Copyright New York Magazine
Of all the gobsmacking developments of the Donald Trump era of American politics, perhaps none was as astonishing to those with some historical perspective as this moment in September 2024, as reported by CNN: Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Friday that he will vote for Democrat Kamala Harris over fellow Republican Donald Trump in the November election, warning that the former president “can never be trusted with power again.” “In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a statement. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.” Cheney, who died on Monday at the age of 84, was — for the Democrats who were active in politics early in the 21st century — the epitome of the scary, extremist Republican seeking to build an imperial presidency and a surveillance state amid the wreckage of prior national and international norms. Yes, from a very limited perspective, the former veep was the father of Liz Cheney, the politician who defined Never Trump Republicanism after her objections to the attempted insurrection of January 6 got her ejected from the House GOP leadership and then from Congress. So Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Harris may have simply represented a paternal reinforcement of the daughter’s prominent role in the Democratic campaign to keep Trump from reentering the White House. But Cheney wasn’t just a doting dad or an over-the-hill politician. He was a titanic figure in the pre-Trump GOP, particularly among those who understood his extraordinary influence during four Republican presidencies. He became Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff at the age of 33. After Ford left office, he was elected to the U.S. House from Wyoming and immediately became the conservative conscience of House Republicans during the Reagan years, devoted particularly to the destruction of the “Vietnam Syndrome” that restrained national and presidential power. As George H.W. Bush’s secretary of Defense, Cheney supervised what was at the time considered the greatest U.S. military triumph since World War II, the Persian Gulf War. And then he became by all accounts the most powerful vice-president in American history as the man George W. Bush deferred to in all foreign-policy matters after September 11. Cheney never considered running for president, probably because of his shaky health and because he became one of the most unpopular figures in the country as the Iraq War he engineered turned into a disastrous occupation. But there was no particular reason to believe he mellowed after leaving office. In 2015, he popped up to accuse Barack Obama of a near-treasonous abandonment of America’s global interests. And even after Trump repudiated the Bush-Cheney-McCain-Romney brand of conservative Republicanism en route to the White House, Cheney would now and then go public in defense of one of the most important areas of agreement he had with the new regime: support for torture as an interrogation method. But for Cheney, as for the 41st president he served and sometimes seemed to displace, January 6 really was the point of no return, a sin against the constitutional order that even the would-be imperial presidents of the past would never have countenanced. Trump making subscription to his lies about the 2020 election a litmus test for the GOP made it personal for Cheney, as reflected by his comments in an ad for his daughter as MAGA devotees drove her from office in a 2022 primary. “He’s a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost it big. I know it, he knows, and deep down, I think most Republicans know it,” Dick Cheney said. So the devil we thought we knew, the man whose saturnine image chilled many a liberal heart during his years in power, pointed at this new devil and suggested new depths of power-hungry mendacity were coming into sight. Perhaps Dick Cheney knowingly lied about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the U.S. invasion in 2003, or perhaps he was self-deluded. And maybe Cheney and George W. Bush swept into office in an election even more disputed than that of 2020. But they relied on the U.S. Supreme Court to consummate their victory, not a mob invading the U.S. Capitol. And yes, we now know, Republican extremism as we have known it can become far worse.
