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dick cheney
On Cheney, Trump, and the Nature of Violence
As a nation, as a unified planet, we need to create a future that’s bigger than Trump, bigger than Cheney—bigger than what they could imagine in terms of global politics and power.
Nov 06, 2025
Let him rest in... peace?
I don’t know. The irony of those words is a little too much for me to grasp as I sit here contemplating the death of Dick Cheney at age 84. Cheney, mastermind and primary organizer on the “war on terror,” which, in a 20-year span of insanity, cost the United States some $8 trillion and killed (murdered) nearly a million people, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
And as though that total weren’t high enough, the project notes that this number is very much an undercount, since it doesn’t include indirect deaths of the war caused by “disease, displacement, and loss of access to food or clean drinking water.”
Revisiting these numbers in the wake of Cheney’s death throws some horrific complexity into the present-day news, that is to say, the authoritarian activities of the Trump administration: Sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement to invade American cities, bombing small boats off the coast of Venezuela, cozying up to authoritarian leaders around the globe and, of course, staying in sync with the Israeli devastation f Gaza.
Trump is just the next step in the violent nation we’ve created: the unhinged step.
President Donald Trump is such an unconstrained blowhard and fascist wannabe, totally open about his desire to arrest, deport, pepperspray, and eliminate every American who dares protest or comedically belittle his policies, that Sen. Bernie Sanders (-Vt.) recently wrote:
This may be the most consequential moment in American history since the civil war. We have a megalomaniacal president who, consumed by his quest for more and more power, is undermining our constitution and the rule of law.
We’re on the verge of losing our country, losing our democracy! I hear it. I feel it. We’re at the edge of a political cliff. But then, in the wake of Dick Cheney’s death, the Bush administration slips back into my awareness and I suddenly find myself plummeting into concern and horror that transcends Trump. Trump has yet to do anything equal to the military hell these guys inflicted on the world, or even equal to their pompous rhetoric about the “axis of evil” they were intent on destroying.
And George W. Bush and Cheney were anti-Trumpers, for God’s sake, furious that Trump took their party away from them. Is this the sin of Trump—taking away not so much our wars but the political correctness in which we swathed them? Trump is an impulsive blatherer, speaking in ordinary-guy language, spewing out whatever he’s thinking in the moment. Yeah, he’s a scary jerk, utterly untrustworthy, but is what we had before him somehow better? Are the monstrous wars—the terror—we’ve waged throughout my lifetime what we want to return to?
I guess what I’m saying is that Trump is just the next step in the violent nation we’ve created: the unhinged step. He’s loosened himself from all sense of political dignity and is free to dance before the world to “YMCA” He’s committed to trashing our Constitution and making himself Boss-in-Chief, but he loves, and is as subservient to, money as any political leader who has preceded him.
All of which leads me back to the book I’m still in the process of writing. As a nation, as a unified planet, we need to create a future that’s bigger than Trump, bigger than Cheney—bigger than what they could imagine in terms of global politics and power. That is to say, we need to create a world that knows how to wage peace. Please understand, in no way do I see this as a simple process. We are creating peace in small fragments all across the planet, but collectively we continue to organize around domination, violence, and dehumanization.
Let me put forth one small piece of the book, which begins to address the nature of violence. I begin by quoting journalist and peace activist Colman McCarthy, who once asked: Why are we violent but not illiterate? This question stuck in my soul.
In the book I wrote: We’re taught to read, of course. The implied analogy here is that violence is the same thing as illiteracy, which is nothing in and of itself, a void, a lack of knowing. Is violence also nothing in and of itself, simply the absence of knowing how to behave with calm rationality and creative compassion? Certainly that doesn’t seem to be the case. To behave with violence, at least with a high level of violence, requires a great deal of knowing. Nations couldn’t go to war if they didn’t have the capacity to organize armies and equip them with up-to-date weaponry; to do this requires an extraordinary amount of “violent literacy,” you might say.
But there is a void of knowing—or perhaps more accurately, a void of control—that surrounds violence. Unlike illiteracy, however, violence has a positive sense of itself. In retrospect, violent behavior may be defended as self-protective and necessary, but in the actual act of it, I believe violence is an abdication of self-ownership, an abdication of everything that is godlike within us: an abdication of our vulnerability. And this abdication is collective...
So why are we violent but not illiterate? Once we’re taught to read, illiteracy is no longer possible or even, in a personal sense, imaginable. Reading isn’t simply a “protest” against illiteracy; reading and writing are steps from nothing to something, channeling spoken language into a world of entirely new possibilities. So what is the nonviolent equivalent of literacy? It’s not protests in the streets; it’s not a countermovement symbolized by peace signs and clenched fists. It’s not a futile demand for an end to violence. What the world needs, and what the New Story must present to us, is the means to evolve beyond violence, in the process reducing violence, in our minds, to the equivalent of illiteracy.
The trans-violent equivalent of literacy must be both intuitive and externally structured; it must be taught. And, indeed, many such systems already exist. The problem is, they don’t reduce simply and easily to a story: a plot device. How is John Wayne atop the stagecoach, as cameras focus in, going to listen to the Apaches’ grievances, absorb the white man’s collective guilt, apologize and begin a journey of atonement? It’s so much easier, when telling a story, to remove one small, inconvenient aspect of reality—consequences—and portray violence as the tool of goodness and the solution to problems.
And thus we have the current world, trying to control its chaos by spewing out ever more state-ordered, state-financed redemptive violence, in the form of war, punishment, news, and entertainment.
Let me leave with a thought: Let’s make America great for the first time.Keep ReadingShow Less
How Cheney's Destructive War on Terror Became Trump's Authoritarian War on Truth
In seeking to defend democracy at all costs, Dick Cheney helped build the machinery that would one day dismantle it. His war on terror became our war on truth, and the nation has yet to recover.
Nov 05, 2025
When Richard Cheney died, it marked more than the end of a political life. It marked the closing of an American chapter, one that began in the smoke of the Twin Towers and stretches to the chaos of today. Between those two moments lies the tragedy of Cheney’s legacy: a man who claimed to defend democracy while systematically undermining its moral foundations.
Cheney was not a showman or a populist firebrand. He was austere, secretive, and precise—a master of bureaucratic power. Yet few figures in modern history have reshaped the nation’s moral and legal architecture as thoroughly. In his determination to protect Americans, he normalized fear. In his effort to preserve liberty, he institutionalized its violation.
After September 11, Cheney became the chief engineer of America’s “War on Terror.” Torture was rebranded as “enhanced interrogation,” mass surveillance legalized under the Patriot Act, and the rule of law quietly rewritten in the name of necessity. Drone strikes, secret prisons, preemptive war — all were justified as temporary measures to secure the homeland. But what began as emergency measures became permanent instruments of power.
Donald Trump did not create this destructive architecture of control; he inherited it.
What began in black sites abroad found its echo in cages at the southern border and in the assault on democratic norms at home.
Cheney and Trump despised one another, one a cold technocrat, the other a performative populist, but their philosophies were aligned in principle. Both believed the ends justify the means. Both treated human dignity as negotiable. Cheney authorized torture to protect Americans from terror. Trump uses that logic to justify cruelty against immigrants, journalists, and political opponents. The moral exception Cheney carved for national security became Trump’s template for political dominance.
The irony is brutal. The man who professed to honor institutions helped birth a movement that scorns them. The leader who claimed to defend freedom helped create conditions for its dismantling. Cheney’s “war on terror” became Trump’s “war on truth.” What began in black sites abroad found its echo in cages at the southern border and in the assault on democratic norms at home.
Cheney was not a cynic; he was a believer. That is what makes his legacy tragic. He genuinely thought America could preserve its dignity while denying it to others. He mistook pragmatism for wisdom and necessity for virtue. In doing so, he opened a door that democracy has not yet closed.
Two decades on, the consequences are visible everywhere: in the surveillance economy, in militarized policing, in the normalization of fear, and in political leaders who wield cruelty as strategy. Cheney gave America the vocabulary of exception. Trump turned it into the language of rule.
The tragedy is not Cheney’s alone, it is ours. By allowing the moral compromises of the past to stand unchallenged, we learned to live with a democracy that operates on exceptions, a freedom bounded by checkpoints, and a conscience dulled by fear.
If America is to escape the shadow of Cheney’s legacy, and prevent its lessons from being exploited againit, must reclaim what both men forgot: the true strength of democracy lies not in its power to destroy its enemies, but in its refusal to become them.
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'No, Not This Time': Combat Veteran Graham Platner Doesn't Mourn for Dick Cheney
"The only legacy we have to remember," said the Maine candidate for US Senate about the former vice president, "is that he wasted thousands of young American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and trillions of dollars for absolutely nothing."
Nov 05, 2025
Graham Platner, the US combat veteran and oyster farmer running for the Democratic nomination to defeat Republican US Senator Susan Collins of Maine in next year's election, is not interested in mourning the life and legacy of reviled war criminal Dick Cheney, though he does have "some thoughts" on the subject.
While Democratic leaders of the old guard such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris issued statements Tuesday fawning over Cheney's service to country, contributing to the familiar hagiography that typically follows the demise of even the worst American leaders the nation has inflicted on the world, Platner stuck a distinctly different tone.
"Usually, when a former vice president passes, we all take some time to mourn," Platner says in a video posted to social media Tuesday. "As a veteran of the Iraq war, I’m going to say: No, not this time."
Platner, who served in the US Marines and in the US Army during multiple combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed back against the pattern of whitewashing the misdeeds of the dead, especially for elected leaders never held to account.
"Over the next couple days, I'm sure there are going to be thousands of think pieces about his legacy," said Platner, "but the only legacy we have to remember is that he wasted thousands of young American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and trillions of dollars for absolutely nothing."
Some thoughts on Dick Cheney and his legacy. pic.twitter.com/vY7S3nu2nt
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) November 4, 2025
"If we take anything" from Cheney's death, continued Platner, "it should be that we need to build a politics that keeps the politicians, like Susan Collins, who support illegal foreign wars like the one in Iraq, accountable and get them out of office."
Platner has spoken at length about his time on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan and how, after multiple tours, he became not only disillusioned with the wars but also incredibly angry over the foreign policy decisions that started them.
Cheney, who served as VP under former President George W. Bush, has long been seen as the chief architect and driving force behind the effort to manipulate the US public into backing the invasion of Iraq in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, despite Iraq having nothing to do with the plot.
Cheney infamously said after 9/11 it would be time to "take off the gloves," which resulted in a torture regime operated by the CIA and war crimes across the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond at the direction of the Bush administration.
Bob Brigham, a self-identified progressive from Montana, was among those who applauded Platner for his statement.
"Dick Cheney was a war criminal who cost my buddy his life in Iraq," said Brigham in a social media post. "Platner has a pitch-perfect remembrance of the a-hole. May Dick Cheney roast in hell!"
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