In death, there are now two Dick Cheneys.

One is the Cheney who was, without question, the most powerful vice-president in the history of the United States, a brilliant, ruthless, and deeply destructive man who remade the domestic and global order in less than a decade. The other is what contemporary Democrats and Republicans, bereft of real memory, perceive: a politician almost completely defined by his opposition to Donald Trump. Cheney’s daughter, Liz, was a proud conservative congresswoman who voted to impeach Trump after January 6; for her bravery, she faced down a Trump-backed challenger and lost badly. Her father, naturally, took umbrage, and he came to represent, for many liberals, the honor that Republicans in the Trump age had supposedly lost. Cheney was, by last year, so rehabilitated that Kamala Harris gladly accepted his endorsement and declared that the architect of the war on terror and the post-9/11 surveillance state was a “true patriot.”

Implied in this embrace was a myth that many liberals have come to accept: Trump is the defiler of a more noble Republican Party, one defined by men like George W. Bush and Cheney. Trump is the subversive, the outlaw, the unhinged autocrat running rampant over conservative traditions that once helped hold the country together. Establishment Republicans who are still wary of Trump share this view. They miss the Bush-Cheney regime and lament that Trump seemed........

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