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

By MAX BOOT

Foreign Affairs
November 5, 2025

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.

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