Liz Cheney has called on courts of law, the news media, government bureaucrats and other citizens to be the “guardrails of democracy” after Kamala Harris – whom she served as a conservative campaign surrogate – lost Tuesday’s US presidential election to their common opponent, Donald Trump.

In a social media post on Wednesday, the former high-profile Republican Wyoming congresswoman – and daughter of George W Bush’s vice-president Dick Cheney – also urged Harris’s supporters to accept her defeat “whether we like the outcome or not”.

“All Americans are bound … to accept the results of our elections,” Cheney wrote of Trump’s having clinched a second presidency. “We now have a special responsibility … to do everything we can to support and defend our constitution, preserve the rule of law and ensure that our institutions hold over these coming four years.

“Citizens across this country, our courts, members of the press and those serving in our federal, state and local governments must now be the guardrails of democracy.”

Those in charge of Harris’s campaign made Cheney its most prominent Republican surrogate as the Democratic vice-president sought to become the first woman elected to the Oval Office. The hope was that Cheney would draw Republican voters away from the party’s nominee, Trump, especially in the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Harris ultimately lost all three states along with other key battlegrounds, costing her not only the electoral college but also the popular vote, making her the first Democratic presidential candidate in two decades to lose the latter.

With his return to power despite a conviction only months earlier on charges of criminally falsifying business records, Trump positioned himself to try to deliver on repeated promises of retribution against Cheney.

She ran afoul of Trump by vociferously speaking out against his lies that electoral fraudsters handed the 2020 presidential race to Joe Biden. And she was also a member of the House congressional committee that investigated Trump supporters’ deadly US Capitol attack in early 2021 – meant to keep him in office – and concluded that the president-elect had a role in enabling it.

Trump aimed some of his most violent rhetoric at Cheney in the waning stages of his contest against Harris. During an interview with conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson on 31 October, Trump said Cheney should be made to face rifles “shooting at her”. He hurled the remark even after openly complaining that he believed criticism of his campaign had fueled what according to authorities were failed attempts to assassinate him in July and September.

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Cheney replied that Trump was a “cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant”.

She left Congress in January 2023 after losing a re-election bid against a Trump-supported challenger, Harriet Hageman. Hageman subsequently triumphed in a general election to succeed Cheney in Wyoming’s lone House seat, and she easily won a second term on Tuesday.