What Trump took from Dick Cheney’s political playbook

Dick Cheney, the former vice president who died on Tuesday, dramatically expanded the powers of the US presidency in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. More than two decades later, Donald Trump is using the political clout that Cheney built as an effective tool to advance his national priorities — even as the two men have had nasty personality clashes over the direction of the Republican Party.

Cheney’s experience in US government extends back to Richard Nixon’s White House, and he honed his theories about 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 Al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—the most critical moment of American national unity and clarity of purpose since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II—to restructure the foundations of executive power.

“Cheney freed Bush to fight the ‘war on terror’ as he saw fit, driven by a shared belief that government must shake off its old habits of restraint,” former Washington Post reporter Barton Gelman wrote in his 2008 book, Angler, about Cheney’s time as vice president.

Now Donald Trump, who inherited those expanded presidential powers, is using them to advance his own political agenda. It is an agenda that has shocked segments of the American public the way it once shocked Cheney, but at times it has been at odds with policies and priorities that Cheney once supported.

While Trump cites “national emergencies” to justify his actions, there is nothing close to 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, Cheney in his final years warned of the danger Trump posed to the nation, especially after Trump’s attempts to challenge his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. In 2024, Cheney said he supports Democrat Kamala Harris.

He added: “There has never been a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.” “As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution.”

For his part, Trump described Cheney as “the king of endless, senseless wars that waste lives and trillions of dollars.”

But the parallels between Cheney and Trump and their expansive deployment of presidential power extend across the American political landscape – in the use of US military force abroad, in the ability to detain and transfer noncitizens, and in the development and expansion of the use of US surveillance power, including a focus on perceived domestic threats.

“The president’s powers to protect our country are absolutely fundamental and will not be questioned,” Stephen Miller, a longtime Trump adviser who is now deputy chief of staff, said during a 2017 television interview. It’s a phrase Cheney might have said when he was at the top of American politics.

Although Trump has repudiated Cheney’s interventionist foreign policy and the Iraq War that he oversaw, he – like Cheney – has demonstrated his willingness to use American military power abroad in a way that often flouts attempts at censorship.

Fire Air strikes on Iran in JuneHe justified this with warnings of a growing nuclear threat from a regional rival, echoing the same logic used by Cheney at the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003.

In recent months, the Trump administration has designated drug traffickers as “enemy combatants,” which they are Conduct an ongoing campaign Destruction of boats suspected of drug smuggling in international waters. They say lethal military attacks are necessary to protect American national security.

According to a Washington Post report, Trump’s Justice Department informed Congress that the White House did not need congressional approval to continue these strikes, despite the requirements governing the use of force set forth in the 1974 War Powers Resolution.

Critics accused the Cheney-Bush administration of expanding the limits of the 2001 authorization of military force in the “War on Terror” to allow US military operations against suspected terrorists around the world. Now Trump is using similar means – drones and missiles – without even that little veil of congressional approval.

Another key aspect of Cheney’s foreign policy is the reliance on “extraordinary deportations” of suspected terrorists arrested abroad or on US soil in order to avoid the jurisdiction of US district courts in individual cases.

The Bush administration built a massive facility at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba in order to detain these individuals indefinitely, and struck deals with foreign governments to operate “black sites” where interrogations could be conducted without judges interfering with the legality of the activities.

During his second term in office, Trump took similar steps to avoid judicial review of his efforts to detain and deport illegal immigrants on U.S. soil. He expanded the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to house deportees and struck deals with foreign governments to receive deported individuals.

Although some US courts have issued injunctions to halt removals, their ability to review the merits of such actions has been limited.

“The Constitution charges the president, not federal district courts, with engaging in foreign diplomacy and protecting the nation from foreign terrorists, including by enforcing their impeachment,” Trump’s lawyers said in one case before the US Supreme Court.

Trump also threatened to use the US Department of Justice’s domestic surveillance and investigative capabilities that Cheney strengthened and expanded more than 20 years ago to fight what he called “the enemy within.”

While the Bush administration used these powers to infiltrate Muslim communities suspected of harboring extremist views, Trump has called for a national crackdown on the unorganized left-wing movement Antifa, which he says has resorted to violence in its demonstrations against the president’s right-wing policies.

The government’s surveillance powers have also focused on foreign nationals with legal permission to enter the United States — revoking residency permits and work visas for those the administration considers to hold anti-American or anti-Semitic views.

Within hours of Cheney’s death on Tuesday, flags at the White House were flown at half-mast, a display of national mourning mandated by federal law. However, the move obscures the dramatic rift that has developed between the conservative old guard under Cheney and the new Republican Party that Trump has shaped in his image.

While tributes to the late Vice President continued at a steady pace, Trump remained noticeably silent.

But the current president has not hesitated to criticize Cheney and his interventionist foreign policy views in the past. He has frequently clashed with Cheney’s daughter, Liz, who has become an outspoken critic of Trump and in 2021 served as vice chair of the congressional committee investigating his conduct during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.

Trump and Cheney have been at odds for more than a decade since the latter left public office for the last time. But those clashes were over policies and personalities. And on presidential power — the scope of executive power and the necessity for the White House to act forcefully when necessary — they were singing the same hymn.

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