“Dick Cheney’s Long, Strange Goodbye”, The New Yorker
Letter from Trump’s Washington
On seeing Rachel Maddow at the former Vice-President’s funeral, while Donald Trump threatened Democrats on social media with death by hanging.
November 20, 2025
Source photograph by Andrew Harnik / Getty
On Thursday morning, not long after entering Washington National Cathedral for the funeral of Dick Cheney, I ran into Rachel Maddow. She gave me a hug. A couple of minutes earlier, a starstruck usher had told me that the iconic liberal TV host was in attendance, though I hadn’t quite believed it. But then, yes, there she was. I got a hug from Rachel Maddow at Dick Cheney’s funeral. Cue the pigs flying. Hell may not yet have frozen over, but on an overcast November morning in Donald Trump’s besieged capital, there were moments when it seemed like it might have.
Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party—the Party that Cheney had loved and served until Trump, finally, caused him to walk away from it—has been a decade in the making. But there can be no better summing up of the reordering of our politics in this era than the scene on Thursday in that lovely church where Washington marks the passing of its giants. On hand to say goodbye to the former Vice-President, who shaped the post-9/11 world with a belief in the unchecked exercise of American power, making him perhaps the most divisive figure in public life until Trump himself, were Nancy Pelosi and Dan Quayle, Mitch McConnell and Adam Schiff, James Carville and Karl Rove. Joe Biden took the Amtrak down from Delaware, even though it was his eighty-third birthday. Kamala Harris sat in the front row next to Mike Pence. Waiting for the service to begin, I exchanged pleasantries with Al Gore and Margaret Tutwiler and Elliott Abrams and a lot of other people whose names one used to read in the newspaper back when people read newspapers.
Absent entirely was Trump or any senior members from his Administration. The sitting Vice-President, J. D. Vance, was not invited. The Republican Speaker of the House, where Cheney served for ten years as a congressman from Wyoming, did not show. This was how Cheney would have wanted it to be. He could not have been prouder in his final years to have followed his daughter Liz out the door of the Party that chose Trump’s lies about the election of 2020 over the plain truth of his defeat. As a result, the cathedral was not completely full, the way it would have been if our city and our country were not so riven by discord, but it was not anywhere near empty, either. Politics moves on; alliances shift. You can fill a very large room with people who have not forgiven Cheney for the Iraq War but who were nonetheless sad to see the passing of a man who dared to speak out about Trump. So many of the former Vice-President’s fellow-Republicans agreed with him privately and said nothing publicly.
“I can’t believe we got Dick Cheney in the national divorce,” someone said as I was walking in. Why were they—we—all there? To see who else was, for sure. It’s still Washington. To remember? Of that, I’m less certain.
I’ve covered a number of these grand National Cathedral sendoffs in the course of this long Trump era. The first such, that of John McCain, in September of 2018, felt like a meeting of the resistance, a clarion call to take up arms where the late senator, another Republican who turned apostate rather than submit to Trump, had left them on the field. It was a shock to see the President’s daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner in attendance, presenting themselves as envoys to an establishment that neither wanted nor acknowledged their intrusion. In hindsight, though, it was a simpler time. Now we know what we didn’t then, which is that there would come a point when they would stop wanting to crash the party and that that would be the real sign of how much trouble we’re in.
Most recently, in January, there was the state funeral for Jimmy Carter. All the former Presidents were there, and the shock then was seeing Barack Obama being chatted up by Trump and gamely laughing in response—a veneer of normalcy that seemed at odds with the death glares coming from various other, resolutely silent dignitaries sitting near them. Was this how it would be now, I wondered, with our previous leaders just pretending everything would somehow be O.K.?
Nine months later, no one is pretending anymore. On Thursday morning, as the mourners were filing into the cathedral, Trump sent out nineteen posts on his social-media platform fulminating about a recent video made by Democratic members of Congress urging military personnel not to obey unlawful orders they might receive from the Trump Administration. This, Trump insisted, was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Another post he shared proposed the means by which they should die. “HANG THEM,” he declared. “GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!”
Perhaps because I was reading these posts on my phone at the funeral service for Liz Cheney’s father, I immediately thought of the threats Trump had issued against her during last year’s campaign. Days before the election, he told Tucker Carlson that she should be put in front of a firing squad and shot. Trump is who he is. “He can never be trusted with power again,” the former Vice-President warned when he endorsed Harris. Right now, unfortunately for the nation and the world, Trump is proving to be every bit the threat that Cheney warned us about.
If Cheney was right about Trump, he was not correct about many other things—most consequentially, of course, that the United States needed to invade Iraq in 2003 and depose Saddam Hussein to stop the nuclear-weapons program that Saddam did not have. As far as I know, Cheney never apologized for this, nor for any of the other costly, deadly excesses for which he advocated during that era.
At Thursday’s funeral, this complicated record was not even mentioned. I never heard the words “Iraq” or “terrorism,” or “Trump,” for that matter. The attack on 9/11 that so defined the George W. Bush Administration in which Cheney served was brought up by only a single speaker—not President Bush but Cheney’s cardiologist, Jonathan Reiner, who had had an appointment with him at the White House that day.
Even when Liz Cheney spoke, she barely alluded to the eventful, contentious life in the public eye that her father had led. There was one rebuke in there, for the absent President who, since rising to power, has so consistently chosen partisanship over country. Not like her dad, she insisted. “He knew the bonds of party must always yield to the single bond we share as Americans,” she said. “For him, a choice between defense of the Constitution and defense of your political party was no choice at all.”
But that was it. And so, with most of the controversies that shadowed Cheney’s life left largely unacknowledged, it was hard to know exactly what to think. Still, everything about the service seemed carefully chosen, including the music to whose strains Richard Bruce Cheney—former Vice-President and, as his granddaughter Grace so lovingly called him, Rodeo Grandpa—left the cathedral. It was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and I have little doubt that Liz Cheney wants us all to know that her father’s truth, whatever it was, will go marching on.
When I walked up the hill to the cathedral on Thursday morning, I had expected the service to be a flashback, a reminder of Washington as it was in the Bush years that now seem so very long ago. But as I left, nearly bumping into Nancy Pelosi as I walked down the stairs, I realized that Cheney’s service had not been a portal to the past. Because there is no past in which Rachel Maddow would have attended Dick Cheney’s funeral. Watching her chatting away before the service, inches from where John Bolton was sitting—that was the present. Because it is only in the present—this cursed, bizarre, Trumpian present—in which such a scene could have been possible. ♦