NYT Reporter: “Dick Cheney’s Presidential Power Push Paved Way for Trump”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And now, from claiming emergency powers to imposing sweeping tariffs to ordering federal troops into American cities, President Trump’s use of executive authority is straining constitutional limits, according to many experts. In a recent New York Times article, journalist Charlie Savage traces the blueprint for Trump’s power grab back to the former vice president, Dick Cheney. Savage talks to Walter Isaacson about how Cheney set the stage for Trump and about his decision to back Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, despite his own solid Republican status.

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And Charlie Savage, welcome to the show.

CHARLIE SAVAGE: Thank you.

ISAACSON: Former Vice President Dick Cheney died last week, and you’ve written something about him. You’ve covered him before, dealt with him in books. But let me read a quote of yours, which is, “a central project in the political life of former Vice President Dick Cheney was his push to expand presidential power, and the legacy left became the groundwork for President Trump’s own aggressive efforts to concentrate and unleash executive authority.” Tell me about why Cheney believed that and how that has translated to President Trump.

SAVAGE: So, Vice President Dick Cheney had one of the longest and most storied political careers in modern American history. Everyone thinks of him these days as the vice president, the unusually powerful vice president to George W. Bush. But his career goes back to the Nixon and Ford administrations when he joined as an aide to Donald Rumsfeld in the Nixon administration, and quickly rose to become the 

youngest White House chief of staff in American history under Gerald Ford. And that was a unique period in the separation of powers story of American democracy. The power of the American presidency had been growing up since the end of World War II, during the early Cold War, under presidents of both power – parties, and the historian Athur Schlesinger Jr. famously called this escalation of unilateral authority and ebbing of congressional and judicial authority over government, the imperial presidency that peaked under Nixon and then collapsed because of the disasters of the Vietnam War, because of the Watergate scandal. And then because of congressional investigations into intelligence abuses under presidents of both parties, most notably the Church Committee Investigation.

And Congress kind of rewoke after a couple decades of doing very little as its power was being ebbed and started reimposing checks and balances on the American presidency, passing a series of laws framing and constraining what a president could do. And everything from spending money to starting wars, to wiretapping people, and much more. So from inside the Ford White House, from inside the beating heart of executive power that did not look like a necessary constitutional correction to Dick Cheney. It looked like an outrage. He thought that the American presidency was being weakened unnecessarily and unwisely, and that that in turn would weaken America. And so for the remainder of his career, he became a strong proponent of restoring in his point of, from his point of view, the imperial presidency. Expanding executive power, getting rid of checks and balances that had been imposed by Congress in the seventies and refighting those wars and winning them this time.

ISAACSON: So let’s explain what he figured out the president could or should do unilaterally, and how that echoes with what President Trump is doing now. Give me some of the levers that he used.

SAVAGE: Well, even before 9/11, the sort of first battle here involved executive secrecy powers, Cheney led a – who had been the executive the CEO of a energy and military contracting company called Halliburton – led an energy policy task force for the Bush administration. And they fought a battle to the Supreme Court to win a ruling that they did not have to make public what energy executives were advising that policy task force to do. And that gutted a 1970s open government law called the Federal Advisory Committees Act. Notably, that act had required Hillary Clinton in the Clinton administration to have her healthcare policy meetings open to the public. But that was the first battle where they sort of crushed some one of those seventies era reforms. 

And then after 9/11, there were numerous opportunities for the government to act in national security scenarios in ways that appeared to violate or contradict statutes in matters ranging from wiretapping to the torture of detainees to the holding of people without trial and so forth. And every time Cheney and his top legal aid, it was a man named David Addington, who was perhaps the most powerful figure in the Bush Cheney legal team would push the administration to do what it thought was necessary as a policy matter not by going to Congress and asking Congress to adjust the law to permit what it is they thought was necessary, but to act in defiance of those statutes based on idiosyncratically broad constitutional theories of a president’s inherent and exclusive power to act without Congress or in defiance of Congress. And by doing that, often in secret – though it later came out – they established historical precedents showing that those theories might be true, because in fact, a president had acted on those theories and that had happened. And so those theories would be available not just for them to do what they were trying to do in the moment, but for future presidents when they too wanted to act in a way that laws passed by Congress appeared to forbid.

ISAACSON: One of the other legacies of former Vice President Dick Cheney, was advocating the aggressive use of American military power and interventionism in many different things.

SAVAGE: Certainly, Dick Cheney was one of the greatest advocates within the Bush administration of going into Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. And that, of course, was, you know, the greatest geopolitical blunder of the 21st century. I think many people now across party lines believe is the case, at least from the American government’s perspective. And in many ways, the disaster of the Iraq war – both the grinding insurgency that followed, all the American deaths, all the Iraqi deaths, the spent treasure, the rise of ISIS and so forth that followed – set the stage for the change within the Republican party in which Donald Trump could repudiate Jeb Bush in 2016 and the sort of attempt to by Bush/Cheney-style Republicans to continue leading that party and take over it – and as an American first person who was not gonna be involved in regime change wars. That’s absolutely correct. And when Cheney criticized him, Trump attacked Cheney at, for his role in the Iraq debacle. 

That said, it is the case now that Donald Trump is using the US military to attack suspected drug cartel smugglers and summarily kill them in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific, building up an enormous amount of force, naval force, but ground forces on ships in that area and appears to be contemplating a regime change war in Venezuela. Clearly members of his administration chief among them, Marco Rubio, his National Security advisor and Secretary of State are, would very much like a military intervention to change the government in Venezuela. And Trump is thinking about it. And so how that fits into the, his rise in repudiating, these kinds of, of foreign entanglements is yet to be seen in terms of whether that was a sticking point or just rhetoric that was useful in the moment.

ISAACSON: Well President Trump has done a lot of sabre rattling, as you say, about maybe using the force and regime change picking countries around the world, but he hasn’t really sent things in to engage in a prolonged, sometimes called forever war or get involved. Isn’t there a fundamental difference between the Trump view of US power and military power and the Dick Cheney view?

SAVAGE:  I think it’s too early for you to say that he hasn’t done that. He didn’t do that in his first term. But the first Trump administration was very different than the second Trump administration. The first Trump administration was filled with experienced, traditional Republicans, to be sure, Republican, very conservative lawyers, to be sure but people who, internal to the party, acted as constraints to some of the impulses that Donald Trump had. 

And I think that the volatility that we have seen these first 10 and a half months or so of the second Trump administration show how the character of this administration is, is not a continuation of the first one. It is a new thing they are doing, everything Trump wants them to do, whether it’s sending US troops into the streets of American cities or imposing wildly large tariffs unilaterally and many other things. The huge you know, immigration crackdown that makes the first term look like nothing. And so with only, only into November of the first term with all the military assets that are still moving into place in the Caribbean aircraft carrier group that’s been directed there and so forth, I think it’s much too early to say he by the end of this, he will have stuck with that non-interventionist tone or vibe that we associate with him from his repudiation of the Bush era Iraq War.

ISAACSON: Your book “Takeover” published in 2007 begins with a really dramatic scene inside the White House bunker while the September 11th attacks are underway. And Vice President Cheney’s in the room, he’s in command, and he issues an order to shoot down that United Airlines flight 93 that seemed to be heading to the Capitol. Explain to me the significance of that. 

SAVAGE: Yes. so Cheney has been grabbed by his Secret Service and rushed downstairs into the White House Bunker. In Florida, Bush was famously reading to some children at a school, and he gets, you know, hurried away and stuck on a plane and their plane, Air Force One is just taking off with no sense out of even where it’s going to land because they don’t know what the scope of this attack is. That thing, you know, things are blowing up at the Pentagon and in New York, and who knows what the final target is. And communications are bad. And the at, at this moment they’re tracking what they think is United Flight 93, which is the one that was – eventually crashes into a field in Pennsylvania, but was probably headed to the US Capitol.

And the the military asks what they should do, and Cheney orders them to shoot it down and why this is – and it turns out not to matter, because it turns out the plane by then had already crashed and they were looking at a projected track of where they thought it might be. It wasn’t actually even in the sky anymore. But why it mattered was it illustrated Cheney’s outsized role as a vice president, literally calling the shots on 9/11 and its aftermath. And the sort of way that that administration started to cover up what was really going on or constrict the flow of information to the public and to Congress because they later claimed, including to the 9/11 Commission, which was a creature of Congress, that Bush had authorized Cheney to give the shootdown order ahead of time.

In some – an earlier call when Cheney first got to the bunker and there was no evidence, that call existed in the logs of communications in and out of the bunker, in the logs of communications in and out of Air Force One in the contemporaneous notes that aids to both of them were making logging what was happening. And so it, it was an attempt to sort of clean up Cheney getting over his skis a little bit as the person who was actually giving the orders, but maybe did, wasn’t supposed to be giving the orders. And a moment probably where they misled the 9/11 Commission.

ISAACSON: Well, one of the things I don’t get is that Dick Cheney was very dismissive of congressional restraints on the President, Congressional power, and yet he was a congressman. He served in the House of Representatives and his daughter serves in the House of Representatives. Why did he feel Congress should surrender so much of its authority granted in Article I of the Constitution?

SAVAGE: You know, he talked about this interestingly, in a speech that he wrote in 1988 or early 89. He was gonna give it at a conference at a conservative think tank. And he never did because in the interim, the first President Bush nominated him to be Secretary of Defense, and he didn’t want to go out and say something controversial when he was coming up for Senate confirmation. But we do have a, a pretty good guide to his thinking, and it’s clear that he thought that Congress was ill suited, institutionally and structurally, to make decisions about foreign policy and national security. It was this diverse, you know 435 people who were worried about getting reelected every two years, in the case of the House. They had, they were prone to leaking, they could, they were not necessarily trustworthy to keep information secret, and it was just hard for them to act decisively as a collective decision-making body.

And he was less worried, therefore, about the risks that a bad president would act quickly and decisively and with secrecy in a bad way. The sort of thing that the founders were worried about when they created this system he just thought the modern world at least, was different than the world of the founders. We have nuclear weapons, et cetera, and the modern world demands one person being able to make a decision and move on without constraint.

ISAACSON: During the 2004 presidential campaign, Cheney breaks with George W. Bush on the issue of gay marriage. Cheney, whose daughter Mary is a lesbian said, “with respect to the question of relationships, my general view is freedom means freedom for everyone…People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to.” We just saw this week, the Supreme Court saying its is not gonna revisit the issue of gay marriage. Do you think that was part of his legacy as well, paving the way for that?

SAVAGE: It was certainly a very important moment on, in Republican politics. Of course, he was not the, the mainstream there. The mainstream was the, the 20– his own campaign, the Bush campaign’s trying to use gay marriage as a wedge issue and a culture war issue to increase turnout among conservative voters. Certainly though, I think that’s an important part of thinking about the complexity of Dick Cheney. And in terms of these social culture war issues, he was in fact, more moderate than perhaps his overall reputation would at first glance portend

ISAACSON: Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney, were the only two Republicans present on the House floor marking the first anniversary of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. And I think Liz Cheney, you could pretty much say, gets excommunicated from the Trump Republican party for her pushback and, you know, fighting against that sort of thing. What impact did all of that have on Dick Cheney’s worldview and his view of a unified executive?

SAVAGE: Right. I’m not aware of him publicly repudiating his earlier articulation in his career of the idea that the country would be better off with a stronger presidency, with fewer constraints, with fewer checks and balances… that the modern world requires a greater unilateral, you know, imperial presidency (he wouldn’t use the term imperial, of course). But I think we do see in his dramatic criticism of Trump, especially after January 6th and ultimately, his defense of his daughter when she’s running against a Trump primary challenger in, in terms of attacking Trump, and finally his endorsement of Kamala Harris whom he clearly disagrees with on 99% of policy issues that he saw that policy issues were not the most important thing, that there was a structural interest in the United States in preserving democracy and the rule of law that over, that supersedes all those other issues. And yeah, the, the, the idea of Dick Cheney, of all people endorsing a Democrat for President, I think underscored that at least at the end of his life he saw things a little bit differently.

ISAACSON: Charlie Savage, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it.

SAVAGE: My pleasure.