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Former President George W. Bush paid tribute to his late vice president, Dick Cheney, on Tuesday, calling him “a patriot who brought integrity, high intelligence, and seriousness of purpose to every position he held.”
“Dick was a calm and steady presence in the White House amid great national challenges,” Bush wrote. “I counted on him for his honest, forthright counsel, and he never failed to give his best. He held to his convictions and prioritized the freedom and security of the American people.”
Cheney, who served as Bush’s powerful right-hand man in the Oval Office from 2001 to 2009, died due to complications from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease, his family said in a statement Tuesday morning. He was 84.
And even though the pair’s relationship was strained toward the end of their time in the White House — due in large part to Bush’s refusal to pardon Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby — the former president hailed Cheney as “among the finest public servants of his generation.”
“For those two terms in office, and throughout his remarkable career, Dick Cheney’s service always reflected credit on the country he loved,” Bush wrote.
One key Republican who has remained conspicuously silent in the hours since Cheney’s death was announced is President Donald Trump. Cheney’s twilight in American politics was marked by his opposition to the president.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” he said in 2022 campaign advertisement for his daughter, Liz Cheney, another Trump foil. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters.”
But many Republicans, even some who backed Trump in the aftermath of his failed bid to remain in the White House after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden, offered their condolences.
“Vice President Cheney dedicated his life to serving our nation,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), a key Trump ally, said in a post on X. “He was known for his love of his family and his country. Ann and I are praying for the Cheney family and all who knew him during this time.”
Casting Trump as a historic threat to democracy, Cheney threw his support behind another former vice president, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 election.
Their stand saw the Cheneys effectively run out of GOP politics, with Trump winning the general election last November and continuing to reshape the party in his image in the months since returning to the Oval Office.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But other key Republicans paid their respects Tuesday.
“As our nation mourns the loss of former Vice President Dick Cheney, we honor his devotion to serving our nation,” Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.), the fourth-ranking House Republican, said on X. “My prayers are with the Cheney family during this difficult time.”
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said in a statement that Cheney, who grew up in Casper, Wyoming, would be remembered as “a towering figure who helped guide the course of history” in the state.
“From high school football star to White House Chief of Staff, Congressman, Secretary of Defense, and Vice President, Dick’s career has few peers in American life,” Barrasso wrote. “His unflinching leadership shaped many of the biggest moments in domestic and U.S. foreign policy for decades.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) called Cheney “a true public servant & proud American.”
“Dick served our country w distinction in various roles over many decades incl as Vice President of the United States,” he wrote.
Miles Taylor, a former senior administration official during Trump’s first term who is now facing an investigation spurred by the president, applauded Cheney’s stand against Trump in a post on X.
“His last act of public service was to defy the GOP as a vocal critic of Donald Trump,” he wrote. “That took guts. Farewell, Angler.”
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President Donald Trump on Saturday went after Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for her Somali heritage, urging her to leave the country in a social media post, reprising an attack he used several times throughout his time in office.
“She should go back!” he wrote on Truth Social, alongside a video of Omar speaking to a crowd. It was not immediately clear when the event was, but the video of Omar speaking has been circulating among right-leaning social media accounts for at least a couple weeks.
Omar was born in Somalia, fled a civil war in the country when she was 8, and arrived in the U.S. after spending four years in a Kenyan refugee camp in 1995. She became an American citizen in 2000.
Trump’s MAGA allies, including Laura Loomer, were quick to amplify his post across their social media channels.
This isn’t the first time in recent weeks that the president has suggested Omar should be removed from the country.
“You know I met the head of Somalia, did you know that?” he told reporters at the Oval Office in September. “And I suggested that maybe he’d like to take her back. He said ‘I don’t want her.’”
Trump also called out Omar multiple times during his first term, in one instance accusing her of “telling us how to run our country” during the final months of the 2020 campaign.
Her office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But the four-term lawmaker told a radio host Friday that she isn’t concerned by rhetoric around her immigration status.
“I have no worry, I don’t know how they’d take away my citizenship and like deport me,” she said on The Dean Obeidallah Show. “But I don’t even know like why that’s such a scary threat. Like I’m not the 8-year-old who escaped war anymore. I’m grown, my kids are grown. Like I could go live wherever I want if I wanted to. It’s a weird thing to wake up every single day to bring that into every single conversation, ‘we’re gonna deport Ilhan.’”
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Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) ripped the Heritage Foundation on Friday, as conservatives clash over the organization’s continued embrace of Tucker Carlson in the wake of his friendly interview this week with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
“Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats,” McConnell, the former Republican Senate majority leader, wrote in a post on X. “But maybe I just don’t know what time it is…”
In the interview, Carlson said Republican supporters of Israel have been “seized by this brain virus.” And Fuentes told Carlson that “organized Jewry” poses the main obstacle to keeping the country together.
But Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation’s president, defended Carlson in a video posted to X Thursday, and even spoke out against deplatforming Fuentes while adding he disagrees with and abhors “things that Nick Fuentes says.”
The real enemy force, Roberts contended, is “the vile ideas of the left.”
In a post on X Friday, Roberts sought to clarify his stance on Fuentes, denouncing among other things, "his vicious antisemitic ideology, his Holocaust denial, and his relentless conspiracy theories that echo the darkest chapters of history." But counsel, and not cancellation, is the best way to respond, he said.
"Our task is to confront and challenge those poisonous ideas at every turn to prevent them from taking America to a very dark place," Roberts wrote. "Join us — not to cancel — but to guide, challenge, and strengthen the conversation, and be confident as I am that our best ideas at the heart of western civilization will prevail."
But McConnell, who has spent the past several months sinceleaving leadership working to safeguard his foreign policy and ideological worldviews within the Republican Party, panned the conservative think tank’s stance.
“The ‘intellectual backbone of the conservative movement’ is only as strong as the values it defends,” he said.
The Heritage Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But McConnell isn’t the only Republican senator taking aim at Carlson for his interview.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) also went after the former Fox News host while speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual summit Thursday in Las Vegas. Cruz has long clashed with Carlson over Israel, including on an episode of Carlson’s podcast in July.
"If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool, and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you are a coward and you are complicit in that evil," said Cruz.
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is deploying the state’s National Guard to Austin ahead of this weekend’s planned No Kings rally in the Texas capital, he announced Thursday, as top Republicans around the country vilify the protests as Antifa-linked and led by the radical flank of the Democratic Party.
“Violence and destruction will never be tolerated in Texas," Abbott said in a statement Thursday. “Today, I directed the Texas Department of Public Safety and Texas National Guard to deploy all necessary law enforcement officials and resources to ensure the safety of Austin residents."
In addition to the National Guard, Abbott is surging Texas Rangers, state troopers and Department of Public Safety personnel to Austin, whom he said would be “supported by aircraft and other tactical assets.”
His announcement was sharply criticized by Democrats. “Sending armed soldiers to suppress peaceful protests is what kings and dictators do — and Greg Abbott just proved he's one of them,” Texas House Minority Leader Gene Wu said in a statement.
More than 2,600 No Kings protests are set to occur across the country on Saturday, according to organizers, including on the National Mall in Washington and in Austin. Its organizers include the ACLU, College Democrats of America and the campaign finance group End Citizens United. The first wave of No Kings protests in June was overwhelmingly peaceful and went on almost entirely without incident.
Abbott’s deployments come as Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, decry the planned protests as “hate America” gatherings, involving radical “pro-Hamas” elements, that have pressured otherwise amenable Senate Democrats to refrain from signing onto Republicans' continuing resolution to end the government shutdown.
Democrats, including Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who is set to speak at Saturday’s D.C. rally, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, criticized the Republican rhetoric and encouraged disaffected Americans to attend the rallies.
“In two days, be a part of the largest peaceful protest in modern American history,” Clinton wrote on X. “Join No Kings this Saturday at an event near you to push back on Trump's power grabs and make it clear—we don't do monarchs here.”
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Kamala Harris’ autopsy of the 2024 election is leaving storefronts at a historic rate.
Simon & Schuster, the book’s publisher, announced Monday that the former vice president’s book had sold 350,000 copies across the country in its first week on sale, putting it on track to be the year’s top-selling memoir. Just three celebrity memoirs — from Britney Spears, Taylor Swift and Prince Harry — have bested the week one total since 2023, the publisher said.
“In addition to being one of the most interesting books ever written about the experience of running for President of the United States, the success of 107 DAYS proves what a galvanizing and inspiring cultural figure Kamala Harris is,” Jonathan Karp, president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, said in a statement.
But “107 Days,” the former vice president’s account of the frenetic 15 weeks following her elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket and culminating in Donald Trump’s November victory, hasn’t exactly ingratiated Harris to other leaders in her own party.
Top Democrats, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have all bristled at jabs Harris wrote into her book describing the first hours of her campaign and the process by which she selected a running mate.
And the media blitz surrounding her book release, which has seen Harris attempt to walk back some of her criticism and refuse to rule out another presidential run, has only further alienated Democrats still sore over losing the White House to Trump in last year’s election.
But it was Harris’ criticism of former President Joe Biden, her boss in the White House, that drew the most attention. In her memoir, Harris wrote that the White House communications shop under Biden saddled her with unpopular policy priorities and amplified negative stories about her office. She wrote that in hindsight, refraining from pushing him to drop out of the presidential race earlier was reckless.
Still, Harris said on "The View" last week that the two have stayed in touch.
“It’s a good relationship and it’s a relationship that is based on mutual respect, having been in the trenches together, and admiration,” she said. “And it’s sincere.”
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