Recommendations of the Editorial team
Dick Cheney, the 46th Vice President of the United States, began reshaping the office of president while I was in college. Quietly, methodically and with no intention of returning it to its old form. Today, as a presidential historian, I study the system he left behind.
When I heard the news of Cheney’s death reading through complications of pneumonia and cardiovascular disease, I thought: By trying to take back executive power after Watergate, Cheney was overloading it. He circumvented legal boundaries, rewrote internal rules and created a presidential office that could overtake any control.
Donald Trump, the 47th president, now commands this system. While Cheney calculatedly and strategically expanded presidential powers, Trump ripped out the safeguards, ignored the controls, and exploited the system for purposes that even Cheney later warned against. 2024, fueled by one final spark – patriotism? Fear? Admission of a design flaw? – Cheney condemned what he himself had created. Meanwhile, his president, George W. Bush, Trump’s Republican predecessor, remained inactive. He refused to show up, to support, to shake Trump’s hand.
Cheney as an architect of power
Bush signed the orders, but Cheney was the architect. He set out to undo everything that had limited his career: he eliminated post-Watergate laws on surveillance, warfare and secrecy, memo by memo. He gutted the War Powers Resolution, bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, turned the Office of Legal Counsel into a weaponry for legal justifications, and declared the office of vice president sacrosanct – subject to neither executive nor legislative oversight. And because this was mostly done in footnotes, the machinery worked. Often illegal, but efficient.
The infamous post-9/11 torture memo — “Standards of Conduct for Interrogation,” written by John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee — defined torture so narrowly that waterboarding and sleep deprivation were suddenly legal. When Congress requested documents on the torture program and surveillance without a court order, Cheney’s team invoked “absolute immunity” – including for himself. When the courts objected, the proceedings were delayed until the end of the term.
The machine continued to run
Executive privilege became the default position, delays in the Freedom of Information Act became a tactic, and control was systematically circumvented. It was a stress test for democracy – and the system held up. Cheney made sure there was no need for a single operator. It could survive changes of government and expand in crises. Trump’s impunity was therefore less a break with Cheney’s vision than its success.
Trump didn’t invent the expansion of presidential power – it was Cheney’s work. Its legal basis still applies today. The surveillance instruments are active, the war powers have not been revoked, and the emergency powers remain limitless. The only difference: the sound. Trump abandoned the pretext of national security. He ran the presidency the way Cheney had designed it – only louder and without lawyers.
A legacy of irresponsibility
Finally, Cheney – following his daughter Liz – broke with Trump and supported Kamala Harris in 2024. Republicans turned away from him, his family and his legacy – but not from surveillance, torture and abuse of power. Cheney was particularly outraged by the storming of the Capitol on January 6th. Trump, he said, should “never be given power again.” But by then the system had long since been diverted: power without law, authority without accountability, a presidential office that its holder could shape at will.
This is Cheney’s legacy. Not just what he did. But what he made possible.