Cheney stayed for a second act as figurehead of the Never Trump Republicans that was marked by an extraordinary public feud with the US President
Dick Cheney left office as US vice president reviled by many as the man behind the Iraq war, and the lies that led to it, and as one of the architects of a programme of torture that robbed America of its moral authority.
Then, he had a second act as a figurehead of the Never Trump Republicans – a protector of the Constitution and the rule of law.
This transition was marked by an extraordinary public feud between Donald Trump and Cheney, between the head of the Republican Party and one of its elder statesmen. The party remains split, but Cheney is the past; Trump is the future.
One story about Cheney: in the first hours of 9/11, he ran the US Government from a secure bunker beneath the White House – then US president George W Bush was still reading The Pet Goat to schoolchildren in Sarasota.
A military aide approached Cheney to say that a plane was 80 miles from Washington and was not answering radio calls. So calmly, it was almost casual, Cheney told the aide to shoot down the plane.
The aide was taken aback that Cheney had answered so quickly and asked again. Cheney said: “You have my authorisation.”
The aide thought Cheney must have misunderstood and asked a third time. Cheney responded with the same unnatural calm. “I said yes.”
As US vice president, then, Cheney was a proverbial tough S-O-B – exactly the kind of “killer” in business and politics that Donald Trump said his father, Fred, had taught him to admire.
But the two men were always very different characters, one a stolid Conservative and party lifer, the other an insurgent who’d been previously registered as a Democrat. Their feud had its beginnings in the 2015 Republican primaries.
Trump blamed the Bush Jnr administration for soaking the Middle East in blood, calling the Iraq war “a big, fat mistake”.
Cheney said Trump “clearly doesn’t understand or has not spent any time learning the facts”. He accused Trump of “sounding like a liberal Democrat” but ended up holding his nose and endorsing him.
In his first term, Trump’s America First nationalism was a repudiation of what Cheney and the Republican neo-con establishment represented. Trump opposed military interventions, questioned the Nato alliance, and embraced protectionism over free trade. He wanted to get out of Afghanistan. T
To Trump’s Maga supporters, Cheney seemed like a reminder of everything the US had lost in Iraq – and there’s nothing worse in the Trump lexicon than the insult “loser”. Some 4,500 American servicemen and women were killed in Iraq, and probably more than 200,000 Iraqis. The war cost trillions of dollars. It created Isis.
Some of the most enduring images of Iraq are of hooded prisoners being tortured in Abu Ghraib. This is Cheney’s legacy, too.
A few days after 9/11, Cheney told Meet the Press: “We also have to work through, sort of, the dark side.” He became the administration’s leading advocate of torture.
The principal planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was waterboarded 183 times. He would say anything to make it stop. A Senate report found these techniques were “not effective”. They did not help find Osama bin Laden. “I signed off on it,” Cheney said in 2010. “I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation programme.” In 2014, he was asked if he’d do it again and said: “In a minute.”
The historian Arthur Schlesinger called the torture programme “the most dramatic, sustained, and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.”
Cheney might therefore seem an unlikely defender of democratic norms against a populist authoritarian. But in challenging Trump, he became American conservatism’s leading voice for the rule of law. The turning point came with Trump’s refusal to accept the result of the 2020 presidential election.
Cheney was afraid that Trump would try to use the army to maintain his grip on power. He helped organise a public letter from all ten living former US Secretaries of Defence, himself included.
Their letter, published on 3 January 2021, warned that talk of martial law would take the country into “unlawful and unconstitutional territory”. They told Trump “to accept he lost the election” and not to involve the military.
Cheney had been instrumental in getting Democrats and Republicans to unite against a Republican president. But the decisive break came three days later, on 6 January, when a crowd of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Building.
The rioters were trying to stop certification of the election, believing Trump’s groundless claims that it had been stolen.
Cheney’s daughter, Liz, was in the building, the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives. She accused Trump of deliberately summoning a violent mob. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States.”
Later, she would be one of only ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. Her father supported her.
On the first anniversary of 6 January, Cheney and Liz were the only two Republicans on the House floor for a bipartisan ceremony commemorating the attack.
They stood in the front row on the Republican side of the chamber for a moment of silence for the Capitol’s police officers, other Republicans conspicuously absent. Democrats lined up to shake Dick’s hand, underlining how isolated both Cheneys had become within their own party.
Liz was vice chair of the 6 January committee of inquiry, facing ostracism and censure from Republican colleagues.
The elder Cheney said he was “very proud of Liz… she’s doing a hell of a job”. He said his daughter would have “nothing more important” to do in her political career than making “sure Trump is never near the Oval Office again…And she will succeed.”
When Liz ran for re-election, her father recorded a campaign advert attacking Trump.
He said: “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Trump.” The following year, 2024, he even said he would vote for Democrat Kamala Harris, country more important than party.
In return, Trump frequently derided “the Cheneys” as RINOs, Republicans in Name Only. He called Liz a “warmonger of low intelligence”. She wanted to “kill people in ‘Endless Wars’ with no gain other than to defence companies”. That doubled as an attack on her father, too.
Trump has won the argument in the Republican Party over engaging in foreign wars – there is no appetite now for boots on the ground anywhere. But Trump is talking about running again in 2028, for a third term in defiance of the Constitution.
Whether the Republican leadership stands up to him will show how completely the party of Cheney has become the party of Trump.
