I’ve been carrying around an unformed thought for more than three months after I posted about Dick Cheney’s death. My brain works like that sometimes.
On an episode of the Slate Political Gabfest a few days after Cheney died, hosts David Plotz, John Dickerson, and Emily Bazelon were discussing Cheney’s legacy and whether his advocacy for extraordinarily strong executive power as George W. Bush’s vice president had set the table for Donald Trump’s autocratic (and despotic) behavior today.
Bazelon:
Cheney [had the] idea that he knew better and that the office of the president should be very strong because a wise, national-security-minded person like him was in charge.
There’s a real irony to how he wound up opposing Trump later in his life, I think a lot because of his daughter. Liz Cheney was being such a strong rule-of-law, stand-up-to-Trump figure in the Republican Party, for which she obviously paid a huge political and personal price. It was like the scales fell from Dick Cheney’s eyes—that if you gave all this power to the presidency and then it turned out the person who occupied the office was not someone you liked or trusted or thought well of, well, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.
Dickerson:
Yeah, I don’t think he reflected on that. I think he thought the presidency could still be as muscular as he wanted. You just shouldn’t have, as he said, Trump—the most dangerous person in the history of the republic. Two hundred forty-eight years, he said.
I think what’s maybe the most striking thing is that he didn’t reflect on the fact [of what] his theory [had become].
