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 have been muted Save for a perfunctory report issued by the White House and noting that flags over establishment buildings should be lowered to half-staff as of Wednesday morning President Donald Trump has noted nothing in tribute although he owes Cheney a debt of gratitude But as one of the majority of consequential politicians of his era Cheney left a mark on American politics and authorities that has changed the system forever His legacy is much more complicated than anyone would have expected when he left office in as the bulk 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 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 Related MAGA has consigned the Reagan Revolution to the ash-heap of history 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 The following year he met Donald H Rumsfeld who had just now been appointed to helm President Richard Nixon s anti-poverty office Under Rumsfeld s patronage Cheney s ascent to power began By at the age of he was named chief of staff to President Gerald Ford the youngest in history After Ford s defeat in 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 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 authorities following Bush s defeat to Bill Clinton in to become CEO of the oil services company Halliburton until 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 establishment 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 program of military strength and moral clarity After the 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 sponsorship for attacking Iraq which had nothing to do with 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 considered in the unitary executive theory before it became de rigueur among Republicans Uniquely for a vice president the effects of his decisions and influence are still being felt Cheney thought in the unitary executive theory before it became de rigueur among Republicans He and other Reaganites supposed 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 leadership utterly 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 inhabitants 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 Cheney literally assumed that a president should have the power of a king In the s Cheney was the ranking Republican on the committee analyzing the Iran-Contra controversy which was essentially about the president usurping the will of Congress to pursue his own procedures goals The committee ultimately recommended that Congress make it harder for the president to break the law Cheney in charge of the minority record 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 Want more sharp takes on politics Sign up for our free newsletter Standing Room Only written by Amanda Marcotte now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts 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 circumstance 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 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 arrangement of his image as someone who could obtain world peace exclusively 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 and refuse to back down And unlike the majority of their fellow Republicans they even endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris a Democrat in Nothing could be more disloyal in Trump s eyes We need your help to stay independent Subscribe at present to promotion Heather Digby Parton s commentary 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 bulk of his beliefs were abominable And it must be commented As laudable as Cheney s rejection of Trump was we never heard him reject the premise that has made Trump the preponderance 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 presumed 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 Read more about this topic In Latin America Trump signals war in all but name History shows that Trump s Venezuela campaign will be disastrous Trump aims for one-party rule and puts despotism at our doorstep The post Without Dick Cheney Donald Trump would be nowhere appeared first on Salon com
