In the Trump Era, Cheney’s Brand of Conservatism Became Obsolete

When George W. Bush asked Dick Cheney to be his running mate in the summer of 2000, Mr. Cheney warned that his voting record was well to the right of Mr. Bush’s presidential campaign platform. The candidate waved him off, causing Mr. Cheney, as he recalled in his memoir, to be more emphatic: “No, I mean really conservative.”

Mr. Bush selected him anyway. Over the next eight years, the vice president came to be viewed by critics as a caricature of right-wing ideology, almost comically strident and coldblooded. They dubbed him Darth Vader, a moniker Mr. Cheney appeared to relish.

But by the standards of the Trump-era Republican Party, Mr. Cheney, who passed away on Monday at the age of 84, more closely resembles — to some political veterans, at least — a crusty and taciturn version of Obi-Wan Kenobi than a lord of darkness.

“Look, Dick Cheney and I disagreed on just about everything,” said Tom Daschle, a liberal South Dakota Democrat who served as the Senate majority leader during the first term of the Bush administration. “But he had character and honest convictions. He was a traditional conservative. I’m amazed at the number of Democrats who tell me they’d give anything to see Cheney and Bush back in office.”

Such sentiments are more a reflection of the Democratic Party’s antipathy for MAGA Republicanism than nostalgia for Mr. Cheney. During his vice presidency, he championed extreme measures in the name of national security, including spying on Americans, transferring terror suspects to foreign countries where they were certain to be tortured, and approving brutal interrogation methods by which U.S. captors could extract intelligence.

Mr. Cheney’s my-way-or-the-highway certitude reached a fateful apogee when he declared in a speech on Aug. 26, 2002, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”

Mr. Cheney never walked back that erroneous statement. To his final days, he remained unwavering in his belief that the war in Iraq was a just one. Still, Mr. Daschle and other prominent political figures have come to see Mr. Cheney in a comparatively favorable light — a reappraisal not only of him but of what conservatism has become.

They recall him as partisan, but not above working and even socializing with the opposition party. Advocate of executive authority though he was, Mr. Cheney was himself a former legislator who appreciated Congress’s stature as an independent body.

To someone who had never heard of Mr. Cheney, his dramatic political arc — from the youngest-ever White House chief of staff during the Ford administration to the most powerful vice president in American history to a Republican outcast — might signify a man undone by a tragic flaw or radical midlife transformation.

But neither applied to Mr. Cheney.

“He started out as a rising star in Republican politics,” said William Kristol, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle. “And he ended up denouncing President Trump. And he remained pretty much the same person throughout it all. It was his party and conservatism that changed.”

No one ever accused Mr. Cheney of being a starry-eyed idealist. On lofty Bush administration domestic priorities like education reform, stem cell funding and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, the man code-named Back Seat by the Secret Service was at best a cameo actor. His interests, as a former chief executive of the oil giant Halliburton, ran more to energy deregulation and tax cuts. In both cases, Mr. Cheney played a leading role in achieving the president’s goals.

His foreign policy views were also sharply defined, and reflected his dark view of the world. “Cheney favored the muscular exercise of American power in the pursuit of national interests,” said Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a center-right foreign policy think tank. Mr. Fontaine differentiated Mr. Cheney’s realpolitik view from that of “the so-called neocons, who supported using that power to expand democracy abroad.”

Mr. Cheney had long been a proponent of deposing Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, going back to his time as the secretary of defense during George H.W. Bush’s presidency. Entering the second Bush administration, the vice president could see that the younger Bush had little appetite for regime change in Iraq.

When that began to change after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Cheney became the single most forceful protagonist in the push to a war that ultimately cost more than 4,000 American lives, in addition to an estimated half a million Iraqi civilian casualties.

Even so, he kept to a narrow argument: Mr. Hussein, the vice president maintained, was a threat to the United States. Mr. Cheney seldom advanced the neoconservative view that a post-Saddam Iraq could cause democracy to flourish in the Middle East, as Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, often did. Nor was he animated by the threat Iraq posed to Israel, and some other senior Bush officials were.

Mr. Cheney’s justification for war was that the Iraqi regime illegally possessed weapons of mass destruction and fully intended to use them. He buttressed this assertion with the reams of intelligence — much of it raw, fanciful and poorly substantiated — that his staff had gathered from disparate sources.

“He was an amazing consumer of intelligence,” recalled Eric S. Edelman, Mr. Cheney’s principal deputy assistant for national security affairs. “And perhaps to his own detriment, because a lot of it turned out not to be accurate.”

Mr. Salter added that his former boss, who had endured years of torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, clashed fiercely with Mr. Cheney over the administration’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques on detainees suspected of terrorism.

“But McCain knew where Cheney was coming from,” Mr. Salter said. “It was, ‘We’re facing a mortal threat, and we have to get information however we can.’ Whereas whenever President Trump would talk about randomly waterboarding someone, McCain would immediately say, ‘Uh, no. We’re not doing that.’”

It is fair to say that no one would have dreamed of branding Mr. Cheney a RINO—Republican in name only — during his nearly four decades in government. “He was a hardheaded conservative of the kind we used to have,” said Mr. Kristol. “Back then, that meant being a free-market guy who was skeptical of government. But it was also compatible with being a free trader, supporting NATO expansion and believing that America had a leadership role in the world.”

Over time, however, Mr. Cheney found it impossible to square his party allegiances with the behavior of Mr. Trump, who “tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,” as the former vice president stated in typically blunt fashion in September 2024.

Mr. Cheney declared his intention to vote for Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. As with his daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney, Mr. Cheney’s break from the Republican Party seemed as decisive as it was astonishing.

Unlike Ms. Cheney, the father neither publicly campaigned for Ms. Harris nor formally changed his party affiliation. Both omissions were in keeping with Mr. Cheney’s back-seat nature. “He cared less about showing off than just about any politician I’ve ever met,” said Mr. Daschle.

Mr. Edelman, the former senior staff member to the vice president who later served as Mr. Bush’s ambassador to Turkey, recalled a photo of Mr. Cheney on the morning of Sept. 11 sitting in the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center moments after Secret Service agents had deposited him in the bunker. Next to him was a copy of The Economist.

“He’d grabbed the magazine before the Secret Service grabbed him,” said Mr. Edelman, “so that he would have something to read in the PEOC if there was any idle time.”