The parallels between Cheney and Trump and their expansive deployment of presidential authority, however, stretch across the breath of the American political landscape – in the use of American military power overseas, the ability to detain and transport non-citizens, and in the development and expanded use of US surveillance power, including focusing on perceived domestic threats.
“The powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned,” Stephen Miller, a long-time Trump adviser who is now deputy chief of staff, said during a television interview in 2017. It’s a line that could have been spoken by Cheney when he was at the pinnacle of American politics.
While Trump has renounced Cheney’s interventionist foreign policy and the Iraq War he oversaw, he – like Cheney – has demonstrated a willingness to use American military power abroad in ways that often flout attempts at oversight.
He launched bombing strikes on Iran in June, which he justified with warnings of a growing nuclear threat from a regional adversary, echoing the very reasoning Cheney used at the start of the 2003 Iraq war.
In recent months, Trump’s administration has designated narcotics traffickers as “enemy combatants” and is undertaking an ongoing campaign of destroying suspected drug-running boats in international waters. The deadly military attacks are necessary, they say, to protect American national security.
According to a Washington Post report, Trump’s justice department has informed Congress that the White House does not need congressional approval to continue these strikes, despite requirements governing the use of force set out in the 1974 War Powers Resolution.
Critics had accused Cheney’s Bush administration of stretching the boundaries of the 2001 Authorisation of Military Force in the “War on Terror” to permit US military operations against suspected terrorists across the world. Now Trump is using similar means – drones and missiles – without even that slim cover of congressional approval.