Dick Cheney Enabled Trump’s Abuse of Presidential Power

When I started college, Dick Cheney, the 46th vice president of the United States, was already rebuilding the presidency — quietly, methodically, and with no intention of returning it in its previous form. Today, as a presidential historian, I study the system he left behind. That’s what I thought when I woke up to the news that Cheney had died from complications of pneumonia and cardiovascular disease: By setting out to reclaim executive authority after Watergate, Cheney supercharged it — circumventing legal limits, rewriting internal rules, and building a presidency that could outpace oversight.

Donald Trump, the 47th president, now commands that system. Where Cheney was shrewd and calculating in expanding the powers of the presidency, Trump ripped out the circuit breakers, ignored the controls, and turned it to purposes even Cheney would later warn against. In 2024, animated by a final flicker of — what, patriotism? fear? design error? — Cheney condemned what he helped make. Meanwhile, his president, Trump’s predecessor from the same party, George W. Bush, sat idly and did little more than refuse — refuse to stump, refuse to endorse, refuse to shake Trump’s hand.

Bush signed the orders, of course, but Cheney was the architect. He claimed the rollbacks to undo everything that had constrained his career: dismantling post-Watergate limits on surveillance, war-making, and secrecy one classified memo at a time. He hollowed out the War Powers Resolution, circumvented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, turned the Office of Legal Counsel into a weapons lab tasked not with checking power but designing classified memos to licence it, and declared the vice presidency exempt from both executive and legislative oversight. And because it was done mostly in footnotes, the machine ran. Illegally, often, but at an efficient clip.

The administration’s notorious post-9/11 torture memo — Standards of Conduct for Interrogation, drafted by Office of Legal Counsel lawyer John Yoo and signed by his boss Jay Bybee — recast torture so narrowly that waterboarding and sleep deprivation were deemed legal. When Congress tried to enforce subpoenaed records on the torture program and warrantless surveillance, Cheney’s legal team invoked “absolute immunity” for senior White House staff — including his own. When courts disagreed, they stalled until the term ended.

Executive privilege became a default posture. Freedom of Information Act delays were strategic. Oversight was structurally evaded. It was a systems test. And the system held. 

Cheney ensured the system didn’t rely on a single operator. It could survive transitions. It could expand with every emergency. Trump’s impunity, then, was less a departure from Cheney’s vision than proof of its enduring success.

Trump did not invent expanding presidential power. It was Cheney. The legal theories he pursued still hold. The surveillance tools are still operational. The war authorizations haven’t expired. The emergency powers remain open-ended. The only difference is tone. Trump made no pretense of national security. He ran the presidency the way Cheney designed it — only louder, and without the lawyers.

Eventually, Cheney — following his daughter and former House member Liz’s lead — broke with Trump, and even endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The Republican Party turned on him, his family, and his legacy. Not, of course, on the surveillance, torture, and most notably, executive overreach. It was the Jan. 6 insurrection Cheney took the greatest issue with, insisting that Trump could “never be trusted with power again.” But by then, the system had already been rerouted: power without law, authority without accountability, a presidency that could be anything its occupant claimed it to be.

That’s the legacy. Not just what Dick Cheney did — but what he made possible.