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<\/p>\nCheney’s death highlights the waning of a more traditional, establishment-oriented version of the GOP that dominated for decades.<\/p>\n
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Does Dick Cheney’s death mark the end of the traditional GOP?<\/p>\n
Dick Cheney’s death highlights the waning of a more traditional, establishment-oriented version of the GOP that dominated for decades.<\/p>\n
The funeral for former Vice President Dick Cheney<\/a> on Thursday will mark the passing of a type of politician who has become increasingly endangered in the Donald Trump era.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cName me the Cheney-style Republican who’s still alive politically,\u201d said Joshua Bolten, who served as White House chief of staff during the final years of the George W. Bush administration.<\/p>\n Cheney’s sendoff <\/a>is one that many Republicans are taking note of. They say he now seems like someone out of a different America, and the funeral at Washington National Cathedral<\/a> where many other 20th century political icons were memorialized also feels like a funeral for a more traditional, establishment-oriented version of the Republican Party that dominated U.S. politics for decades.<\/p>\n More: <\/strong>Dick Cheney, a longtime Democratic bogeyman, became an ally opposing Trump<\/a><\/p>\n Cheney embodied the old GOP and was one of the party\u2019s leading figures of the last half century. That was before he clashed with Trump, calling the then-former president a “threat to our Republic” in declaring he\u2019d vote for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in 2024 <\/a>over the candidate chosen by the party that Cheney helped define for several generations.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a familiar story for many Republicans, most notably figures such as former senators and GOP presidential nominees Mitt Romney and John McCain and Cheney\u2019s own daughter, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney<\/a>. All of them chafed at what the party had become, from its shifting ideology to what some perceive as Trump\u2019s trampling of norms, institutions and the rule of law – only to be considered persona non grata after speaking up with their concerns about the state of American democracy.<\/p>\n Cheney \u201cwas by the book\u201d said former GOP Rep. Fred Upton, a self-described “Reagan Republican” who is planning to attend Cheney’s funeral and witnessed the former vice president’s career up close during more than three decades in Congress than ended in 2023.<\/p>\n \u201cTrump tests everything,\u201d added Upton, a former powerful House committee chairman and one of 10 Republicans who voted in 2021 to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol.<\/p>\n The Cheneys were particularly outraged about Trump\u2019s effort to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the Jan. 6 attacks.\u00a0They paid a heavy price, with Trump driving Liz Cheney out of office<\/a> via a GOP primary challenge for participating in the congressional investigation of the attack.<\/p>\n Dick Cheney contrasted with Trump in many other ways, from his cool temperament to his deep governing experience and hawkish support for foreign interventions that Trump later campaigned against.<\/p>\n Cheney and Bush took office under a cloud of controversy after the Supreme Court<\/a> ended Florida’s recount during the 2000 presidential election. They left the White House eight years later with the economy collapsing into the Great Recession and two unpopular wars raging.<\/p>\n It was that political landscape that Trump found so amendable to his own outsider campaign in 2016 that helped catapult him from New York real estate and reality TV star into the White House. Along the way, <\/strong>Trump would accuse<\/a> Bush and Cheney of leading the U.S. into “endless wars.”<\/p>\n Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone called Cheney “the ultimate deep state insider” and an “especially evil villain.”<\/p>\n “He and his henchmen… have the blood of thousands of American servicemen and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi on their hands,” Stone said.<\/p>\n Soon after Cheney’s death,<\/strong> Vice President JD Vance mocked his predecessor<\/a>, responding to a comment that Cheney seemed to be “running the country” during Bush’s presidency with: “Not very well, as it turns out.”<\/p>\n The White House hasn’t responded to an inquiry about whether Trump, Vance or anyone else from the administration will attend Cheney’s funeral, but did lower flags to half staff as directed by the U.S. Flag Code.<\/a><\/p>\n ‘Granddaddy in the room’<\/p>\n Cheney is viewed by many as the most powerful vice president in history, and his power partly came from his extensive knowledge of the government.<\/p>\n At 34, he became the youngest White House chief of staff in history<\/a> under Republican President Gerald Ford, represented Wyoming in the House for a decade, including several years inside GOP leadership and was secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush. Cheney was tapped by Bush’s son to vet potential running mates and ended up getting the job himself.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was extremely qualified,\u201d said former GOP Congressman Dan Miller of Florida, who left office in 2003.<\/p>\n For Miller, a Trump critic who describes himself as an \u201cold-fashioned, conservative, traditional” lawmaker of “the Reagan-Cheney mold,\u201d the former vice president represents \u201ccompetence and experience,\u201d which he said is a \u201chuge contrast\u201d with the Trump administration.<\/p>\n \u201cYou heard the phrase ‘adults in the room?’ Well the Bush administration was crowded with adults in the room and (Cheney) was one of the most adult, almost a granddaddy in the room,\u201d said Duke University political science Professor Peter Feaver, who worked on the National Security Council during the Bush administration. \u201cThis was not his first rodeo, it wasn\u2019t his second rodeo, it was like his fifth or sixth rodeo.\u201d<\/p>\n The type of experience that Cheney brought to the Bush administration was more extensive than most, but a record of high-level service used to be the norm for top officials.<\/p>\n Trump upended that.<\/p>\n Cheney was “an insider,” Upton said, “he knew how things worked and how things should work.” A real estate scion with no governing experience, Trump ran as an outsider and has promoted likeminded people in his second administration.<\/a><\/p>\n Cheney the hawk<\/strong><\/p>\n The late 46th vice president of the United States came of age politically in the post-World War II, Cold War era and was hawkish about military intervention and confronting adversaries abroad, from the former Soviet Union to perceived threats in the Middle East.<\/p>\n \u201cCheney was a piece of the Reagan rock,\u201d Upton said of Reagan, the two-term Republican president from 1981 to 1989 who was known for a hardline foreign policy approach that emphasized military might.<\/p>\n Parts of Trump’s second term foreign policy agenda, such as bombing Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities<\/a>, align with Cheney’s philosophy, according to those who worked with the former vice president. Trump also has taken an expansive view of executive power, something Cheney championed.<\/p>\n But Trump has been much more diplomatic with some autocratic figures, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin <\/a>and China’s Xi Jinping, than some GOP hardliners would like.<\/p>\n “Cheney would\u2019ve been more hawkish with both,” Feaver said.<\/p>\n Trump also has taken direct aim at some of the military interventions Cheney helped initiate, criticizing the Iraq war and moving during his first term to wind down military operations in Afghanistan<\/a>, which the U.S. invaded during the Bush-Cheney administration after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.<\/p>\n Trump was channeling popular opinion among many war-weary Americans. But there also has long been an isolationist streak in the GOP that he tapped into, and which Bush and Cheney resisted.<\/p>\n \u201cBush was very much against the Republican Party pursuing a populist agenda, which Bush at the time defined as isolationism, nativism and protectionism, and Bush was against all three, as was Cheney,\u201d Bolten said.<\/p>\n Trump, meanwhile, has aggressively pursued tariffs<\/a> and the deportation of immigrants without legal status, while wavering at times in his support for Ukraine<\/a> against Russian attacks.<\/p>\n A funeral for Cheney’s GOP<\/p>\n The mourners gathering at Cheney\u2019s funeral are likely to skew heavily toward the old GOP over the new MAGA version. Bush and Liz Cheney are speaking during the service at the National Cathedral, where services have been held for six presidents.<\/a><\/p>\n Whether Cheney\u2019s death is also the death of what he represented in the party will play out in the coming months and years, especially as Trump starts to exit from the political scene and debate ramps up about what comes next for the party.<\/p>\n Former Cheney aide John Hannah said \u201cit\u2019s increasingly dubious\u201d that the GOP returns to something resembling the party Cheney helped define.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re beginning to put the final period on an era that has passed,\u201d said Hannah, who worked for Cheney for eight years when he was vice president, including more than three years as his national security adviser.<\/p>\n Yet some conservatives still hold out hope that traditional GOP will see a resurgence.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a little premature to say that wing is dead and will be buried with Cheney,\u201d Feaver said.<\/p>\n