Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:12 pm
You’ve been warned, America.
Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential pick Governor Mike Pence told ABC’s This Week he holds former Republican VP Dick Cheney “in really high regard in his role as vice president” and like Cheney, he aspires to be “a very active vice president.”
Former Vice President Dick Cheney is widely regarded as the architect of the Iraq War.
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Dick Cheney, the man who ran George W. Bush, is Pence’s role model.
“I frankly hold Dick Cheney in really high regard in his role as vice president and as an American,” Gov. Pence said in the walk and talk part of his ABC This Week interview.
Pence laid out why Cheney was a good role model, saying he hopes to be “a very active vice president.”
“Vice President Cheney had experience in Congress as I do, and he was very active in working with members of the House and the Senate.”
Martha Raddatz pointed out that Cheney was criticized for being too influential over Bush, and Pence replied that he admired vice presidents who “take the vision” of the president to those who craft policy so he can help Trump “make America great again.”
Cheney has widely been cited as the most influential vice president in history. NPR listed a few of the reasons why:
In the first term, Cheney reshaped national security law, expanded the prerogatives of the executive branch and orchestrated secret, warrantless domestic surveillance, circumventing a court set up by Congress specifically to oversee such surveillance. He presented the president with options that led to a shutdown of negotiations with North Korea, and played a major role in persuading President Bush to go to war against Iraq.
On the domestic front, he screened potential Supreme Court nominees, presided over the budget, led the selection of personnel from Cabinet officers to key lower-level positions. Without the president’s knowledge, he engineered the rewriting of the president’s tax bill so it included a capital gains tax break that the president had initially rejected. With the president’s knowledge, he led an industry-friendly revamping of energy and environmental regulations.
Without the president’s knowledge, he rewrote the tax bill…
Mike Pence is in no way going to be able to control Donald Trump like Dick Cheney controlled George w Bush, after all Pence couldn’t even handle a Trump peddling birtherism question in the sit down portion of this interview. But here he is citing the power-grabbing Cheney as a role model.
Pence aspires to be Dick Cheney, which in and of itself should disqualify him from the VP position.
Pence doesn’t view Congress as a separate branch, but rather a place he would park himself to shape Trump policy.
Former President George H. W. Bush criticized Dick Cheney as serving his son George W. Bush poorly, saying Cheney “built his own empire” and asserted too much “hard-line” influence.
Cheney was out there pushing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and used that as a reason to invade. Iraq did not have wmds. As experts acknowledge, “The strategic mistake since going into Iraq was all theirs. The mistake was going in.”
Going in was Cheney’s mistake. And Pence wants to be like Cheney.
Dick Cheney may be a lot of things, but he is not an aspirational version of a vice president to anyone who values the three branches of government, freedom, liberty, American values, the Constitution, etc. He is simply not a role model anyone should admit to.
Basically the Trump Pence ticket is the ticket in which the presidential nominee admires the leadership of dictators and the vice presidential nominee admires the vice president who most resembled a power-mad dictator.
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