How liberals learned to love Dick Cheney

Former US congresswoman Liz Cheney was the first to break the news that has warmed liberal America’s heart. During a conversation at the Texas Tribune Festival on Friday, she announced that her father, Republican bigwig Dick Cheney, is not only refusing to back Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, ahead of November’s presidential election – he is also going to vote for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris instead.

Dick Cheney himself then followed up his daughter’s revelation with a statement that could have been written by Harris’s campaign team:

‘In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.’

Since then, elite liberals have fallen over themselves to praise Cheney for his supposed wisdom, good sense and all-round decency. Harris welcomed Cheney’s endorsement, with her campaign chief saying she ‘deeply respects his courage to put country over party’. CNN’s John King praised him as a ‘patriot’. Even veteran leftist Bernie Sanders felt moved to ‘applaud the Cheneys for their courage in defending democracy’.

Given the kind words heading Cheney’s way from America’s liberals and leftists, you could be forgiven for thinking that they must be talking about a different Dick Cheney from the one most of us remember. But as incredible as it may seem, they really are sanctifying and celebrating that Dick Cheney. The man who, as George HW Bush’s defence secretary and later George W Bush’s vice-president, they once loved to loathe – the man they came to regard as the most sinister member of Dubya’s cabinet in particular.

Cheney’s dreadful reputation was well-deserved. He was a lead architect of the catastrophic Iraq War. In the run-up to the invasion in 2003 and afterwards, he relentlessly promoted claims about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, for which he knew there was no evidence. He said Iraqi tyrant Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, in full knowledge that US intelligence agencies could find nothing to back this up. He insisted on a link between Iraq’s Ba’athist regime and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, again in full knowledge that there was no proof of any link. In short, he played a lead role in willfully deceiving the American public in order to wage a war that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, destabilised an entire region and created the conditions in which brutal Islamist terrorists like Islamic State could flourish.

Cheney’s record of wrongdoing doesn’t stop there. He also licensed the de facto torture of terror suspects, helped drive the opening of a prison at Guantánamo Bay and shamelessly pushed for the large-scale surveillance of US citizens’ phone calls and emails, as part of what became known as the Terrorist Surveillance Programme. In the words of the Atlantic from 2011, Cheney was a ‘self-aggrandising criminal who used his knowledge as a Washington insider to subvert both informed public debate about matters of war and peace and to manipulate presidential decisionmaking’.

Of course, large sections of the Democratic establishment also supported the Iraq War, as well as the post-9/11 surveillance state. But more principled liberals have long – rightly – seen Cheney as the architect of a bloody folly and an unabashed authoritarian.

For good measure, he also managed to do the very thing Trump is so despised for. In the eyes of liberals at least, Cheney helped Bush to steal an election. That’s right, for over 20 years, many Democrats have remained convinced that George W Bush and Cheney ‘stole’ the 2000 presidential election from Al Gore, by purging thousands of registered voters from voter rolls and even staging ‘a riot’ to shut down a recount in Florida.

For all of these reasons and more, Cheney was ‘despised’ by liberal America, as the Guardian notes. He was seen as the profoundly illiberal power behind George W Bush’s dark throne, driving the US into the hell of the Iraq War. As the Atlantic once put it, ‘Few political figures in history have been so reviled’.

But this all began to change in the early 2020s, when Cheney first started to publicly criticise Trump. His interventions then were largely in support of his virulently anti-Trump daughter, Liz, who was then being marginalised by the Trump-supporting GOP. Nevertheless, that was all it took for the liberal revulsion towards Dick Cheney to start to melt away. And now, following his endorsement of Kamala and his characterisation of Trump as a semi-fascist threat to the republic, Cheney is reborn.

The destruction of Iraq, the crushing of civil liberties at home, even the supposedly ‘stolen’ vote. None of that seems to matter to liberals any more. We’ve seen this kind of sudden rehabilitation happen with other warmongers, too – from John McCain to even George W Bush himself, feted today for his friendship with the sainted Michelle Obama and transformed into a cuddly elder statesman.

This is one of the grotesque ironies of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Democrats’ fear and loathing of Trump and his supporters is so vehement that they are willing to whitewash the actions of genuinely wretched politicians like Cheney – and to ditch all the criticisms of him and others they were making all of five minutes ago.

Anti-Trumpism absolves all sins, it seems. What a shallow, unprincipled bunch America’s liberal elite has become.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.