Former Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed his own record launching an overseas war based on junk intelligence when he claimed Thursday that former President Donald Trump is the worst threat to the republic since the Declaration of Independence was signed.
On Thursday, endangered Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, whom the state GOP no longer recognizes as a Republican, published a video of her father’s endorsement.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” said the former vice president under George W. Bush.
“He lost his election, and he lost big,” Dick Cheney added, despite Trump only losing the 2020 contest by less than 50,000 votes across three tipping-point states. Nevertheless, Cheney said, “I know it, he knows it, and deep down I think most Republicans know it.”
The 81-year-old longtime presidential adviser, whose Washington resume stretches from the Ford White House to both Bush administrations, appeared in the one-minute ad less than two weeks before Liz Cheney faces primary voters at the ballot box. The three-term incumbent is up against Trump-endorsed attorney Harriet Hageman, who, according to a July poll sponsored by the Casper-Star Tribune, is up by 22 points.
During the second Bush administration, Dick Cheney was a “chief architect” of the Iraq war, sending American troops into a conflict that would last decades without an exit strategy. The invasion was launched under the pretense that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) based on U.S. intelligence. The classified information cited by the White House to justify the war however, turned out to be one of the worst intelligence failures in modern American history, if not the worst failure.
The oldest living former vice president’s assertion that Trump is the greatest threat to the republic in its existence, meanwhile, glosses over the dozens of historical figures who surely did more harm. Was Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy who oversaw a four-year insurrection, less of a threat than Donald Trump? Was John Wilkes Booth, who shot President Abraham Lincoln, less of a threat? What about Benedict Arnold?
It’s unlikely that Dick Cheney’s video will save Liz’s House seat. According to an Axios poll in March, less than 2 in 5 GOP Wyoming voters reported a favorable opinion of former vice president. Nearly half, 48 percent, said they view Dick Cheney unfavorably.
