On Thursday morning, shortly after entering the Washington National Cathedral for Dick Cheney's funeral, I ran into Rachel Maddow. She hugged me. A couple of minutes ago, a shocked usher told me that a famous liberal TV presenter was present at the event, although I didn’t quite believe it. But then yes, here it is. Rachel Maddow hugged me at Dick Cheney's funeral. Signal for pigs to fly. Hell may not have frozen over yet, but on a cloudy November morning in Donald Trump's beleaguered capital, there were moments when it seemed like it was.
Trump's takeover of the Republican Party—the party Cheney loved and served until Trump finally forced him to quit—was a decade in the making. But there is no better summation of the reordering of our politics in this era than the scene Thursday in that fine church where Washington commemorated the passing of its giants. Ready to say goodbye to the former vice president who shaped the post-9/11 world with a belief in the unfettered exercise of American power that made him perhaps the most divisive figure in public life before Trump were Nancy Pelosi and Dan Quayle, Mitch McConnell and Adam Schiff, James Carville and Karl Rove. Joe Biden took Amtrak out of Delaware even though it was his eighty-third birthday. Kamala Harris sat in the front row next to Mike Pence. While waiting for the service to begin, I exchanged pleasantries with Al Gore, Margaret Tutwiler, Elliot Abrams, and many other people whose names could be read in newspapers in the days when people read newspapers.
Trump or any senior members of his administration were completely absent from the event. Incumbent Vice President J.D. Vance was not invited. The Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, where Cheney served for ten years as a congressman from Wyoming, did not appear. Cheney wanted it to be this way. In his final years, he took great pride in following his daughter Liz out the door of a party that chose Trump's lies about the 2020 election over the simple truth of his defeat. As a result, the cathedral was not completely filled, as it would have been if our city and our country had not been so torn by strife, but it was not empty either. Politics moves forward; alliances change. You could fill a very large room with people who had not forgiven Cheney for the Iraq War but were nonetheless saddened by the passing of the man who dared to speak out about Trump. Many of the former vice president's Republicans agreed with him privately and said nothing publicly.
“I can’t believe Dick Cheney is involved in a national scam,” someone said as I entered. Why were they—we—all there? Of course, to see who else was there. It's still Washington. To remember? I'm less sure about this.
I've covered a number of these grand National Cathedral send-offs during this long Trump era. The first such event, which happened to John McCain in September 2018, was similar to resistance rallya clarion call to take up arms while the late senator, another Republican who turned renegade rather than bow to Trump, left him on the battlefield. It was a shock to see the president's daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner at the event, presenting themselves as emissaries of an establishment that did not want or acknowledge their intrusion. However, looking back, it was a simpler time. We know now what we didn't know then, which is that there will come a point when they stop wanting to crash the party, and that will be a real sign of the trouble we're in.
Most recently, in January, the state took place. Jimmy Carter's funeral. All the former presidents were there, and the shock then was to see Trump chatting with Barack Obama and laughing bravely back – a semblance of normalcy that seemed to belie the damning glares of the other, resolutely silent dignitaries sitting next to them. I wonder if this would be the case now when our previous leaders just pretended that everything would somehow be okay?
Nine months later, no one is pretending anymore. On Thursday morning, as mourners filed into the cathedral, Trump sent out nineteen posts on his social media platform lashing out at a recent video made by Democratic members of Congress urging military personnel to disobey illegal orders they may receive from the Trump administration. This, Trump insisted, was “seditious behavior punishable by DEATH!” Another post he shared suggested ways they should die. “HANG THEM,” he declared. “GEORGE WASHINGTON WAS!”
