Two decades after he helped define American foreign policy after 9/11, former Vice President Dick Cheney has turned his fire inward — against a political movement that many say grew from the seeds he once planted. By endorsing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024, Dick Cheney not only rejected Donald Trump; in a sense, he repudiated the very strain of fear-driven nationalism that his own presidency helped to legitimize.
When history closes its book on Dick Cheney, the legacy he leaves behind will be one of paradox. The former US vice president – who died today aged 84 – helped define the post-9/11 American order, a world shaped by fear, force and the ever-expanding presidential power.
Yet in his final years, Dick Cheney has become one of the fiercest critics of Donald Trump and the populist movement that now dominates the Republican Party he once helped lead.
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This contradiction is not accidental; that’s the gist of Cheney’s story. The man who spent decades empowering America’s president finally lived long enough to watch his own party wield that power in ways he could no longer defend. A man who preached unyielding nationalism abroad found himself condemned at home.
Architect of the New American Order
After the 9/11 attacks, Cheney emerged as the most influential vice president in modern history—a shadow executive who shaped America’s “war on terror.” His worldview was simple and absolute: The United States must strike before it is struck. It was Cheney who championed the invasion of Iraq, authorized expanded surveillance powers, and advocated the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that the rest of the world called torture.
His policies reshaped not only US foreign policy, but also its political DNA. Cheney’s doctrine of preemptive power and moral certainty normalized a new kind of politics—politics defined by suspicion of dissent, executive secrecy, and “us versus them” supremacy. In this new world, strength was measured not by restraint but by dominance.
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This atmosphere of perpetual emergency—cultivated in the name of safety—has become fertile ground for something darker. The populist authoritarianism that Cheney later denounced was in many ways the logical endpoint of his own political project.
The birth of Trumpism from the ashes of the war on terror
Dick Cheney’s “unitary executive” philosophy gave presidents extraordinary power to act unilaterally, often bypassing Congress and the courts. Two decades later, Donald Trump inherits this machinery—using it not for national security, but for personal grievances and political theater.
The politics of fear that Cheney deployed against foreign enemies became Trump’s tool against domestic ones: immigrants, journalists, political opponents. The same anti-establishment anger that fueled support for the architects of the Iraq War has now turned on Washington itself.
In an effort to protect the American state, Cheney built the framework for its internal siege.
A break from your own creation
And yet, to his credit, Cheney recognized the danger. When much of the Republican establishment rallied behind Trump’s strongman policies, Cheney — once the party’s enforcer — balked. His daughter, former congresswoman Liz Cheney, became one of the few Republicans willing to directly confront Trump, and her father stood right beside her.
In one of his last public statements, Cheney called Trump a “coward” and “the greatest threat to our republic” in the nation’s history. The words, coming from a man who once embodied the harshest edge of the American right, carried moral weight—and no small amount of irony.
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Dick Cheney’s end-of-life split with Donald Trump was not a political rebranding; it was a showdown. He helped build a system that rewarded absolutism, demanded loyalty, and punished nuance. Trump merely replaced the language of national security with the language of revenge.
The paradox of the patriot
For all his ruthlessness, Cheney was never a demagogue. He believed in hierarchy, secrecy and control – not chaos. He saw the world as a dangerous place requiring strong men to make impossible decisions. But he also believed in the endurance of American institutions. This is perhaps where the Trump movement has completely broken away from him.
In the wake of Cheney’s death, Cheney’s legacy forces a deeper question: how much of the current crisis in American democracy was inevitable once fear became the organizing principle of its politics? Was Trumpism a betrayal of Cheneyism—or its culmination?
History may conclude that Cheney, in trying to save America from its enemies, inadvertently taught it to fear itself.
A legacy of opposites
It’s tempting to see Dick Cheney’s final years—his endorsement of Joe Biden in 2024, his outspoken criticism of Trump, his staunch defense of constitutional norms—as an arc of moral redemption. But perhaps it is more honest to look at it as a late recognition of cause and effect.
The empire he helped build—the surveillance state, the imperial presidency, zero-sum politics—became the foundation for a new era of domestic strongmen. Cheney has spent the last few years trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
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There was something tragic about him, after all: a man of immense conviction who lived long enough to face the unintended consequences of his own power.
The final irony
In life, Dick Cheney embodied the American century—its military might, its moral contradictions, its boundless faith in the power of command. In death, he stands as a warning of what happens when the tools built to defend democracy are turned against it.
For a man who once believed that only force could save the republic, his final years revealed a quieter truth: that unchecked force could just as easily destroy it.
