Without Dick Cheney, Donald Trump would be nowhere

For someone who was so powerful in his day, the tributes that have come after the death of former Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday at the age of 84 have been muted. Save for a perfunctory statement issued by the White House and noting that flags over government buildings should be lowered to half-staff, as of Wednesday morning President Donald Trump has said nothing in tribute — although he owes Cheney a debt of gratitude.

But as one of the most consequential politicians of his era, Cheney left a mark on American politics and government that has changed the system forever. His legacy is much more complicated than anyone would have expected when he left office in 2009 as the most unpopular vice president in American history. 

According to a New York Times/ CBS News poll, during his last year in office, Cheney’s approval rating dipped as low as 13%. The country had soured on what he and President George W. Bush had wrought, including the “War on Terror” and the Iraq war, both of which Cheney had championed, pushing the limits of presidential power from the vice president’s office. While his approval ratings would rise slightly over time, in the end Cheney remained a unique figure in American politics, unpopular on both sides of the aisle.

There was a time when this would have been unthinkable. He had been part of the Republican establishment for decades before he became vice president, having served in politics since he took a one-year fellowship in Washington, D.C., for a Wisconsin GOP congressman in 1968. The following year, he met Donald H. Rumsfeld, who had recently been appointed to helm President Richard Nixon’s anti-poverty office. Under Rumsfeld’s patronage, Cheney’s ascent to power began. By 1975, at the age of 34, he was named chief of staff to President Gerald Ford — the youngest in history.

After Ford’s defeat in 1976 by Jimmy Carter, Cheney returned to Wyoming and was elected as the state’s lone congressman for ten years, becoming a highly influential Reagan Revolutionary. In 1989, President George Bush appointed him secretary of defense, and from his perch in the Pentagon he oversaw controversial military operations in Panama and the Gulf War. Cheney left government following Bush’s defeat to Bill Clinton in 1992 to become CEO of the oil services company Halliburton until 2000, when he was called upon to help his old boss’s son, GOP nominee George W. Bush, select a vice president — and he recommended himself. 

Despite his own lack of military experience — like President Donald Trump, he had deferments throughout the Vietnam War — Cheney was an unreconstructed hawk, rarely seeing a war he didn’t want to fight. During his hiatus from government after serving as secretary of defense, he became a prominent member of the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank whose goal was “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.”

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a whole world of opportunity opened up to the claque of neoconservatives in Bush’s orbit, who had been agitating to go back into Iraq to depose its leader Saddam Hussein. Under the rubric of War on Terror, Cheney spearheaded a propaganda campaign to gain political support for attacking Iraq — which had nothing to do with 9/11 — and helped the CIA manipulate intelligence to imply that Iraq was actively producing weapons of mass destruction. We all know the results of that horrific decision. 

Uniquely for a vice president, the effects of his decisions and influence are still being felt. Cheney believed in the unitary executive theory before it became de rigueur among Republicans. He and other Reaganites believed presidents had been dangerously constrained by what they saw as an overreaction to Nixon’s criminal behavior. Cheney set out to reverse that trend, advising Bush to push the limits of executive power. 

He was an unrepentant believer in torture, and years after leaving office he continued to claim its legality, saying it should be employed as necessary. Cheney even went so far as to argue that the office of the vice president was essentially a fourth branch of government, completely immune from oversight because of its dual role as a member of the executive branch and president of the Senate, which meant that neither branch had the authority to question him. Democrats cried foul, but Republicans went along with him. The public shrugged. 

As historian Rick Perlstein, the preeminent historian of the conservative movement, has written in his forthcoming book “The Infernal Triangle: How America Got This Way,” which is expected to be published in 2026, Cheney literally believed that a president should have the power of a king. In the 1980s, Cheney was the ranking Republican on the committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal, which was essentially about the president usurping the will of Congress to pursue his own policy goals. The committee ultimately recommended that Congress make it harder for the president to break the law. Cheney, in charge of the minority report, objected to that idea.

“Chief Executives are given the responsibility for acting to respond to crises or emergencies,” his draft text read. “To the extent that the Constitution and laws are read narrowly, as Jefferson wished, the Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of prerogative that will permit him to exceed the law.”

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Based on those words, Dick Cheney should be one of Donald Trump’s favorite people — and the entire MAGA universe would be overcome with grief and praise at his passing. 

But that’s hardly the case. Beyond Trump’s lack of tribute, the paeans that have been given by Republicans have only been short and stilted. There certainly is not the widespread glory and acclaim one would normally expect for such a central figure in the Republican Party. 

We all know why Trump and MAGA aren’t shedding any tears over Cheney’s passing. Sure, Trump ran against the Iraq war in 2016, asserting that Bush and Cheney were stupid for going in, and then for not keeping the oil once they did. Trump pretended to be against all the “forever wars,” but his rhetoric was mostly in service of his image as someone who could obtain world peace simply through the “art of the deal.” 

No, the crime that cannot ever be forgiven was that Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz, a hawk as conservative as her father who became congresswoman from Wyoming and ascended into the House Republican leadership, committed political treason when they dared to stand against Trump after Jan. 6 and refuse to back down. And unlike most of their fellow Republicans, they even endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, in 2024. Nothing could be more disloyal in Trump’s eyes. 

Much of what is being written about Cheney on the occasion of his death presents him as a man of principle, someone who never wavered in his beliefs, even when it required him to buck his own party. That would be admirable if it weren’t for the fact that most of his beliefs were abominable. And it must be said: As laudable as Cheney’s rejection of Trump was, we never heard him reject the premise that has made Trump the most dangerous president in American history, someone who is on the precipice of bringing the entire American experiment in democracy down. 

The irony is that Cheney’s decades-long dream of a unitary executive has been achieved. The president is now acting with the “monarchical prerogatives” he believed was needed — and Cheney was appalled by what he is doing with them. But it shouldn’t have taken a real-life demonstration of how that could happen. After all, the country was founded by people who had already lived that experience. They had put their lives on the line to create a democratic republic, answerable to the people and not a king. 

Cheney’s legacy would have been somewhat redeemed if he had admitted that the philosophy he espoused and the work he did for decades laid the groundwork for the destruction of democracy we are witnessing. 

But he didn’t. And Donald Trump would be nowhere without him.