November 6, 2025

BYRON YORK: Dick Cheney’s complicated legacy.

Trump called the Iraq war “a big, fat mistake,” and Republican crowds applauded. He called the entire Bush-Cheney administration a “disaster.” He dumped all over the Bush-Cheney legacy and went on to win the Republican nomination. Things had changed.

Still, Cheney actually supported Trump as the Republican nominee in 2016. Only after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot did Cheney declare Trump a “coward” and a “threat to our republic.” Cheney ultimately cast his last vote for president for Kamala Harris in 2024.

By then, Cheney’s brand of Republican politics, whatever you might think of it, had receded far into the past. The man who was Gerald Ford’s chief of staff half a century earlier could find no place in today’s GOP politics. The bitter irony was that Cheney, with the misadventure in Iraq and the calamitous end of the Bush-Cheney administration, had himself contributed to creating Trump’s Republican Party.

Bush’s “misadventure in Iraq” might be remembered a bit differently, if Obama hadn’t thrown all of America’s gains away for a 2012 reelection selling point.

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll