By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

How Dick Cheney Became the Accidental Architect of Trump’s Power

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died on November 3 at age 84, enjoyed some unexpected respect in his last years from Democrats who once viewed him as a Machiavellian warmonger. This was because, following the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Cheney became an outspoken critic of Donald Trump.

In 2022, when his daughter Liz Cheney was running for reelection as a Republican member of Congress from Wyoming, the former vice president appeared in a commercial for her and said, “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.” (Liz Cheney lost to a Trump-backed challenger.) Then, in 2024, both Dick and Liz Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris for president. “As citizens,” Dick Cheney said in a statement, “we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.”

After a lifetime as a Republican official in both elected and appointed office, Cheney’s willingness to break with his own party was commendable and unusual; his former boss, George W. Bush, did not endorse Harris or publicly criticize Trump. Cheney knew that he was inviting abuse from Trump (who called him “the King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars”), but unlike many other Republicans, he didn’t care. He was determined to do what he thought was right, regardless of the consequences.

There was, however, something ironic about Cheney’s late-in-life emergence as a Never Trumper, because, in many ways, the policies he had pursued during his own distinguished career helped pave the way not only for Trump’s rise but also for Trump’s exertion of unprecedented executive power. It was not what Cheney intended, but it is what happened. Indeed, to understand the present political moment, it is imperative to unravel Cheney’s complicated historical legacy and how he developed his own mania for expanding presidential power.

 

Boxed In

In the 1970s, Cheney, along with many other Republicans at the time, lamented efforts by Congress to rein in the “imperial presidency” after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The nation was just learning about the FBI spying on the civil rights and antiwar movements, as well as the CIA’s attempts to assassinate or overthrow various foreign heads of state, and those abuses led to a congressional backlash.

Cheney was in the center of these debates over executive power. Beginning in 1969, he held a series of increasingly powerful executive branch jobs arranged by his mentor Donald Rumsfeld. When Rumsfeld became White House chief of staff in 1974, he took Cheney along as deputy chief of staff. The following year, Rumsfeld became secretary of defense, and Cheney became, at 34, the youngest White House chief of staff in history. Gerald Ford lost reelection in 1976, but Cheney returned to Washington two years later, as the lone House representative from his home state of Wyoming.

Throughout this decade, as Cheney’s political views were being shaped, Congress was passing a series of laws that restricted the executive branch: the 1973 Case-Church Amendment forbade the executive branch from supporting South Vietnam militarily; the 1973 War Powers Act forbade the president from launching wars without congressional authorization; the 1974 Impoundment Control Act forbade the president from refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress; the 1974 Hughes-Ryan Amendment forbade the executive branch from carrying out covert actions without notification to Congress; the 1976 National Emergencies Act and the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (WorldEconomy.html) forbade the president from declaring national emergencies without congressional consent; and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act forbade the executive branch from engaging in domestic surveillance without judicial oversight. As president, Jimmy Carter went on to impose additional limits on presidential power, both stylistically and substantively. His CIA director, Stansfield Turner, outraged national security conservatives such as Cheney when he cashiered many of the CIA’s clandestine operators in what became known as the Halloween Massacre of 1977.

Cheney and many other Republicans saw these moves as a reckless assault on the president’s ability to defend the country, and they found confirmation in all the humiliations that the United States suffered in those years, from the fall of Vietnam and the Mayaguez incident in 1975 to the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Cheney would spend the rest of his career trying to expand presidential authority.

By the end of the 1980s, Cheney rose to become House minority whip (the number two leadership post), and he, not Newt Gingrich, might have become the first Republican Speaker of the House in many decades had not John Tower’s nomination for secretary of defense failed to win Senate approval in 1989. President George H. W. Bush then asked Cheney to take the job instead, and he did, orchestrating two successful military operations—the overthrow of Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989 and the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991—followed by a post–Cold War military drawdown.

Cheney’s successful tenure as defense secretary confirmed his reputation as a competent, low-key public servant and brought him into the Bush family orbit. In 2000, he was advising the former president’s son on his selection of a presidential running mate when George W. Bush asked him to take the post himself. Cheney was seen as offering the kind of Washington experience and gravitas that the younger Bush—who was coming from the Texas governor’s mansion—lacked. Once the conservative Supreme Court halted the Florida recount and handed the election to the Republican ticket, Cheney became arguably the most powerful vice president in history.

 

The Backlash

Cheney used his influence to push through an agenda that shocked colleagues from the Ford and George H. W. Bush administrations who thought of him as a prudent and cautious pragmatist. Following the 9/11 attacks—when he directed the White House response because the president was traveling—Cheney advocated for invasions of Afghanistan first and then, more controversially, Iraq. In the latter case, he greatly inflated the threat from Saddam Hussein, telling the Veterans of Foreign Wars in 2002: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”

There is no reason to think that Cheney was deliberately lying, but there is also no doubt that he was interpreting contradictory and inconclusive intelligence reporting in the most alarmist light possible. Thus, Cheney helped lead the United States into what became known as a “forever war.” While the public initially backed the invasion, popular support quickly waned when no weapons of mass destruction were discovered and U.S. troops became embroiled in a costly counterinsurgency campaign against shadowy guerrillas, both Sunni and Shiite.

The world was shocked to see how ill-prepared the United States was for the war’s aftermath—especially given how experienced so many senior administration officials were, from Cheney on down. It undercut the assumption that extensive government experience was a necessary prerequisite for holding the nation’s highest office and, combined with other Bush administration failures, from the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to the financial crash in 2007, gave rise to anti-Washington populism on both the left and the right.

This backlash against the war in Iraq (which Cheney championed) and the establishment (which he personified) helped elect, first, the freshman senator Barack Obama, and then, eight years later, the real estate developer Donald Trump, who had never held a government position in his life. Trump had initially supported the invasion—contrary to his subsequent claims of having been an opponent from the start—but his eventual willingness to denounce the war resonated with voters, especially when his leading primary opponent was the brother of the president who had ordered the invasion in the first place.

Cheney shaking hands with a U.S. service member at an air base in Baghdad, March 2008

Besides being an influential supporter of the Iraq invasion, Cheney was also the leading architect of the “war on terror.” Five days after the September 11 attacks, he said that the U.S. government would have to respond on the “dark side,” using “any means at our disposal.” The programs he championed included giving the National Security Agency the authority to engage in warrantless wiretapping of Americans communicating with foreigners; opening CIA “black sites” and an offshore prison in Guantánamo Bay to hold detainees indefinitely without trial and without any of the protections offered by the Geneva Conventions; and even torturing detainees by employing what were euphemistically known as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Lawmakers and judges eventually reined in the Bush administration: Congress outlawed “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of detainees, and the Supreme Court held that even detainees deemed “enemy combatants” had the right to petition the courts for their release. But by then the damage had been done: America was increasingly seen as a lawless superpower engaging in human rights abuse such as the ones uncovered at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Cheney’s popular image took a dark turn. Many of his former colleagues thought that he had been radicalized by the 9/11 attacks; even the elder Bush said that he “became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with.” But Cheney remained unrepentant, pointing to the lack of further terrorist attacks on the scale of 9/11 as vindication of his hard-line approach. He also insisted that his views were consistent. In 2005, while defending warrantless wiretaps of Americans, Cheney explained to reporters his expansive views of presidential power: “I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of presidential power and authority, that it’s reflected in a number of developments. . . . A lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both in the ’70s, served to erode the authority. . . . I believe in a strong, robust executive authority. And I think the world we live in demands it.”

Cheney’s views on the need for strong presidential power were shared by John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who were both nominated to the Supreme Court during the Bush administration with his strong support. They were two of the conservative justices who voted, in the 2023 case Trump v. United States, to give the president virtually unlimited immunity from criminal prosecution in carrying out his “official” duties. That ruling has, no doubt, emboldened Trump as he expands his power from an imperial presidency to an authoritarian presidency.

 

Gop Generations

Cheney rightly came to decry Trump’s abuses of power, but many of Trump’s actions grew out of a contempt for congressional, media, and judicial oversight that was fostered by Cheney and other “normal” Republicans of his generation. Trump, for example, is making a mockery of the Impoundment Control Act by refusing to spend congressionally appropriated funds on the National Institutes of Health, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Head Start, and other priorities that are not favored by the MAGA movement. Trump even closed down the congressionally authorized U.S. Agency for International Development by executive order. Cheney never supported the Impoundment Control Act in the first place.

Trump is also ignoring the War Powers Act by ordering the U.S. military to sink suspected drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific without any authorization from Congress. The administration has offered an unconvincing explanation of why the War Powers Act does not apply to the boat attacks—unconvincing, that is, to anyone who believes that the legislation serves as an important safeguard on the president’s war-making authority. Cheney always argued that the act was an improper and unconstitutional “infringement on the authority of the presidency.”

And Trump is taking advantage of the “unitary executive theory” that Cheney championed—the belief that the president should have unlimited authority over all aspects of the executive branch—to try to fire officials of independent federal agencies, such as the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Reserve, and to order the Justice Department to indict his political foes. Cheney promoted “executive privilege” in order to give the president wide latitude to make difficult national security decisions, but Trump’s actions are taking it a step further and wiping away any internal checks on the president’s exercise of power. Now the courts are the last line of defense of the constitutional order.

It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Cheney was a proto-Trumpist or that his career led directly to Trump’s rise. Many of the actions that Trump is taking run contrary to what Cheney and other Republicans of his day believed. Trump, for example, has repudiated the party’s long-standing support for free trade and legal immigration while engaging in efforts to repress dissent and to punish political foes that exceed even those of the Nixon era. Whatever else he was, Cheney was no foe of democracy, even if he ran roughshod over some of its procedural safeguards in the name of national security. The only time he deployed the armed forces domestically—during the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles—was in response to a genuine emergency and at the request of California’s governor. He certainly was not plotting to send the National Guard to Democrat-run cities, as Trump is now doing. Cheney was a patriot and a technocrat, not a demagogue. He was not hell-bent on seizing power or gaining attention for himself; he always gave the impression that he saw government service as an important, if onerous, duty, not as an exercise in ego aggrandizement.

But this merely confirms the experience of the post–World War II epoch: each generation of Republicans turns out to be more radical than the last. Ronald Reagan was more right-wing than Richard Nixon, and Trump is more right-wing than Reagan. By the 1980s, Barry Goldwater, once the avatar of the Republican far right, was seen as a libertarian critic of the party’s social conservatism. So, too, Cheney, who in a previous generation served as a champion of the hard right, ended up as a symbol of resistance to the MAGA movement. But even if Cheney never intended to give rise to the Trump movement, many of its actions are rooted in his legacy.

It is, therefore, time for principled conservatives to rethink Cheney’s devotion to untrammeled executive authority, now that they have seen where that passion has led. Instead of plotting how to expand presidential power, constitutional conservatives should be discussing how to resurrect the checks and balances that are being eroded or ignored by the Trump administration.

 

 

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