Claims about her courage can be overdone. She’s a professional. She has taken brickbats for sure but she’s not thrown herself on the pyre. She is betting intelligently on her future in full recognition that most politicians don’t become president but her chances are as good or better than they were before she opposed Donald Trump. Her political celebrity is enhanced. Her name is as familiar now to 330 million Americans as it was previously to 581,813 Wyoming inhabitants.

Ms. Cheney’s biggest long-run risk may come not from antagonizing Mr. Trump but from antagonizing millions of voters by making common cause with Jan. 6 committee Democrats like Adam Schiff, whose lying and cynicism have been every bit as corrosive as Mr. Trump’s. At an appropriate moment, it will pay her to talk a great deal about her opposition to the Russia collusion hoax…

It feels weird to say it, but if Mr. Trump represents a unique threat (and maybe he does), it’s because his lies aren’t the establishment’s lies, they aren’t the media elite’s lies, and yet his lies have a purchase with a large and possibly decisive electorate. Offhand, only one lie heard in normal, everyday American discourse seems to me close in size to Mr. Trump’s 2020 lie, and that’s the routine, universally affirmed lie, which is nowhere found in the science, that climate change is the end of the world.