The United States on Thursday buried its 46th vice president, a man who represented the old guard of the Republican Party, and feuded publicly with President Donald Trump over what he saw as Trump’s disdain for the Constitution, disrespect for democratic values and eschewing the rule of law.
Richard “Dick” Cheney served as VP under then-President George W Bush from 2001 to 2009, and previously held various posts including Secretary of Defense and Chief of Staff under George H.W. Bush, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, now all deceased. He had a ten-year tenure in the House of Representatives, and in all, he served continuously in Washington in some capacity from 1969 to 2009.
While a Republican icon of old, he broke in dramatic fashion with the new, populist, isolationist MAGA version of the party after Trump was defeated in 2020 and refused to accept the results, fomenting an insurrection on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6 2021.
Cheney’s daughter Liz, then the Chair of the House Republican Conference and holding the same Wyoming district seat her father had held for 10 years, called out Trump for eroding American democratic values in that riot, voted for his second impeachment, but paid a heavy political price for it. Trump directed vast campaign funds to her opponent for re-election in 2022 and she was defeated.
Cheney endorsed Trump’s opponent, Democrat Kamala Harris, in the 2024 elections. In a 2022 political TV ad, he said: “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said, calling him a “coward.”
“A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big. I know it. He knows it, and deep down, I think most Republicans know it.”
Neither Trump nor Vice President J.D. Vance were invited to the funeral.
In the National Cathedral in Washington, along with her family members and former president Bush, Liz Cheney remarked in her eulogy that her father “knew that bonds of party must always yield to the single bond we share as Americans” and said he always “put country over party.”
Also in attendance were Harris, former President Joe Biden, and a host of other Democrats.
The gruff-talking Cheney was remembered as one of the last surviving Cold Warriors, facing down Soviet expansionism and what his breed deemed as a constant Communist threat. Liz Cheney remained a staunch supporter of Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky throughout Moscow’s unprovoked invasion.
In his eulogy, Bush offered several veiled attacks on the current president, talking of Cheney’s lack of ego and self-promotion, and noted that, “his time produced an old breed of public servant, defined by their substance and character.”
In true form, the 41st president also injected a little cowboy humor in his remarks, saying of “the only person from America’s Mountain West elected to national office”:
“He wasn’t your standard-issue politician. If any voters came up hoping for a kind word and a hug, they’d have to settle for the kind word.”