Washington Wednesday: Legacies of power

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 5th of November.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

First up: the legacy of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

CHENEY: Mr. Chairman, delegates and fellow citizens, I am honored by your nomination, and I accept it. [cheers]

Dick Cheney 25 years ago … a few months ahead of an election that would make him the 46th vice president of the United States.

EICHER: As you heard at the top of the program, Cheney died Monday at the age of 84.

Before becoming VP … Cheney already had an impressive resume long before.

He worked under Donald Rumsfeld in the Nixon administration. And President Gerald Ford hired Cheney as chief of staff when Cheney was just 34. To this day, he’s the youngest person ever to hold that post.

MAST: Congressman Dick Cheney later represented Wyoming for 10 years.

And he served as defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush.

But of course, he’s best remembered as right hand man to Bush 43 — President George W. Bush.

And many regard him as the most powerful VP in American history. Here’s Cheney speaking at an event in 2014.

CHENEY:  I think isolationism is, is, uh, crazy. Anybody who went through 9-11, uh, who thinks we can retreat behind our oceans and will be safe and secure is, is I'm, I'm sorry, but they're out to lunch.

As vice president, he helped shape U.S. policy after the 9/11 attacks … and was by some accounts, the driving force behind the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 … to disarm Saddam Hussein.

And in the eyes of many, it was his role in that decision that, for better or for worse, will forever define his legacy.

EICHER: Dick Cheney was a symbol of loyalty, power, and paradox. His long partnership with the Bush family … and specifically President George W. Bush began to fray after a disagreement over Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby. Libby was convicted in 2007 of perjury and obstruction of justice in the leak of the identity of a CIA operative. The story goes that when President Bush refused to give Libby a pardon, Cheney accused Bush of “leaving a soldier on the battlefield.”

2018 SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS, BRIEFING: REPORTER “What was it that convinced him that Scooter Libby deserved a pardon?” 

SANDERS: The president thought it was the right thing to do.

More than a decade later, it was Donald Trump who finally granted Libby that pardon. And yet Cheney would later repay the favor by denouncing Trump as a threat to constitutional norms—which, interestingly, was the same charge Democrats had leveled against Cheney throughout his entire career.

Fast forward to last year, in what would be his final vote in a presidential election, Cheney cast his vote for Kamala Harris.

Joining us now is political scientist and WORLD Opinions contributor Hunter Baker. Hunter, good morning.

BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: So, Hunter, to me, that story arc really shows how Cheney’s power peaked and then waned: First as architect of the Bush foreign policy after 9/11, and later as that same interventionist worldview came under fire, from within his own party.

What do you say will be Dick Cheney’s legacy?

BAKER: Really, one of the notable careers in Washington. You're talking about a guy, he's almost like a character in a movie, and of course, they did make a movie about him called Vice. But he was chief of staff to Gerald Ford at the age of 34— now just think about that. Went on to have, not long after that, something like four or five heart attacks. He held all these responsible positions: a notable congressman from Wyoming, then the Secretary of Defense under the first Bush and Vice President under the second Bush. And he is originally identifiable as kind of a cold warrior, somebody who wants to make sure we can fight the Russians, but then somebody who is part of that post-Reagan glow, when Americans were filled with confidence that we could do anything, and that our values were ascendant in the world, and that we could take them anywhere and transform any population. 

And after September 11, he was one of the architects of the policy to go to the Middle East to “liberate” the people there and to remove the radical threats of the type that had caused September 11. That was his legacy, but it's a legacy that was very much tarnished with our failures in the Middle East, and then with the rejection of the type of party of which he was a part by Donald Trump. Donald Trump had different ideas for what the Republican Party would be, and voters have seemingly embraced the new Trump party over against the old Cheney/Bush party.

MAST: Back in 2014, Dick Cheney spoke with commentator Bill Kristol about what he saw as America’s increasing weakness on the world stage. It was five years after he left office, as the Obama administration wound down the wars he helped launch.

Cheney warned that the United States was in “a period of considerable danger,” that the military was being cut back, and that the country needed a president willing to project strength. Here’s a clip from that interview with the now-defunct Weekly Standard magazine.

CHENEY: So I think we’re entering a period of considerable danger with the United States that relative to other nations is weaker than we ought to be, that our military force is being dramatically reduced when it shouldn’t be and what we need is strong leadership. And we need a President and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat… We really need a strong leader, and we need somebody who can step up and remind the world what the United States is capable of and demonstrate the ability and the willingness to do that.

MAST: Hunter, ten years after he said that, as we’ve noted, Cheney strongly opposed Donald Trump—the very candidate who built his appeal around strength. How do you read that reversal?

BAKER: There's a couple of things. First of all, I think that a lot of people forget that Trump's post-2020 election behavior struck a lot of people as dangerous as sort of a subversion of our constitutional norms and the peaceful transfer of power. And Cheney's daughter, in particular, Liz Cheney, a congresswoman, she really doubled down in her opposition to Trump after that happened, and I think that Cheney basically backed his daughter's play. What ended up happening, though, was that she was overwhelmingly rejected by Wyoming voters after having done that. 

And I think that Cheney took that personally to the point that he would do something, to me which would be inconceivable for a person like him. You're talking about someone who was a constitutionalist, you know, in favor of states rights and smaller government, and who then turns around and says that he's supporting Kamala Harris, who would be the type of person who would see Cheney himself as Darth Vader, as bad as it gets himself a major threat to the American Constitution and our way of life. And so I can really only explain his support for Kamala Harris as something personal in kind of reacting to what happened to his daughter.

EICHER: A new front in President Trump’s foreign policy: Over the weekend, the president posted on social media that the U.S. should halt aid to Nigeria and designate it a country of particular concern. He cited the widespread killing of Christians in the country.

When asked about possible U.S. Military action in Nigeria, Trump said it’s possible.

TRUMP: They're killing record numbers of Christians in Nigeria. And they have very bad, you know that that part of the world very bad. They're killing the Christians and killing them in very large numbers. And we’re not going to allow that to happen.

Hunter, this does not strike me as a MAGA priority. What do you think is behind this decision to get tough with Nigeria?

BAKER: Well, what's going on in Nigeria has suddenly become a lot more prominent, largely because of the television host Bill Maher, who just pointed to the fact that, you know, something like 100,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria during the past several years. And he's sort of asking, Why are we so focused on what has happened in Gaza, when this same sort of thing, maybe worse has been happening in Nigeria.

MAHER: They are literally attempting to wipe out the Christian population of an entire country. Where are the kids protesting this?

So that has, that has kind of drawn a lot of eyeballs. And another thing to think of, as we look at this is what happened in Rwanda several, several years ago. You know, in Rwanda, we had this terrible genocide, and the United States did not do anything about it, and neither did anybody else, really. And you know, somewhere between half a million and a million people were killed in that genocide in Rwanda and a lot of different nations, including the United States, kind of looked at that and said, “Should we have done something? Did we make a mistake by just sitting back and watching this happen?” And so maybe as these questions are raised about Nigeria, we may be starting to wonder the same thing.

SPANBERGER: My fellow Virginians [cheers], tonight we sent a message [cheers, yes, we did] … We sent a message to the whole world, that in 2025, Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship [cheers out].

MAST: Before we go, Hunter, I guess it was not a big surprise, but the Democratic sweep last night began in Virginia, where Abigail Spanberger won the governorship. Moments later, Mikey Sherrill won the governor’s race in New Jersey, and then the biggest story has to be the one we were all anticipating—the victory of a Socialist mayor of the financial capital, New York City. Hunter, what do you look at historically to make sense of last night’s results?

BAKER: Throughout this campaign, I have found myself thinking about 2008 and 2009. In 2008 Barack Obama swept to an historic victory going to the White House, and a mere year later we had this same set of elections in Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, and in Virginia, the Republican Bob McDonnell won the governor's race by some 18 points. In New Jersey, a candidate named Chris Christie became the Republican governor of the state, and would be there for two terms. And in New York City, Michael Bloomberg would win his third term as the successor to Rudy Giuliani, who had two terms before him. 

The reason that I say this is is that it reminds me of now. We had Donald Trump in 2024 with a pretty convincing victory now followed a mere year later with significant bold action in the meantime, with these same sort of adverse results that Barack Obama experienced in 2009. All of this is to say is that some of these things are a little bit baked in. I think that Trump, like Obama, brings his electorate when he's on the ticket and when he's not on the ticket, his electorate is less energized, but at the same time, the people who were on the losing side of the campaign against him look to a midterm election like this as the time to strike back and the time to send a message. And it happened in 2009 and I think that we've just seen it happen in 2025.

EICHER: Well, to return to the point about Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect in New York City. This will certainly energize Democrats … but won’t it also have similar effects for Republicans … won’t they hang Mamdani around the necks of every purple state Democrat and tag the whole party as fully Socialist? Won’t there be a backlash to the backlash?

BAKER: Certainly going to be a big deal in American politics. You think about what the election of a single Congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, just a few years ago, has done in American politics. You know, she has sort of energized the left with her election, and she has been similarly radical in the way that Mamdani has been, and now he is occupying a much loftier perch as the new elected mayor of New York City. So it automatically elevates him in the American conscience. He is going to be covered by the media like you have not seen in a long time. You know, everything that he has to say. 

And, of course, there will be all kinds of fashion spreads and the celebrity treatment, you know, all of these sorts of things. So he's going to be front and center in everything that we and everything that we experience as Americans, and we'll see he either will generate a big backlash, or he may succeed in continuing to reshape the Democratic Party. So I'm not sure what happens next, but he he's going to be around and he's going to have an impact.

HOST: Hunter Baker is a political scientist and provost at North Greenville University. Hunter, thank you.

BAKER: Thank you.

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