“In our nation’s 246-year history,” Dick Cheney says at the beginning of a viral ad for his daughter Liz Cheney, the Wyoming congresswoman, “there has never been an individual who has been a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.”

That’s a remarkable claim, and not just because the United States once had to fight a war to suppress an actual insurrection led by antidemocratic ideologues. Compare the 360,000 Union soldiers who died suppressing the Southern rebellion to the zero Capitol police officers who were directly killed by pro-Trump rioters on January 6, 2021.

And we don’t need to go back to the Civil War to see the absurdity of Cheney’s claim. Just in the last few decades, you know who was a much more competent and dangerous enemy of democracy than Donald Trump? Dick Cheney.