Anthony ZurcherNorth America correspondent
BBC
Dick Cheney, the former vice-president who died on Tuesday, dramatically expanded the powers of the US presidency in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks. More than two decades later, Donald Trump is wielding the political levers Cheney constructed as a potent tool to advance his national priorities – even as the two men had nasty personal clashes over the direction of the Republican Party.
Cheney’s experience in US government stretched back to Richard Nixon’s White House, and he honed his theories of presidential powers over decades of experience in the corridors of power in Congress and during multiple Republican administrations.
As vice-president during the George W Bush administration, he used the Al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon – the most consequential moment of American national unity and clarity of purpose since the Japanese Pearl Harbor attack of World War Two – to restructure the foundations of executive authority.
“Cheney freed Bush to fight the ‘war on terror’ as he saw fit, driven by a shared belief that the government had to shake off old habits of self-restraint,” former Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman writes in Angler, his 2008 book on Cheney’s time as vice-president.
AP
Cheney worked as chief of staff in the White House for President Gerald Ford in the 1970s
Now Donald Trump, who has inherited those expanded presidential powers, is using them to pursue his own political agenda. It’s an agenda that has shocked portions of the American public the way Cheney’s once did, but one that has, at times, run counter to the policies and priorities Cheney once endorsed.
And while Trump cites “national emergencies” to justify his actions, there is nothing near the national unity or sense of crisis that gripped America in the wake of 9/11.
Despite spending decades concentrating power in the White House, in the later years of his life Cheney warned of the danger Trump posed to the nation, particularly after Trump’s attempts to challenge his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. In 2024, Cheney said he supported Democrat Kamala Harris.
“There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” he said. “As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution.”
Trump, for his part, called Cheney “the king of endless, nonsensical wars, wasting lives and trillions of dollars”.
How Trump mirrors Cheney’s playbook
The parallels between Cheney and Trump and their expansive deployment of presidential authority, however, stretch across the breath of the American political landscape – in the use of American military power overseas, the ability to detain and transport non-citizens, and in the development and expanded use of US surveillance power, including focusing on perceived domestic threats.
“The powers of the president to protect our country are very substantia
Read More