Dick Cheney created the ground for Trump’s excesses, despite their differences | Dick Cheney

Before Donald Trump and his Maga movement usurped that phrase, he was the embodiment of America’s first ideals.

The principle of a strong president with authority to advance the agenda was fundamental to his view of how U.S. politics should operate.

But long before his death on Tuesday, Dick Cheney had become deeply alienated from his life’s work, the Republican party, and from Trump, who single-handedly reshaped that party in his own image.

Once synonymous with right-wing Republican neoconservatism, the former vice president and his daughter Liz Cheney have so lost faith in the modern GOP and panicked at the threat she believes Trump poses that she has endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris for president in 2024.

He had previously appeared on the steps of the US Capitol with Liz (then a member of Congress and now one of Trump’s sworn enemies) on the one-year anniversary of the January 6 riot, in which Trump supporters sought to overturn the results of the presidential election. The event, at which no other Republicans were present, created the extraordinary spectacle of Democrats warmly shaking hands.

The memories will inevitably soften the image Democrats have of him. Still, critics find it difficult to reconcile the image of Cheney in his heyday.

For an entire generation, Cheney was seen as the driving force and architect behind the US invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Iraq in 2003, on the misleading grounds that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had ties to Al Qaeda.

As George W. Bush’s vice president, Cheney was a persistent propagator of both theories and showed no remorse when they were proven wrong.

Both campaigns resulted in long, bloody occupations; these invasions sparked fierce internal resistance and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis, as well as U.S. and allied service personnel. The cost on national resources was enormous.

The ability of Cheney to play such a decisive role in America’s foreign policy in the early 21st century was due to Bush’s relative inexperience in international relations, knowing that he had served as defense secretary during the reign of his father, George HW Bush; As a result, Bush gave his vice president wide – many would say unprecedented – leeway.

His influence on the second Bush administration was profound in other ways as well; It was a major impetus in the development of the “war on terror” that followed the September 11 attacks and culminated within weeks in the USA PATRIOT Act. The legislation paved the way for a range of actions designed to combat terrorism and prevent repeat attacks.

The result is a counterterrorism infrastructure that includes the now-infamous detention center at Guantánamo Bay, secret rendition flights of suspects detained abroad, and “enhanced interrogation” techniques that human rights groups and others have condemned as torture.

Cheney may not have engineered all of this, or he may not have been the sole instigator. But he was closely identified with him, to a degree exceeding that of every other administration figure except perhaps Bush himself.

The hawkish vice president, far from paying attention, exaggerated everything. He reveled in the public role he was given as the administration’s “Darth Vader,” joking that his wife, Lynn, said it “humanized” him.

Despite this dark atmosphere, the ironies of Cheney’s parting ways with Trump and today’s Republicans are many.

His forceful personality and willingness to push his own agenda in the Bush White House led to the “endless wars” that Trump later condemned and vowed his support base would avoid during his presidency.

But much of what Cheney believed and fought for paved the way for Trump’s excesses.

The USA PATRIOT Act, for example, can now be used to justify the current administration’s actions against Venezuela, whose president, Nicolas Maduro, and leading officials have been described by Trump as “narcoterrorists” potentially subject to the same lethal acts that befell Al Qaeda figures such as Osama bin Laden.

Cheney was also a proponent of appointing some of the most right-wing figures to the U.S. supreme court, including current chief justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

Cheney, who served as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff in the immediate aftermath of Watergate, was deeply critical of the limitations placed on the presidency in response to abuses that occurred under Richard Nixon, believing that it rendered the officeholder impotent in many ways.

He clamored for a more assertive executive, which he helped implement and implement during Bush’s presidency.

But under the Trump administration, that vision has expanded in ways Cheney perhaps could not have imagined; aided in part by sympathetic decisions that the current high court has played a role in shaping.

Cheney lived long enough to see his fears confirmed after the January 6 riot.

“After the rebellion… he saw the dangers of an overly powerful president,” said Robert Schmuhl, a professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame.

It seemed an odd comeback for a man who, at least during his first term at the height of Bush’s influence, had wielded more power and influence than any other vice president in U.S. history.

But that doesn’t mean a change of heart or opinion, Schmuhl said. “He really worked to strengthen the presidency, but then he realized you could only go so far and that there had to be guardrails,” he said.

“Dick Cheney was a very important figure, but he was also a hugely controversial figure, and in hindsight, the controversy overshadows the results.”