murder statutes by interpreting the 14th Amendment’s language that “no state [shall] deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” to include the unborn.

Put simply, the bill that she co-sponsored was far more restrictive of abortion than the vast majority of state laws currently in effect, which all allow for doctors to provide necessary medical treatment to pregnant women. But for Cheney, facts cannot get in the way of her narrative that she is not like the “crazy” Republicans who are aligned with former President Donald Trump.

So the question becomes, then, who is Liz Cheney? Is she the rare principled politician who was willing to accept the consequences of tough decisions? Or is she an opportunist who followed the only available path to maintaining influence?

Cheney will never admit it because it undermines her anti-Trump campaign, but she was already laying the groundwork for her political future before she broke with Trump. When Trump addressed the crowd at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, he name-checked Cheney as an example of Republicans who had to be forced out of the party. The riot at the Capitol then provided Cheney with the excuse to break with Trump and back his impeachment after he had already announced that they were no longer on friendly terms.

As long as Cheney had a future in a Trump-led Republican Party, she was his biggest cheerleader, even as she worked behind the scenes to ensure the Republican Party’s governing agenda was the one favored by the political establishment and not the one promoted by Trump. But once her future in the party was over, she turned around and became his biggest critic.

It is entirely reasonable to conclude that Cheney, knowing that she was persona non grata with Trump, calculated that Jan. 6 would be the end of the president’s political career, and if she got ahead of condemning him, she would be able to lead the party into the future. But when Trump proved politically resilient, she was left with no choice but to embrace the Democratic Party.

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At this point, it is hard to determine what positions Cheney continues to hold that align with the Republican Party’s policy positions. She has repudiated her previous pro-life stance and sides with the Democratic Party on foreign policy, the topic she cares most about.

The truth is that Cheney chose the path that gave her the most influence based on the reality of her political circumstances. There are rumors that she could be under consideration for a Cabinet post if Harris wins the presidential election. If her support for Harris yields her a job running a Cabinet-level agency, it will be hard to argue that her embrace of the Democratic Party didn’t pay off in spades.