Why Americans refused to believe Dick Cheney about Trump

Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney — who passed away on Monday night at the age of 84 — spent his final year warning Americans about President Donald Trump and unsuccessfully campaigning against him. But one author says Cheney's legacy made it impossible for his message to reach Americans.

In a Tuesday op-ed for the New York Times, Ron Suskind — who wrote "The One Percent Doctrine" about the George W. Bush administration — argued that Cheney set an example of what runaway executive power looked like, making his criticisms of Trump during the 2024 election ring hollow. He likened the Trump presidency to the Bush administration's War on Terror — "without the war."

"[Cheney] wrote a playbook of how to exercise executive authority beyond constitutional boundaries and the rule of law," Suskind wrote. "Donald Trump has added pages and is working on a sequel."

According to Suskind, Cheney blazed the trail that Trump later walked by plowing ahead with the controversial invasion of Iraq, imposition of mass surveillance infrastructure and declaration of emergencies to circumvent traditional means of implementing policy. The author also pointed out that Cheney bulldozed his way through Republicans not on board with his vision, like former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman. And like Trump, Cheney also pursued costly tax cuts that were overwhelmingly beneficial to the very wealthy.

"Disastrous as those all actions were, Mr. Trump has undertaken even more significant expansions of power and illegality, often under even more dubious claims of emergency," Suskind wrote. "... Mr. Cheney made it possible."

Suskind pointed out that Cheney's red line for Trump was the January 6, 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol. And he observed that Cheney's eventual endorsement of then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election was a "remarkable development." However, by then, he argued that "it was too late" for him to persuade anyone, since he "had done as much as anyone in history to undermine Americans’ trust in their institutions and leaders."

"A false case for war will do that. So will the worst financial crash in 80 years, whose consequences middle- and working-class Americans were left to suffer unblunted," Suskind wrote. "Many of them went on to join Mr. Trump’s army of grievance and anger."

"For all his belatedly discovered democratic principles, Mr. Cheney helped to create the world that Mr. Trump inhabits," he added. "The contempt he showed for any constraints on his power paved the way for Mr. Trump and the contempt he now shows for everything but his own naked interest."

Click here to read Suskind's full New York Times op-ed (subscription required).