The Cheney Endorsement
The Cheney Endorsement
If the Cheneys wanted to hurt Donald Trump electorally then they should have endorsed him instead of Kamala Harris
I was browsing Reddit the other day and came across a comment about Dick and Liz Cheney endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president instead of Donald Trump. This is notable because Dick Cheney was the former Republican vice president in the George W. Bush regime, and Liz Cheney was a former Republican U.S. representative; yet neither is supporting the Republican nominee in 2024. The Reddit comment said something to the effect of, “The literal devil is endorsing Harris over Trump, if that doesn’t make Trump supporters come to their senses then nothing will.” Given the premise, the conclusion drawn here seems to be the exact opposite of what it should be: If Harris is being endorsed by “the devil,” then perhaps it’s Harris’s supporters who should reconsider their choice.
I know that it makes very little sense to hyper-focus on one random comment from one random person on the internet, and this one may even be satire or trolling, but this is, less subtly, the narrative the corporate media is going with on the topic. From Politico:
Charlie Sykes, a former conservative radio talk show host in Wisconsin who is now anti-Trump, said the “one-two punch” of Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s endorsement gives conservatives wavering on Trump consent to back Harris. And while others in Trump’s administration who have broken with the former president have been reluctant to endorse a liberal Democrat, including former Vice President Mike Pence, the endorsement of someone like Dick Cheney carries significant weight.
“Both living Republican ex-vice presidents are now saying they’re not going to vote for Donald Trump. And one of them, a two-term Republican vice president, is saying he’s going to vote for Kamala Harris,” Sykes added. “That clearly creates this permission dynamic.”
The narrative is that staunch Republicans like the Cheneys supporting Kamala Harris should give those Republicans who are uncomfortable about supporting Donald Trump the kick in the pants they need to switch their vote over to the Democratic Party this once. And yet it was Dick Cheney who was in large part responsible for the disastrous War on Terror under the Bush regime, where the United States went to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq because some Saudi terrorists, likely with support from at least some sectors of the America-allied Saudi government, attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001. And yet, with the benefit of hindsight of the cost in lives and money and the decreased credibility of the U.S. government internationally, both Cheneys still openly claim the War on Terror was the right policy, and that successive presidents simply didn’t fight it hard enough. They both still support the torture of random people that the U.S. engaged in during the War on Terror. I say random because there is no way to know whether these people were innocent civilians or combatants because you can torture someone into saying whatever you want them to say just to make the torture stop. And, if you hate the economy and the inflation we’re currently living with today, then just imagine how much better off you and your family might be today had we not listened to Dick Cheney in 2001 and blown trillions of dollars on the War on Terror.
These are the people whose sober judgment we are being told to respect in terms of who to support for president. If the people who still think torture and the War on Terror were a good idea are telling me that Kamala Harris is the best choice for president, then that tells me that Kamala Harris is probably the last person who should ever be anywhere near the White House.
Somewhat of an aside, but, given that Dick Cheney was the embodiment of pure evil to Democrats for well over a decade, it will be interesting to see the inevitable rehabilitation of Donald Trump among Democrats in the future when he is no longer a political threat to them and some other Republican is the new “literal Hitler.” If it can happen to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the worst president and vice president of my lifetime by far, then it can and almost certainly will happen to Donald Trump. I bet the rehabilitation takes even less time for Trump than it did for Bush or Cheney.