Dick Cheney’s last public act was to fight Donald Trump

In the last year of his life, former Vice President Dick Cheney issued one of his final public statements to defend the country against what he said was one of the most dangerous forces it had ever come up against — President Donald Trump.

“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney wrote in an endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.”

Cheney’s extraordinary condemnation followed years of similar warnings about Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack, for which Cheney blamed Trump. The former vice president escorted his daughter, U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, through the Capitol in 2022 as she led an inquiry into Trump’s actions that day. And he stood by her as she faced a Trump-endorsed primary challenge and calls by Trump for her to be jailed or even face a firing squad.

“He is a coward,” Dick Cheney said of Trump. “A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big. I know it. He knows it, and deep down, I think most Republicans know.”

Dick Cheney died Tuesday at the age of 84, going down in history as one of the most powerful vice presidents in American history, as well as one so reviled that he, along with former President George Bush, gave rise to Trump’s “America First” movement inside the GOP in the first place. For all of the bad blood between Trumps and Cheneys, it’s one of the great political ironies that there would likely be no President Donald Trump without Vice President Dick Cheney in the first place.

It’s easy to forget now, but when Trump launched his White House bid in 2015 at Trump Tower in New York City, he was getting into a GOP field where Jeb Bush, Bush’s brother, was the early front-runner.

But as Trump campaigned around the country, he got his biggest applause when he promised GOP voters he would stop getting the country into “forever wars” like the ones Bush and Cheney began in Iraq and Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Instead, Trump promised to “put America first.”

“The last thing we need is another Bush,” he told a rally in South Carolina.

At a debate days later, he said it again. “The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake,” Trump said. “We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, Iran is taking over. … George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that was a beauty.”

Jeb Bush responded by defending his brother and trying to ignore Trump, eventually calling him only, “the front running candidate” as polls showed Trump overtaking him. Jeb lost the South Carolina primary by a mile and became the first, but not the last, to learn about the perils of soft-pedaling criticism of Trump in an attempt to be the bigger man. Dick Cheney never made that mistake.

By the time Cheney died this week, the lifelong Republican had survived five heart attacks, a heart transplant and decades in public office and public service. Before becoming Bush’s vice president, Cheney had also served as a congressman from Wyoming, White House chief of staff under President Gerald Ford, and as the secretary of defense to President George H.W. Bush.

During those years, he was as polarizing as he was influential. Cheney was so despised by Democrats during his time in the White House that they often called him “Darth Vader.” But he was also known by his friends and staff as fiercely loyal and terrifically funny.

When he spoke to a Republican group in Georgia in 2008, he joked that former U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss was “a courageous man.”

“I know that because he’s one of my hunting buddies,” Cheney said, referring to the hunting accident two years earlier when Cheney accidentally shot a different hunting buddy in the face.

All of these years later, the vision that Cheney had for the world as vice president, with American democracy taking root around the globe, has been largely undone by Trump, if it was ever successful at all. The Republican Party he helped strengthen has been taken over by Trump. The Washington establishment he mastered no longer exists.

But Trump never, ever let up. Campaigning in 2024, with Cheney long retired and living in Wyoming, Trump bashed him and his daughter on the trail from Michigan to Macon. Whatever the Cheneys stood for, Trump was still running against.

But you had the sense that at the end of his life, Dick Cheney died a proud man, beloved by his family and still standing up for what he thought was right for the country, no matter what.