“I think he’s done more harm than any other single elected official in memory in terms of shredding the constitution. You know — condoning torture … This idea of a unitary executive. Meaning the Congress and the people have no power in a time of war. And the President controls everything,” - Joe Biden on Dick Cheney in the 2008 vice-presidential debate.
There was something perfect about the Supreme Court’s review of President Trump’s tariff spree the week Dick Cheney passed away. What the court was weighing, after all, was Cheney’s core legacy: the limitless executive power now claimed by Cheney’s Frankenstein monster, Trump.
In that sense, Dick Cheney pioneered the Trump presidency. Without Cheney and Addington, no Trump and Vought. Cheney was never a constitutional conservative; he was always an extremist, a pioneer of an elected, unaccountable, and secret monarchy that has reached its zenith in the GOP today. His attempt to cast himself in recent years as some kind of principled, old-school constitutional Republican is classic Cheney: i.e. shameless misdirection, calculated spin, and a big fat lie.
But resistance libs have lapped it up. I understand the impulse not to speak ill of the newly dead … but there is no excuse for lies. The NYT still refuses to use the word “torture” to describe the literal Gestapo techniques Cheney backed; Robert Draper even claims Cheney “appreciated Congress’s stature as an independent body” and allows Bill Kristol to argue that Cheney “remained pretty much the same person throughout it all. It was his party and conservatism that changed.” Please. It was Cheney who changed conservatism over many decades — precisely to make it safe for autocracy.
No surprise then that Cheney endorsed Trump as early as May 2016, voted for him that year, and was silent in 2020. Cheney did draw the line, it’s true … eight years later, after January 6. We should be grateful for small mercies, I suppose, and Cheney never believed a president could overturn an election. But the power-grabs of Trump before January 6 and since? Cheney pioneered all of them, and believed in all of them.
Count them. Cheney believed the president could spend money on things the Congress forbade and impound money the Congress mandated be spent. He believed that laws passed by the Congress need not be obeyed by the president, attaching “signing statements” to them that deeply eroded the separation of powers. He pioneered the abuse of the pardon power for political purposes, trying to get his buddy, Lewis Libby, off the hook. (Bush refused to follow Cheney; Trump, naturally, obliged.) He believed that a president could militarily attack anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason — outside international and domestic law and the laws of war.
If you want to see the kind of thing Cheney believed in, check out Trump’s current illegal, unaccountable, and largely secret deployment in the Caribbean. So far, the US has murdered 70 people there for “smuggling drugs” (with no due process and no actual drug hauls), and sent our largest aircraft carrier along with five destroyers to the region to foment regime change in Venezuela. Who knows what Trump could do next — since the law and the Congress are irrelevant? That’s the arbitrary, murderous monarchy that Americans once fought a revolution against, but that Dick Cheney deeply believed in and methodically built.
Incensed by post-Watergate reforms, Cheney was an early passionate advocate of “unitary executive theory,” of the profligate presidential use of emergency powers, and of a presidency immune to legal prosecution (of crimes and even war crimes related to his official business). He believed the president alone had the authority to declare war and prosecute it however he wanted, urging H.W. Bush to launch the Persian Gulf War and W. the Iraq War with no Congressional vote. He was Trump before Trump — just more belligerent.
Cheney’s affect and demeanor, of course, were, on the surface, the opposite. Taciturn, leery of the limelight, appearing as a reassuring statesman rather than a Twitter buffoon, he tended to his image diligently. But this image obscured the fact that, behind the doors, when 9/11 happened and cool minds were needed, he wasn’t possessed of one. In fact, he instantly lost his shit. From the very beginning, he became the chief hysteric of the administration, and therefore the man most responsible for the greatest foreign policy error in American history.
The psychic trauma of that awful September morning — and the knowledge that the worst attack since Pearl Harbor had happened on his watch because of his negligence — clearly deranged him. (Netanyahu followed exactly the same pattern after 10/7.) Two words suffice to describe his response: panic that became mindless revenge. The “one-percent doctrine” — that even if there was as little as a one percent chance of a terror attack with WMDs, the US had to go to war pre-emptively — was emotionally satisfying, and psychologically understandable as a response to 9/11. But as a geo-strategy, it was close to insane. It meant war without end all over the globe — war decided entirely by one person in total secrecy, with zero checks and balances. We are still living in the wreckage of Cheney’s wars.
Like Trump, Cheney was suspicious of the CIA or anyone who dared to tell him something he didn’t want to hear, refusing to believe his own spies when they told him Saddam had no WMDs. Like Trump, he was completely delusional at times, in his case about Saddam. Like Trump, he believed that if he willed something, reality had to yield. He didn’t lie about Saddam’s WMDs in my view. It was worse than that. His psychological need to believe in them, to find a way to enact revenge and expiate his guilt, outweighed any rationality. Pure Trump. To my shame, I trusted his word.
Cheney embraced Trump’s “alternative facts” decades earlier. Take a quote that could come from anyone in the Trump administration today:
When we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.
That was a high-level Bush official, probably Karl Rove, pioneering today’s post-modern, who-gives-a-fuck-what’s-true conservatism a long, long time ago.
And like Trump, Cheney almost never admitted error. (One rare exception is when he shot a friend in the face, after which the friend immediately apologized for getting in the way.) He went to his grave having no regrets about the Iraq War, which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and over 3,000 Americans, and cost $2 trillion, believing the Iraq War was a triumph, because his ego, like Trump’s, demanded it. He was also what can only be called callous, just like Trump. Yes, he trashed the Geneva Conventions that America constructed in the wake of the Nazis, and he authorized the torture of prisoners — a war crime. But it was the way in which he treated the question that speaks volumes about him.
The prisoners simply were not human to him and were all definitionally guilty, regardless of the evidence. Most advocates of torture in those dark years regarded it as something terrible, but perhaps necessary as a last resort to save lives. Some of us recalled how deeply opposed the West — from Washington to Churchill — had always been to torture. Cheney was unmoved by both arguments. For him, there wasn’t the slightest moral or legal concern. He sneered at the idea of military honor. In his mind, the question was: are you going to “preserve your, your honor, or are you going to do your job?” The honor was George Washington’s. The job was committing war crimes.
It took some dedication to retain such an amoral worldview, even years after the events. But Cheney always steadfastly refused to admit that hanging people from shackles, freezing them to near-death, near-drowning them so their abdomens were distended with water, anally raping them, breaking their limbs, and keeping them awake so long they hallucinated — all things he authorized and supported — were torture. He treated the Senate’s subsequent attempt to get to the bottom of these war crimes as contemptible. When asked to describe what he would regard as torture, he replied:
I’ll tell you what my definition of torture is: what nineteen guys armed with airline tickets and boxcutters did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11.
When asked whether he regretted the case of Gul Rahman, a completely innocent man, whom the US tortured to death, he said he didn’t:
The problem I have is with all the folks we did release who ended up on the battlefield … I have no problem [with it] as long as we achieved our objective.
If you cannot regret torturing an innocent man to death, what on earth can you regret?
The moral abyss of Trump, in other words, was pioneered by Cheney. All detainees were definitionally guilty, and torturing them was a “no-brainer.” That it was clearly illegal under domestic and international law meant nothing to him. That torture almost always provides false information was equally irrelevant. All that mattered to him was, in his words: “how nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3,000 Americans?” The glibness still manages to sicken, even after all these years.
Trump’s authoritarianism has not yet gone as far as Cheney’s did — to assert the right the executive to seize anyone, citizen or not, off the street, deny them due process, torture them to incriminate themselves, and lock them up forever. But Cheney walked that walk. For him, there were literally no moral or legal limits to presidential power: “It’s vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically to achieve our objectives.” My italics. That included surveillance powers that would make totalitarians envious.
Like Trump, Cheney was also a reckless gambler.
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(This week’s issue also includes: a talk with Cory Clark about sex differences; dissents over my column on illiberalism in higher ed; nine notable quotes from the week in news, including an Yglesias Award for a Heritage staffer; 13 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of CK and his dog; a coastal window in Scotland; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
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New On The Dishcast: Cory Clark
Cory is a behavioral scientist, the executive director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at Penn, a visiting scholar at Penn, and an associate professor of psychology at New College of Florida. She’s also been Director of Academic Engagement for Heterodox Academy and an assistant professor of behavioral science at Durham University. We talk sex differences and the recent essay, “The Great Feminization,” by Helen Andrews.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the female dominance in education, and the growing power of HR. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s pod with David Ignatius on our declining republic. We also hear from readers on the illiberalism of higher ed and other topics.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Fiona Hill on Putin’s war, Mark Halperin on US politics, Michel Paradis on Eisenhower, Vivek Ramaswamy on the right, Jason Willick on trade and conservatism, Shadi Hamid on US power abroad, George Packer on his Orwell-inspired novel, and Arthur Brooks on the science of happiness. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
You catalogue your exasperations with what is taught, but nowhere do you identify what line has been crossed that now calls for governmental intrusion. Where is the limiting principle to such meddling? Is government allowed to meddle if, in the judgment of the president (the unitary executive), the schools have gone “too far’? Do you not perceive the danger?
There is also a significant constitutional argument that such meddling is unconstitutional. Government-compelled speech may offend the First Amendment.
Read my response here, along with another dissent. More debate over my column is on the pod page. Please keep the criticism coming — dish@andrewsullivan.com — and follow more Dish debate in my Notes feed.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the tariff hearings, Tuesday’s elections, and Dem prospects for the next ones. Examples:
Richard Hanania, rarely boring, gets at something here: “The arc of conservatism bends towards Fuentes.”
Alexandre Lefebvre has a thoughtful piece on “mob boss liberalism.”
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month sub if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the VFYW). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. From a sleuth in last week’s contest:
It’s 8:36 p.m. Wednesday here in the illegally annexed Sandwich Islands. The wild boars are congregating outside, and I have to be up at 4 a.m. for another trip. Not even kidding:
Alas, conference season has not yet ended, so I only have one bit of trivia this week. I contemplated writing about cities that borrow the names of alien states: Oklahoma City, Texas; Nevada City, California; Virginia City, Nevada; Florida, Missouri; Maryland, Kentucky; Idaho Springs, Colorado; Wyoming and Delaware, Ohio; and, of course, this week’s location …
