As part of their breaking-news coverage of Dick Cheney’s death, NPR’s Morning Edition turned to Jonah Goldberg, who tweeted “Dick Cheney, a great man, has passed after an amazing life. RIP.” The “great man” part didn’t come up on NPR.
NPR morning anchor Steve “Obama’s Always Cool” Inskeep had to make Cheney’s death about Trump.
INSKEEP: I just want to note, he became a critic of President Trump. His daughter Liz Cheney was a fierce critic of President Trump. And at the end, if I’m not mistaken, former Vice President Cheney voted for a Democrat for president who he could not possibly have agreed on with very much in terms of issues but believed it was better for the country. Is there any irony in that?
NPR didn’t exactly think that was Cheney flip-flopping on everything he ever believed out of personal spite. Pro-Trump analysts would have Inskeep that voting for an abortion-loving socialist who wanted to fund transgender operations for prisoners wasn’t “ironic,” it was two middle fingers at the Republican Party. But Goldberg said Yes to irony:
GOLDBERG: There’s a lot of irony to Dick Cheney’s career. He was one of the foremost public officials in the sort of intellectual realm championing this idea of a stronger executive branch. He thought the executive branch would become too weak, that Congress and the courts and the permanent bureaucracy had overtaken things. And a lot of that argument has been picked up in ways that obviously Dick Cheney would not endorse by the Trump administration.
He was also an architect of the — you know, the action that took Manuel Noriega out in Panama, which, you know, a lot of the supposedly intellectual arguments in favor of what Trump is doing in the Caribbean and with Venezuela these days point to that as the precedent that allows them to do this.
And it’s a – it’s sort of an example of – Dick Cheney’s entire life, he argued for a stronger presidency on the assumption that the presidency would be, you know, occupied by a person of real conviction and patriotic principle. And it’s sort of – you know, it’s a – for him, it has to have felt a little bit like a Frankenstein’s monster to have this guy he did not like and thought did not put the country first using a lot of the arguments and mechanisms that he tried to put in place for his own ends.
Geopolitically, this analysis is curious, since taking out Noriega is a much more invasive military action than Trump has often done. He’s more of the quick-take military action, like taking out Soleimani or now bombing Venezuelan boats he says are full of fentanyl. Inskeep wanted to double down on Trump’s character deficiencies:
INSKEEP: Just about 30 seconds then. I think you’re telling me that he didn’t really have a legal argument with President Trump. He had a character argument with President Trump.
GOLDBERG: I think that’s right. I think that’s right. There are a lot of — it’s sort of like John Bolton, who’s got his own issues these days. John Bolton, in terms of, like, the intellectual superstructure of Trumpism — there’s a lot of agreement there, but they just don’t think the guy is — was fit for the office. And so they put the country first because they thought the character mattered more than just mere policy positions.
“Mere policy positions.” Apparently, policy sellouts are the true moralists and patriots. Here again, NPR found horror in Donald Trump having classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and when Biden’s Justice Department ordered a raid his home with guns drawn, that’s fine. But John Bolton can apparently take them, and if you prosecute that, it’s “retribution.”
