DICK CHENEY’S STAND AGAINST TRUMP SIGNALS THE GRAVITY OF THE SITUATION

 
Dick Cheney, the country’s oldest living vice president, and an ultra-conservative icon of the pre-Trumpian GOP far-right, this past week announced that he will be voting for liberal Democrat Kamala Harris for president. His reason? He feels the other candidate, Donald Trump, simply poses too grave a danger to democracy and the republic to vote for him.

Dick Cheney - Trump greatest threat in history

Although Cheney has been an open critic of Trump’s ever since the January Sixth Insurrection of 2021—as has his ticket-mate, former President George W. Bush—until now, he has remained circumspect about the stance of his daughter, former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, who has made it clear that there was no way she would vote for her party’s presidential ticket if Donald Trump was heading it. She too recently announced that she was voting for Harris, despite her and Harris’s starkly juxtaposed policy positions.

In the case of both father and daughter, and despite both being dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, they posit that there are times when patriotism requires placing nation above party. Both are the staunchest of true Republicans. Although there had been speculation that Liz Cheney might eventually join other never-Trump conservatives in forming a third party, this never materialized and she has recently been uncharacteristically quiet, after sacrificing her entire career to take on what she considered Trump’s treasonous behavior when she was one of only two Republican members of the nine-person January Sixth investigative committee.

Nor will she or her father act—as have other anti-Trump Republicans such as former Representative Adam Kinzinger or former Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan—as surrogates for the Harris campaign. They remain party loyalists, but the kind of loyalists who consider the GOP to have been hijacked by Trump, as a would-be dictator.

On announcing his decision to vote for Harris, Dick Cheney said this past week, “In our nation’s two hundred forty-eight-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” adding that, “He can never be trusted with power again.”

Cheney underscored his decision by saying, “We have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.”

Trump - delusional authoritarian candidate

Cheney made his announcement against a backdrop in which Trump’s own pronouncements are becoming ever more authoritarian, dystopian and insane. For instance, while the Republican-Party-of-Trump candidate continues to waffle on the question of abortion in an attempt to dupe right-leaning independents into voting for him, he has nevertheless made it clear he would support a national ban—an issue on which Harris, at least among women, will likely take him to the cleaner’s. But that’s not the worst of it. He keeps repeating the MAGA conspiracy theory that Democrats want to allow abortion throughout the ninth month, or even that they will allow babies to be murdered after they are born. This is a flat and feverish lie, of course, and an utterly delusional idea. His backers in Vladimir Putin’s election-interference squad have used typical Russian propaganda to try and convince the most gullible among Trump’s supporters that these baby-killings are already, indeed, taking place, but that “nobody talks about it”, which is utterly absurd. But that hasn’t kept Trump from repeating Russian talking points.

Trump has also gone off the deep end with conspiracy theories about what immigration will be like under Harris—despite the fact that she supports increasing the Border Guards by fifteen hundred officers and turning back undocumented migrants at the border, and having drawn criticism from sectors of her own party by publicly warning unprocessed migrants not to come. According to another delusional Trump theory, espoused during a recent rally, “If I don’t win Colorado, it will be taken over by migrants and the governor will be sent fleeing.” He went on to say, “If you think you have a nice house, have a migrant enjoy your house, because a migrant will take it over. A migrant will take it over. It will be Venezuela on steroids.”

But his latest conspiracy theory, which he has repeated on the campaign trail, is even more certifiably insane. He is now claiming that children (“childs”, as he called them) are being subjected to gender-affirming surgeries at school (at school!!!) without their parents’ knowledge.

“Can you imagine,” Trump has said, “you're a parent and your son leaves the house, and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school, and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”

Speaking to the radical right-wing advocacy group Moms for Liberty, Trump said, “But the transgender thing is incredible. Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what's going to happen with your child. And you know, many of these childs [sic] fifteen years later say, 'What the hell happened? Who did this to me?' They say, 'Who did this to me?' It's incredible.”

There is no way to stress enough just how off-the-wall all of this is, especially coming from a man who could end up with the nuclear codes. These dystopian fantasies of his are, in a word, batshit crazy.

And the madness doesn’t end there. Recently, Trump told a rally of people who identify as “Christian conservatives” that he needed for them to turn out and vote in this election, but adding, “I love you. You gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

Even coming from Donald Trump this seemed like a shockingly autocratic statement. So much so that the ever Trump-sympathetic Murdoch empire’s infotainment network, Fox News, called him on it. In an interview, one of Trump’s most slavish cheerleaders, Laura Ingraham, pointed out that Democrats were citing the quote as evidence that Trump would end elections if he returned to office. She called the Democrats’ claim “ridiculous” and sought to get Trump to backtrack on his statement. But he didn’t.

 “I said, vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it ever again. It’s true,” Trump reiterated. “Because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group. They don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote anymore. I won’t need your vote.”

Ingraham tried again saying, more specifically, “It’s being interpreted, as you are not surprised to hear, by the left as, well, they’re never going to have another election. So can you even just respond…” But Trump cut her off and tried to change the subject, repeating again his (false) claim that Christians vote in small numbers. When she persisted, he repeated exactly what he had posited before, saying, “Don’t worry about the future. You have to vote on November fifth. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore. I don’t care, because we’re going to fix it. The country will be fixed and we won’t even need your vote anymore, because frankly we will have such love, if you don’t want to vote anymore, that’s OK.”

It was a statement that those of us accustomed to covering dictators throughout the Americas, both past and present, have heard many times before. It’s part of the authoritarian playbook to tell the governed that things will be so good for them under the authoritarian government that nobody will ever even care again if there are elections or not—with the elliptical end of that sentence being, because there won’t be.

Following former Vice President Dick Cheney’s announcement that he was casting his vote for Harris, Trump responded by referring to Cheney as an “irrelevant RINO” (Republican in Name Only).

Wait…Really??? An irrelevant RINO? Dick Cheney?

Well, for anyone who doesn’t know him, meet Richard Bruce Cheney:

Born in 1941, Dick Cheney, at eighty-three, is the oldest living US vice president, having served as such for eight years under the administration of George W. Bush. But that came after a very long career as a key figure in the conservative far-right Republican camp. So much so that even moderate Republicans considered him “too far right.” He was, arguably, the most powerful VP in history, considered by some observers to be more of a “shadow president” since he was often seen as calling the shots in the Bush administration.

Cheney started his political career as an intern for US Representative William Steiger, who served in Congress from 1967 until his death in 1978. But already during the Nixon era (1969-1974), Cheney was working in the West Wing. After Nixon’s resignation, Cheney became White House chief of staff for Gerald Ford. He then served from 1979 to 1989 as US representative for Wyoming. Before serving as vice president to George W. Bush, he was appointed secretary of defense by Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1973, during which time he oversaw the US invasion of Panama (Operation Just Cause), and the Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm).

Under the younger Bush, Cheney came into his own as one of the Republican Party’s most powerful players. After 911, he was instrumental in expanding the powers of the presidency, and in advocating for exceptional intelligence-gathering methods in the War on Terror, of which he was an architect. These included secret wiretaps, enhanced interrogation (torture), waterboarding as standard practice, and removal of terrorist suspects from the normal judicial system, suspending their civil rights. This allowed, as in dictatorships, anyone dubbed a terrorist to be held, without formal charges, at the disposal of the Executive Branch.

Cheney was also among the earliest proponents of invading Iraq on what would, for the most part, turn out to be false pretenses. As such, he was also a chief architect of the Iraq War, which later expanded into the Middle East War, basically a US war of aggression on the Middle East.  

The extent of his power in government was underscored by his public disagreement with Bush over same-sex marriage. Bush originally endorsed civil unions between people of the same sex. Cheney openly and publicly disagreed with him and backed amended legislation to ban same-sex marriage. It is telling that Bush later the same year (2004) lent his support to the ban. This was unlikely to have surprised Washington insiders, however, since many of them reported that few if any administration decisions were made without Cheney’s okay.

Liz and Dick Cheney, lone Republicans at J-6 observance

In short, Cheney is the sort of far-right Republican that liberal Democrats love to hate. Indeed, many of the policies that would have his full-throated approval are precisely of the sort that would normally appeal to the MAGA base. Furthermore, his daughter is very much of his same bent, and during the four years that Trump was president and Liz Cheney was a representative, she voted in lockstep with Trump policies ninety-three percent of the time.

So, in other words, what has led both Liz Cheney and, now, her father, to write Trump off as what Liz calls an “unrecoverable catastrophe” has little to do with government policy and everything to do with Trump’s dictatorial designs. Both Cheneys have been done with him since January Sixth, 2021. That was the deal-breaker, as was his refusal to concede defeat and maintain the two-and-a-half-century democratic tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.

That is to say, no matter how far to the right father and daughter might be, they are, nevertheless, patriots, who believe in representative democracy, and in their oaths to defend the Constitution and the Nation against all enemies both foreign and domestic. And they see Trump in the same way I and many other small-d democrats do, as a clear and present danger to democracy and to the survival of the Nation. Or, as Liz Cheney succinctly put it in a recent interview, "We see it on a daily basis, somebody (Trump) who was willing to use violence in order to attempt to seize power, to stay in power, someone who represents unrecoverable catastrophe, frankly, in my view, and we have to do everything possible to ensure that he's not reelected."

All I can say is, “Amen.”