Dick Cheney, who was a Republican congressman, defense secretary and one of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history, has died at age 84. His influence in the George W. Bush administration, including his role as an architect of the brutal “war on terror,” earned him enmity from the administration’s Democratic foes. But his criticism of President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection rehabilitated his image in the eyes of some Democrats. Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 even praised Cheney for “what he has done to serve our country” after he endorsed her for president in 2024.
Cheney was right about the threat that Trump posed, and continues to pose, to our democracy. But there is no need to downplay his own grave misdeeds in the wake of his death — not just because the darkest parts of his legacy were unforgivable, but because they helped set the stage for Trump.
Cheney was a crucial figure in introducing elaborate lies into the American mind.
As vice president under Bush, such was Cheney’s power that friend and foe alike likened him to Darth Vader — a comparison Cheney himself embraced. He was obsessed with maintaining U.S. global hegemony around the world and he did everything in his power to enact that goal. He was a hawk among hawks in the “war on terror.” He played a major role in creating new regimes of torture, invasive surveillance and imprisonment of innocents. He was instrumental in the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the war in Iraq. And long before Trump embraced blatant conflicts of interest, the Bush administration doled out generous contracts to Halliburton, the oil and gas services company of which Cheney was the chief executive before entering the vice presidency.
It’s misguided to compartmentalize Cheney’s national security policies — because they help explain some of how the U.S. got where it is today. The falsehoods in the run-up to the Iraq War went far beyond just motivated reasoning or fudged data. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews put it in 2016, “there were numerous occasions when Bush and his advisers made statements that intelligence agencies knew to be false, both about WMDs and about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent links to al-Qaeda. The term commonly used for making statements that one knows to be false is ‘lying.’”
The Trump administration lies differently than the Bush administration did — it lies about more things and with less sophistication. But Cheney was a crucial figure in introducing elaborate lies into the American mind in the 21st century to justify overturning a nation’s right to self-determination. Those lies resulted in extraordinary loss of life and money. And nobody was held accountable for it. That should be understood as something that takes a serious toll on a democracy.
Moreover, the results of the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq contributed to the trust crisis that Trump exploited in his rise to power. One key way that Trump broke from the GOP establishment during his first run for president was criticizing both wars as pointless mistakes that had cost lives needlessly. He successfully channeled disillusionment with neoconservative nation-building toward a foreign policy oriented more narrowly around U.S. interests. Republican voters didn’t punish Trump for questioning post-9/11 security orthodoxy — they rewarded him with more support. Cheney was also a major player in helping advance the imperial presidency that Trump benefits from today. In a 2008 interview, The New York Times’ Charlie Savage, the author of “Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of Democracy,” described Cheney as “the driving force behind the Bush administration’s systematic and highly successful project to expand presidential power, a push that was articulated on their first day in office, long before 9/11, and whose first battleground was the fight over whether Cheney would have to comply with open-government laws that mandated that he tell Congress and the public whom his energy task force had met with.” He added, “The second President Bush adopted Cheney’s view that they ought to use their time in office to strengthen presidential power as an end to itself — to leave the office stronger than it had been when they inherited it — and that is what they set out to do.” Cheney wasn’t involved in a project to turn the president into a total autocrat. But he contributed to the degradation of checks on presidential power. Cheney was never made to answer for his role in a project of global domination that cost millions of lives — or for helping to create legal paradigms and norms that reshaped our country for the worse. That Cheney wanted the U.S. to remain a republic and opposed Trump’s autocratic ambition does nothing to erase or mitigate his many terrible acts.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer for MS NOW. Sign up for his newsletter. 
