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    Liz Cheney wanted to follow her father’s legacy. Instead, Trump ended her career

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    Weeks before one of America’s best-known businessmen, Donald Trump, was sworn in as president on an overcast day in Washington DC, a different politician with a similarly familiar name took her oath of office elsewhere in the Capitol.Liz Cheney was then both a freshman congresswoman from Wyoming and a stalwart of the neoconservative philosophy espoused by her father Dick Cheney, the former vice-president under George W Bush who died on Monday. Trump had repudiated Bush’s invasion of Iraq in his campaign for president, but the congresswoman nonetheless went on to become an ally in bending Republican lawmakers to his will.It was only after the January 6 insurrection that Cheney broke with Trump, making what turned out to be a lonely stand against his dominance of Republicans that wound up ending her political career. The then-former president orchestrated her ouster, first from Republican leadership, then from the House of Representatives entirely. Liberals would lionize Cheney for her defiance as an emblem of the “good Republicans” they long hoped would one day expel Trump from the party, even though she never broke with her conservative Republican politics.The Cheneys’ view of American power may now seem farther from relevance than at any time since Bush left office, but signs of it linger in Trump’s new administration. Though he promised to be a peacemaker while campaigning for re-election last year, the president has ordered the first-ever US bombing raid on Iran, blown up boats he claims are carrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela and ordered a formidable naval flotilla to the South American country’s coastline, while mulling airstrikes on its territory.“Many of the people who are around him actually were in favor of the Iraq war, and I think with that influence, he’s being influenced towards regime change war in Venezuela,” the Republican senator Rand Paul told reporters last week.Liz Cheney is certainly excluded from that group. Rising to chair the House Republican conference just after winning her second term in office, Cheney’s time in leadership was brief. After a mob of pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol, she became the highest-ranking Republican to break with the president.“The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president,” Cheney said, as she voted to impeach Trump over the violence.She would go on to serve as vice-chair, and one of two Republicans, on the House committee that investigated the attack. But her political fate was sealed. House Republicans voted to strip her from her leadership post in May 2021, and she lost her primary the following year, in both cases to lawmakers that have hewed closely to the president’s positions.Through it all, Cheney remained a conservative in the tradition of her father. As recently as 2021, she joined him in defending waterboarding, the brutal interrogation technique Bush’s CIA used against terrorism suspects, and restated her opposition to abortion and the Affordable Care Act. When Joe Biden’s priorities came up before the House, she mostly voted against them.None of that was enough to stave off Trump’s wrath. As Republicans moved to depose her from leadership, she took to the House floor to call the former president “a threat America has never seen before”.“He risks inciting further violence. Millions of Americans have been misled by the former president. They have heard only his words, but not the truth as he continues to undermine our democratic process, sowing seeds of doubt about whether democracy really works at all,” she said.Nor did her father hold his tongue.“He is a coward. 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,” the former vice-president said of Trump in a television ad for his daughter’s failed bid for a fourth term in 2022.Both Cheneys would go on to endorse and, in Liz’s case, campaign with, Kamala Harris last year. Trump in turn blasted Dick Cheney as “an irrelevant RINO” or Republican in name only, and “the King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars”. Biden later awarded Liz Cheney the Presidential Citizens Medal and, in his final hours as president, issued her a pre-emptive pardon after Trump threatened her prosecution.When the president this year ordered seven B-2 bombers to fly more than 14,000 miles from Missouri to attack Iran’s nuclear sites, John Bolton, a neoconservative veteran of both the Bush and Trump administrations who has since become a bitter enemy of the president, praised him for taking a course of action he had advocated for decades.“I can say unequivocally, I think President Trump made the right decision for America in attacking the Iranian nuclear program,” he told Bloomberg Surveillance. “We could have done it in the first term, too.”Cheney, by contrast, remained silent. More

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      Dick Cheney created the ground for Trump’s excesses, despite their differences

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      He was the embodiment of America-first ideals before Donald Trump and his Maga movement hijacked the phrase.The principle of a strong president empowered to push through the agenda was core to his view of how US politics should function.Yet long before his death on Tuesday, Dick Cheney was deeply estranged from the Republican party that had been his life’s work and the person, Trump himself, who had single-handedly reshaped it in his own image.Along with his daughter, Liz Cheney, the former vice-president who was once synonymous with rightwing Republican neo-conservatism – became so disenchanted with the modern GOP and alarmed by the threat he believed Trump posed, that he endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris for president in 2024.He had earlier appeared with Liz (then a member of Congress and now one of Trump’s sworn enemies) on the steps of the US Capitol on the first anniversary of the January 6 riot by Trump supporters trying to overturn the results of the presidential election. The occasion, at which no other Republicans were present, produced the remarkable spectacle of Democrats warmly shaking his hand.The memories will inevitably soften the image Democrats are apt to have of him. Yet they are hard to reconcile with the picture his legions of critics held of Cheney in his prime.For an entire generation, Cheney was viewed unambiguously – and not inaccurately – as the driving force and architect behind the US invasions of Afghanistan following the September 11 terror attacks, and in 2003, of Iraq, on the fallacious grounds that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destructions and had ties to al-Qaida.As vice-president to George W Bush, Cheney was an emphatic propagator of both theories – and unapologetic when they were proved wrong.Both campaigns resulted in long, bloody occupations, that spawned bitter internal resistance, and cost hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi lives – as well as those of US and allied service personnel. The cost in national resources was immense.That Cheney was able to play such a defining role in America’s early 21st century foreign policy was down to the relative inexperience in international affairs of Bush, who consequently gave his vice-president broad – many said unprecedented – latitude, knowing that he had served as defense secretary under his father, George HW Bush.His influence in the second Bush administration was profound in other ways, being a key driving force to its unfolding “war on terror” that followed the 9/11 attacks and resulted, within weeks, in the USA Patriot Act. The legislation paved the way for a whole panoply of actions designed to counteract terrorism and prevent repeat attacks.The result was an anti-terrorism infrastructure that included the now notorious detention centre at Guantánamo Bay, secret rendition flights of suspects detained overseas, and “enhanced interrogation” techniques that human rights groups and others denounced as torture.Cheney may not have designed all of it – or been the sole instigator. But he was closely identified with it in a way that exceeded any other administration figure, barring perhaps Bush himself.Far from minding, the hawkish vice-president lapped it all up. He relished his publicly assigned role of being the administration’s “Darth Vader”, joking that his wife, Lynn, said it “humanized” him.Against that dark aura, the ironies of Cheney’s parting of ways with Trump and modern day Republicans are numerous.His forceful personality and willingness to push his own agenda in the Bush White House brought about the “forever wars” that Trump later denounced and promised his support base would be avoided under his presidency.Yet so much of what Cheney believed and fought for created the ground for Trump’s excesses.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe USA Patriot Act, for instance, may be now be used to justify the current administration’s actions against Venezuela, whose president, Nicolás Maduro, and leading officials have been designated by Trump as “narco-terrorists” potentially subject to the same lethal actions that befell al-Qaida figures like Osama bin Laden.Cheney was also an advocate of appointing some of the most rightwing figures to the US supreme court, including the current chief justice, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito.As chief-of-staff to Gerald Ford in the immediate aftermath of Watergate, Cheney became deeply critical of the limitations placed on the presidency in reactions to the abuses that had occurred under Richard Nixon, believing it rendered the office holder impotent in many ways.He clamored for a more assertive executive, which he helped to implement – and exercise – during Bush’s presidency.Yet under Trump that vision has expanded in ways that Cheney could perhaps not imagine, helped in part by sympathetic rulings from the current supreme court that he played some role in shaping.Cheney lived long enough to see confirmation of the fears he experienced after the January 6 riot.“After the riot … he saw the dangers of an overly powerful president,” said Robert Schmuhl, professor in American studies at the University of Notre Dame.It seemed a strange turnaround for a man who – at least in Bush’s first term, when his impact was at its zenith – accrued more power and influence than any other vice-president in US history.Yet, said Schmuhl, it did not amount to a change of mind or heart. “He really worked to strengthen the presidency, but then recognized that you can only go so far, and that there should be guardrails,” he said.“Dick Cheney was a very consequential figure but was also a deeply controversial figure – and in retrospect, the controversy overshadows the consequence.” More

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      ‘Morally indefensible’ – but George W Bush will not come out against Trump

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      The MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell this week hit out at George W Bush, the Republican former president, for refusing to weigh in on America’s looming presidential election.“All any decent person wants him to do is to say, ‘Don’t vote for Donald Trump, and here’s why,’ and he won’t even do that,” O’Donnell told the Fast Politics podcast, of the Republican president who was in office from 2001 to 2009.Increasingly, Bush – and some other top Republicans from his political era – are looking lonely in their ongoing refusal to take a side in an election in which many have warned that US democracy is under threat from Trump’s open sympathies with autocracy.Bush’s vice-president Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney, whose January 6 committee role cost her a US House seat in Wyoming, have endorsed Kamala Harris. So have other senior Republicans, including more than 100 who this week signed a letter declaring that Trump, their party’s nominee for a third election running, must never return to the White House.“We believe that the president of the United States must be a principled, serious and steady leader,” the officials said. “We expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues, but we believe that she possesses the essential qualities to serve as president and Donald Trump does not.”Big-name signatories included Chuck Hagel, a former senator and defense secretary; Gen Michael Hayden, a former CIA and NSA chief; and John Negroponte, once ambassador to the UN. Robert Zoellick, a longtime aide to both presidents Bush and a deputy to James Baker, secretary of state to the elder Bush, was on the list too.Missing from the list, however, were Baker, the younger Bush and his own secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. As perhaps the three most senior Republicans who have not come out against Trump in this election cycle, Bush, Rice and Baker’s lack of comment excites growing comment itself.Bush’s office recently said he would not endorse, having “retired from presidential politics years ago”, perhaps ensuring that his most lasting comment on his successor will be the one he reportedly delivered on the dais at the Capitol after Trump’s inaugural speech in 2017, “American carnage” and all: “That was some weird shit.”Rice did oppose Trump in 2016. Amid the Access Hollywood scandal, over Trump’s boasts about sexual assault, Rice said he should withdraw as the Republican candidate, in favor of “someone who has the dignity and stature to run for the highest office in the greatest democracy on earth”.She has commented on Trump’s presidency too. In 2021, she said his appeal to people who felt let down by establishment politicians was “something that we probably still really need to pay attention to”. Earlier this year, Rice spoke out against isolationism, another central tenet of Trumpism. But that drew a rebuke from Adam Kinzinger, the former congressman from Illinois who sat with Cheney on the January 6 committee and who endorsed Harris at the Democratic national convention.“It’s time to speak up and do more,” Kinzinger said. “You’re not fighting against ‘isolationism’. You’re fighting against Trump and you need to say this out loud. No more straddling the fence, Republicans. You’re for Trump or against him. Pick a side.”Baker has not taken a public position on Trump but in 2020, his biographers reported that though the “myriad ethical scandals surrounding Trump were head-spinning, Baker kept telling himself it was worth it to get conservative judges, tax cuts and deregulation”.“I will vote for the Republican,” Baker was quoted as saying. “I really will.”Now 94 but still active in the public realm, Baker has not publicly indicated how he will vote this year. A source close to him said he had been sharply critical of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election in 2020. Nonetheless, the former secretary of state’s words in his biography ring loud.“I won’t leave my party. You can say my party has left me because the leader of it has. But I think it’s important, the big picture.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn most eyes, though, the big picture has only grown more alarming. Trump has incited a deadly attack on Congress; beaten a second impeachment arising from that attack; been convicted on 34 criminal charges with more than 50 pending; been ordered to pay hundreds of millions in civil cases regarding business fraud and a defamation suit arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”; and launched an election campaign of breathtaking racist invective and lies.“Taxes go up, taxes go down. Regulations are imposed, they are withdrawn. But a democracy? You can’t squander that. Our reputation in the world, the Nato alliance at a time of extreme danger – once those things are gone, they would be exceptionally hard to rebuild.”That was the view of one Washington Republican, a White House official under both Bushes whose job now precludes public endorsements but who was granted anonymity to speak frankly and said they would vote for Harris.With a laugh, the former official suggested George W Bush “may write in Condi Rice again”, a reference to the protest vote Bush said he lodged in 2020, rather than support Joe Biden.As for Baker, the former official said: “Don’t forget, he’s from Houston. I think if you spend 50 years around Houston, you just absorb the oil and gas view of the world. Many people in the oil and gas industry are very anti-Biden, very anti-Harris, largely because of the perception that Biden was for the Green New Deal, which is false, and then the natural gas export review.”For Republicans, the former official said, it is easier to come out against Trump in the national security space and what might be called the democracy space, given the enormity of Trump’s election subversion and January 6 and anxious questions about his relationships with autocrats including Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China and Kim Jong-un of North Korea.“There are the Dick Cheneys of the world, who basically say: ‘This is about democracy. This is about January 6. Donald Trump cannot be trusted with power.’ I would also suspect that in Cheney’s case, this goes back to his tenure in the defense department [under George HW Bush], and if you recall the op-ed that all the living secretaries of defense wrote on 3 January 2021, it’s all coming out of that.”That column, for the Washington Post, urged all Americans to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. Three days later, Trump ensured that did not happen.The former official continued: “While there have been a number of more moderate Republicans who have endorsed Harris, I do not see this as ideological. I see it as, principally, first stop Trump, then attempt to rebuild the party.”Such ambitions may also motivate establishment Republicans who have chosen to back Trump, among them the New Hampshire governor, Chris Sununu, and Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who fought Trump in the primary. All may have eyes on a post-Trump world – either in 2024 if he loses or 2028 if he wins.If so, the former White House official suggested, it may not prove a wise course.“I think it would be hugely, hugely difficult to rebuild the party, largely because the Trumpers just have control of pretty much everything in the states, in the state parties.“But I think that is the task of a generation, and even more moderate figures are going to have to make nods in the direction of Trumpism for the foreseeable future.” More

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      Former vice-president Dick Cheney confirms he will vote for Kamala Harris

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      The former vice-president Dick Cheney, a lifelong Republican, will vote for the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, in November’s presidential election, he said in a statement on Friday.“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 said of the former president and Republican nominee. “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.“As citizens, 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.”Liz Cheney, who herself endorsed Harris on Thursday, first announced her father’s endorsement when asked by Mark Leibovich of the Atlantic during an onstage interview at the Texas Tribune festival in Austin.“Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” Liz Cheney said to audience cheers.“Wow,” Leibovich replied.Like his daughter, Dick Cheney has been an outspoken critic of Trump, notably during Liz Cheney’s ill-fated re-election campaign in 2022.In a campaign ad for Liz Cheney as she sought a fourth term as Wyoming’s lone congressperson, Dick Cheney called the former president a “coward” for trying to “steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him”.The ad did little good for his daughter in a deep-red state that once held the Cheney family dear but is now thoroughly in Trump’s corner. By a two-to-one margin, Liz Cheney lost her Republican primary to the Trump-endorsed attorney Harriet Hageman.Notably absent from Friday’s endorsement announcement was the 83-year-old former vice-president, who has made few if any public appearances over the past year or more.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      John Bolton says he will write in Dick Cheney instead of voting for Biden

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      John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Donald Trump who wrote a tell-all book and now campaigns against him, will cast a write-in vote for the former vice-president Dick Cheney instead of Joe Biden this year – despite saying Trump must not be re-elected.Bemoaning Trump’s focus on the 2020 election, which he lost conclusively but falsely insists was won with electoral fraud, Bolton told CNN that four years ago: “I voted for Dick Cheney.“And I’ll vote for Dick Cheney again this November. He was a principled Reaganite conservative and he still is. Age is no longer a factor in American presidential politics, so his age doesn’t disqualify him.”Cheney, 83, has suffered five heart attacks, the first aged just 37. In 2001, at the beginning of his vice-presidency to George W Bush, he prepared a resignation letter lest he become too ill to do the job. He went on to be by most judgments the most powerful vice-president of all but also an architect of the disastrous invasion of Iraq which cost hundreds of thousands of lives and sparked chaos across the Middle East.Three years after leaving office, in 2012 and aged 71, Cheney was given a new heart.Bolton said: “I think he’d do an immensely better job than either Trump or Biden.”Biden is 81. Trump is 77. Both are subject to doubts about their mental and physical capacity to be president.Trump faces unprecedented legal jeopardy, from 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties. Biden does not.Trump was impeached twice, for blackmailing Ukraine for political dirt and for inciting an insurrection in the attack on Congress on 6 January 2021. Attempts to impeach Biden, over alleged corruption involving his son, have failed to produce evidence or momentum.On CNN, Bolton was asked if he had considered writing in Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney’s daughter who lost her seat in Congress over her opposition to Trump and who has flirted with a presidential run.Bolton said: “Well, I like Liz a lot. And, you know, maybe someday she’ll get my write-in vote too. But right now I’ll stick with her father.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I hope it sways the electorate and prevents both Trump and Biden from being the successful candidate and if I could start a nationwide write-in campaign for Dick Cheney, maybe I should do that.”Trump v Biden round two promises to be settled by razor-thin margins in a small number of battleground states. Both candidates fear the impact of third-party candidates or voters deserting the major party picks in any way.Among other anti-Trump conservatives, Bolton’s choice did not land well.“I think this is so wrong,” said Joe Walsh, a former Tea Party congressman who ran for the presidential nomination against Trump in 2020.“Bolton believes Trump is unfit, yet he won’t vote for Joe Biden, the only person on the ballot this year who can keep Trump out of the White House. Instead he does this. This is wrong.” More

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      Texas lawyer shot by Dick Cheney on 2006 hunting trip dies aged 95

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      Texas lawyer shot by Dick Cheney on 2006 hunting trip dies aged 95Harry Whittington spent week in intensive care after being inadvertently shot by then vice-president on quail-hunting trip A Texas attorney who was inadvertently shot by US vice-president Dick Cheney during a 2006 hunting trip – and then apologized to him for the attention the accident drew – has died.Harry Whittington was 95.George Santos accused of sexual harassment by congressional aideRead moreWhittington died on Saturday morning after a short illness, the Texas Tribune reported.Whittington was known in his state as an avid supporter of the Republican party, helping build the state’s GOP on a national level, the Associated Press reported. Whittington also worked for George W Bush and George HW Bush during their years in Texas politics before both men became US president.Whittington made international headlines after Cheney, George W Bush’s vice-president, shot him while quail hunting. Whittington, Cheney and others were hunting on the sprawling 50,000-acre Armstrong ranch after sunset.Cheney had aimed at a bird but mistakenly hit Whittington in the face, neck and body.Whittington was rushed to the hospital with several birdshot wounds after the shooting, which was deemed an accident. He suffered a collapsed lung as well as a mild heart attack due to a piece of birdshot near his heart, and he spent a week recovering in an intensive care unit, the Tribune reported.The accident did not go public until 14 hours after it occurred. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times broke the story after the ranch owner called the newspaper. The White House later confirmed the shooting.Whittington was largely blamed for the accident. A White House spokesperson said that Whittington had stepped into Cheney’s line of fire.The host of the hunting group, Katharine Armstrong, noted that Whittington did not make his presence known when he approached a group of hunters after shooting a quail.Whittington later apologized to Cheney and his family for having been shot. His apology said: “My family and I are deeply sorry for all that vice-president Cheney and his family have had to go through this past week.”Whittington spoke publicly about the shooting years after it happened. He discussed the shooting and its portrayal in the movie Vice, about Cheney’s role in the Bush administration, in a 2018 Austin American-Statesman interview.“The script doesn’t attempt to discuss how it happened other than a picture of [Cheney] having a gun,” Whittington said, emphasizing that the shooting was an accident.“Quail hunting is a fast-moving procedure. The birds fly and you swing on them and shoot the best you can. I had been hunting for 50 years before this accident. I wasn’t exactly an inexperienced hunter, and I’d never seen an accident.”TopicsUS politicsDick CheneyTexasRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Dick Cheney attacks Donald Trump as ‘greatest threat to our republic’

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      Dick Cheney attacks Donald Trump as ‘greatest threat to our republic’Vice-president under George W Bush denounces, in campaign ad for daughter Liz, ‘coward … who lost his election, and lost big’ Dick Cheney has branded Donald Trump the greatest “threat to our republic”, in a new campaign ad for his daughter, Liz Cheney, who is running for re-election in Wyoming.“In our nation’s 236-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” said Cheney, who served as vice-president for two terms under George W Bush.Alex Jones: Sandy Hook family seeks punitive damages beyond $4.1m awardRead moreCheney said: “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.“He is a coward. 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 it.”Cheney went on to speak about how proud he was of his daughter “for standing up to the truth, doing what’s right, honoring her oath to the constitution when so many in our party are too scared to do so”.The one-minute ad featured the elder Cheney’s sharpest public attacks against Trump to date. Best known as the most powerful vice-president in American history, and a major figure in leading the US to war in Iraq, he has taken to defending his daughter in her fight against Trump.“There’s nothing more important she will ever do than lead the effort to make sure Donald Trump is never near the Oval Office. And she will succeed,” he said in the ad.The younger Cheney has been widely praised from liberals as vice-chairwoman of the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack. Cheney has been one of Trump’s most pointed critics, accusing him of violating the constitution for his role in the insurrection.In return, she has been largely ostracized from her party. Cheney faces an uphill re-election battle against the Trump-backed candidate Harriet Hageman, who maintains that the 2020 election was stolen.“Liz Cheney has long forgotten she works for Wyoming (or perhaps she never knew), not the Radical Democrats,” Hageman tweeted on Thursday. “Wyoming deserves a Congresswoman who will represent us AND our conservative values. It’s time to retire elitist Liz Cheney.”Though Cheney has at least a million dollars more in donations to her campaign against Hageman, she was 22 points behind Hageman in a July poll conducted by the Casper Star-Tribune.In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Cheney said she does not expect to lose on 16 August.“I really believe that the people of Wyoming fundamentally understand how important fidelity to the constitution is – understand how important it is that we fight for those fundamental principles on which everything else is based,” she said.TopicsRepublicansWyomingUS politicsDick CheneyDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More