Within the final yr of his life, former Vice President Dick Cheney issued one in every of his ultimate public statements to defend the nation in opposition to what he mentioned was one of the harmful forces it had ever come up in opposition to — President Donald Trump.
“In our nation’s 248-year historical past, there has by no means been a person who’s a better menace to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney wrote in an endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris. “He tried to steal the final election utilizing lies and violence to maintain himself in energy after the voters had rejected him. He can by no means be trusted with energy once more.”
Cheney’s extraordinary condemnation adopted years of comparable warnings about Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol assault, for which Cheney blamed Trump. The previous vp escorted his daughter, U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, via the Capitol in 2022 as she led an inquiry into Trump’s actions that day. And he stood by her as she confronted a Trump-endorsed major problem and calls by Trump for her to be jailed and even face a firing squad.
“He’s a coward,” Dick Cheney mentioned of Trump. “An actual man wouldn’t deceive his supporters. He misplaced his election, and he misplaced huge. I do know it. He is aware of it, and deep down, I feel most Republicans know.”
Dick Cheney died Tuesday on the age of 84, taking place in historical past as one of the highly effective vice presidents in American historical past, in addition to one so reviled that he, together with former President George Bush, gave rise to Trump’s “America First” motion contained in the GOP within the first place. For the entire unhealthy blood between Trumps and Cheneys, it’s one of many nice political ironies that there would doubtless be no President Donald Trump with out Vice President Dick Cheney within the first place.
It’s straightforward to neglect now, however when Trump launched his White Home bid in 2015 at Trump Tower in New York Metropolis, he was getting right into a GOP subject the place Jeb Bush, Bush’s brother, was the early front-runner.
However as Trump campaigned across the nation, he bought his greatest applause when he promised GOP voters he would cease getting the nation into “endlessly wars” like those Bush and Cheney started in Iraq and Afghanistan after the terrorist assaults on Sept. 11, 2001. As an alternative, Trump promised to “put America first.”
“The very last thing we want is one other Bush,” he instructed a rally in South Carolina.
At a debate days later, he mentioned it once more. “The struggle in Iraq was a giant, fats mistake,” Trump mentioned. “We spent $2 trillion, hundreds of lives, Iran is taking up. … George Bush made a mistake. We are able to make errors, however that was a magnificence.”
Jeb Bush responded by defending his brother and attempting to disregard Trump, finally calling him solely, “the entrance operating candidate” as polls confirmed Trump overtaking him. Jeb misplaced the South Carolina major by a mile and have become the primary, however not the final, to study in regards to the perils of soft-pedaling criticism of Trump in an try and be the larger man. Dick Cheney by no means made that mistake.
By the point Cheney died this week, the lifelong Republican had survived 5 coronary heart assaults, a coronary heart transplant and many years in public workplace and public service. Earlier than changing into Bush’s vp, Cheney had additionally served as a congressman from Wyoming, White Home chief of employees beneath President Gerald Ford and because the secretary of protection to President George H.W. Bush.
Throughout these years, he was as polarizing as he was influential. Cheney was so despised by Democrats throughout his time within the White Home that they typically referred to as him “Darth Vader.” However he was additionally identified by his mates and employees as fiercely loyal and terrifically humorous.
When he spoke to a Republican group in Georgia in 2008, he joked that former U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss was “a brave man.”
“I do know that as a result of he’s one in every of my searching buddies,” Cheney mentioned, referring to the searching accident two years earlier when Cheney by chance shot a unique searching buddy within the face.
All of those years later, the imaginative and prescient that Cheney had for the world as vp, with American democracy taking root across the globe, has been largely undone by Trump, if it was ever profitable in any respect. The Republican Occasion he helped strengthen has been taken over by Trump. The Washington institution he mastered now not exists.
However Trump by no means, ever let up. Campaigning in 2024, with Cheney lengthy retired and residing in Wyoming, Trump bashed him and his daughter on the path from Michigan to Macon. Regardless of the Cheneys stood for, Trump was nonetheless operating in opposition to.
However you had the sense that on the finish of his life, Dick Cheney died a proud man, beloved by his household and nonetheless standing up for what he thought was proper for the nation, it doesn’t matter what.
Just a few years earlier than he died, he was requested by a journalist how he needed to be remembered. “As anyone who didn’t spend lots of time apprehensive about his public standing,” he mentioned.
Sitting subsequent to him was Liz Cheney, who added, “I really feel assured that he will likely be remembered as a person of super braveness and somebody who did what he knew was proper, even when it was powerful and even when individuals had been criticizing him for it, and we love him for that.”
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