How Cheney’s Presidential Power Push Paved the Way for Trump to Go Further

A central project in the political life of former Vice President Dick Cheney was his push to expand presidential power, and the legacy he left became groundwork for President Trump’s own aggressive efforts to concentrate and unleash executive authority.

The two men were political enemies, but in this respect, Mr. Cheney, who died on Monday, was a precursor to Mr. Trump. Both aspired to strengthen the gravitational pull of power toward the Oval Office and away from Congress and the judiciary.

In the 1970s, as a young aide in the Nixon administration, then as the White House chief of staff in the Ford administration, Mr. Cheney was dismayed as Congress passed laws to restrain executive power. Those pushing to reimpose checks were spurred by the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal, after what a historian famously described as an “imperial presidency” had grown in the first decades of the Cold War.

Mr. Cheney believed those limits were unwise. Years later, as vice president in the George W. Bush administration, he used his outsized influence to pursue an agenda of restoring presidential power to elevated levels — seeking more secrecy and latitude to override laws for national security reasons.

Today, one of those successors, Mr. Trump, has begun his own bid to consolidate power in the White House across multiple fronts, representing one of his clearest continuities with the Bush-Cheney administration.

In many other ways, Mr. Trump has transformed the Republican Party — in policy, style and character — from the organization as it existed when Bushes and Cheneys held sway.

When Mr. Trump first ran for office, Mr. Cheney criticized his call for a Muslim travel ban as un-American, and said he “sounds like a liberal Democrat,” after the candidate accused the Bush White House of lying about Iraq. By 2024, the deeply conservative Mr. Cheney endorsed the Democrats’ presidential nominee, saying there had “never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.” He added that Mr. Trump could “never be trusted with power again.”

Mr. Trump fired back, calling him the “King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars, wasting Lives and Trillions of Dollars” and an “irrelevant RINO,” or Republican in name only. He mocked Mr. Cheney’s daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney, who helped lead the House committee that investigated Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of 2020 election but lost her Wyoming seat in 2022 to a primary challenger.

After Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. granted Ms. Cheney and other committee members a pre-emptive pardon to shield them from revenge prosecutions. Since returning to office, Mr. Trump has pushed the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries, trampling over its post-Watergate norm of independence from the White House.

In September, he ousted a prosecutor who balked at indicting the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and installed his own former personal lawyer, who had no prosecutorial experience, to generate an indictment.

Mr. Trump’s norm-busting use — and, his critics say, abuse — of presidential powers, both those he inherited and others he is summoning into existence, provide a marker to assess Mr. Cheney’s nearly lifelong belief that the United States would be better off with a stronger presidency and fewer checks and balances.

After the Ford administration, Mr. Cheney won a House seat in Wyoming, the same one his daughter would later hold. He became the lead House Republican in the Iran-contra inquiry, investigating how the Reagan White House had steered funds to Nicaraguan guerrillas in defiance of a statute.

The inquiry culminated in a bipartisan majority report accusing the White House of undermining the Constitution’s “most significant check on executive power: The president can spend funds on a program only if he can convince Congress to appropriate the money.” Mr. Cheney spearheaded a minority report condemning Congress for enacting the law banning funding of the fighters, portraying it as an unconstitutional intrusion on presidential power.

His report got little attention. But in 2005, when it came to light that the Bush administration had secretly authorized warrantless wiretapping, despite a 1978 law, Mr. Cheney pointed to it as a guide to his thinking.

Mr. Cheney had greater success persuading the younger Mr. Bush to make expansive claims of his power as commander in chief than with President George H.W. Bush, who appointed him secretary of defense. In 1990, Mr. Cheney advised launching the Persian Gulf War without seeking congressional authorization. The elder Mr. Bush went to Congress anyway.

A decade later, the younger Mr. Bush took office as one of the least experienced presidents ever, while Mr. Cheney became one of the most experienced and bureaucratically savvy vice presidents in American history. Especially in Mr. Bush’s first term, Mr. Cheney wielded significant influence, which he used to pursue his agenda on executive power.

Early on, Mr. Cheney, who had run an oil services and military contracting company during Bill Clinton’s presidency, led an energy policy task force, and had the administration fight to keep secret the advice it received from energy companies. The clash went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the White House won a ruling that hollowed out a 1972 open government law, expanding the executive branch’s power to keep such talks confidential.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, many new opportunities to set precedents expanding executive power would arise.

Pushed by Mr. Cheney and his like-minded lawyer, David Addington, the administration took numerous steps in the realms of national security and foreign policy that violated statutes, relying on a theory that the commander in chief had inherent constitutional powers to override such limits.

In drafting presidential bill signing statements that asserted a constitutional right to bypass statutory restrictions, Mr. Addington repeatedly cited the unitary executive theory, a revisionist interpretation of the Constitution developed by the Reagan administration as part of its pushback to the 1970s-era resurgence of Congress.

The theory says that Congress cannot limit the president’s control of officials who wield executive power. When Mr. Trump returned to office in January, he began putting the theory into action by firing various officials in defiance of legal limits. That included a mass purge of inspectors general — watchdog officials created as another 1970s reform — and commissioners atop agencies Congress created to be independent from the White House.

Mr. Trump appears to be positioning the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority to declare the unitary executive theory valid, overturning a 90-year-old precedent and ending Congress’s power to create pockets of independent decision-making authority inside the executive branch.

The Supreme Court supermajority has generally functioned as an ally to Mr. Trump’s efforts. Its ruling last year granted presidents immunity from prosecution for crimes they may commit using official powers, and it has frequently used the emergency docket this year to relieve Mr. Trump of lower-court orders blocking his moves.

Mr. Cheney indirectly contributed to this dynamic as well, by helping lead the vetting of Mr. Bush’s Supreme Court nominees. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito were conservatives of a certain stripe: former executive branch lawyers who had spent their formative years in the 1980s dealing with disputes over presidential power.

By bringing cases to the Supreme Court, Mr. Trump is giving the justices an opportunity to fulfill the Reagan-era vision of a unitary executive. It is just one of the many ways he has continued Mr. Cheney’s quest to roll back the 1970s reform era and make the presidency more imperial.

In 2005, when Mr. Cheney told reporters to read his Iran-contra report, he also expounded on the 1970s reforms, calling them unwise, and listed other statutory constraints on presidential power that he said “will be tested at some point.”

One constraint was a 1974 law that banned impoundment — when the executive branch refuses to spend money Congress appropriated for programs the president opposes.

Mr. Trump has now frozen billions of dollars that Congress appropriated for foreign aid, infrastructure, scientific research and other programs. The moves appear to be headed toward a frontal challenge to the 1974 law, which he vowed during the campaign to have rescinded or struck down as unconstitutional.

Mr. Cheney in 2005 also mentioned the War Powers Resolution, a 1973 law requiring presidents to terminate congressionally unauthorized military deployments into hostile situations after 60 days.

In these and other steps, Mr. Trump has been emboldened not just by the Supreme Court, but by his stranglehold over the Republican Party, which controls Congress and has done little to preserve its constitutional role in making decisions Mr. Trump has usurped.

The destruction of Ms. Cheney’s political career by a primary challenger Mr. Trump endorsed was one of the highest profile of several episodes warning Republicans that challenging him is perilous.

But Mr. Trump’s approach to power is, in many ways, the fulfillment of the worldview of the Dick Cheney of a quarter-century ago. “When you’re asking about my view of the presidency, yes, I believe in a strong, robust executive authority,” Mr. Cheney said in 2005. “And I think the world we live in demands it.”