The funeral for former Vice President Dick Cheney on Thursday will mark the passing of a type of politician who has become increasingly endangered in the Donald Trump era.

“Name me the Cheney-style Republican who's still alive politically,” said Joshua Bolten, who served as White House chief of staff during the final years of the George W. Bush administration.

Cheney's sendoff is one that many Republicans are taking note of. They say he now seems like someone out of a different America, and the funeral at Washington National Cathedral where many other 20th century political icons were memorialized also feels like a funeral for a more traditional, establishment-oriented version of the Republican Party that dominated U.S. politics for decades.

Cheney embodied the old GOP and was one of the party’s leading figures of the last half century. That was before he clashed with Trump, calling the then-former president a "threat to our Republic" in declaring he’d vote for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in 2024 over the candidate chosen by the party that Cheney helped define for several generations.

It’s a familiar story for many Republicans, most notably figures such as former senators and GOP presidential nominees Mitt Romney and John McCain and Cheney’s own daughter, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney. All of them chafed at what the party had become, from its shifting ideology to what some perceive as Trump’s trampling of norms, institutions and the rule of law - only to be considered persona non grata after speaking up with their concerns about the state of American democracy.

Cheney “was by the book” said former GOP Rep. Fred Upton, a self-described "Reagan Republican" who is planning to attend Cheney's funeral and witnessed the former vice president's career up close during more than three decades in Congress than ended in 2023.

“Trump tests everything,” added Upton, a former powerful House committee chairman and one of 10 Republicans who voted in 2021 to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol.

The Cheneys were particularly outraged about Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the Jan. 6 attacks. They paid a heavy price, with Trump driving Liz Cheney out of office via a GOP primary challenge for participating in the congressional investigation of the attack.

Dick Cheney contrasted with Trump in many other ways, from his cool temperament to his deep governing experience and hawkish support for foreign interventions that Trump later campaigned against.

Cheney and Bush took office under a cloud of controversy after the Supreme Court ended Florida's recount during the 2000 presidential election. They left the White House eight years later with the economy collapsing into the Great Recession and two unpopular wars raging.

It was that political landscape that Trump found so amendable to his own outsider campaign in 2016 that helped catapult him from New York real estate and reality TV star into the White House. Along the way, Trump would accuse Bush and Cheney of leading the U.S. into "endless wars."

Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone called Cheney "the ultimate deep state insider" and an "especially evil villain."

"He and his henchmen... have the blood of thousands of American servicemen and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi on their hands," Stone said.

Soon after Cheney's death, Vice President JD Vance mocked his predecessor, responding to a comment that Cheney seemed to be "running the country" during Bush's presidency with: "Not very well, as it turns out."

The White House hasn't responded to an inquiry about whether Trump, Vance or anyone else from the administration will attend Cheney's funeral, but did lower flags to half staff as directed by the U.S. Flag Code.

'Granddaddy in the room'

Cheney is viewed by many as the most powerful vice president in history, and his power partly came from his extensive knowledge of the government.

At 34, he became the youngest White House chief of staff in history under Republican President Gerald Ford, represented Wyoming in the House for a decade, including several years inside GOP leadership and was secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush. Cheney was tapped by Bush's son to vet potential running mates and ended up getting the job himself.

“He was extremely qualified,” said former GOP Congressman Dan Miller of Florida, who left office in 2003.

For Miller, a Trump critic who describes himself as an “old-fashioned, conservative, traditional" lawmaker of "the Reagan-Cheney mold,” the former vice president represents “competence and experience,” which he said is a “huge contrast” with the Trump administration.

“You heard the phrase 'adults in the room?' Well the Bush administration was crowded with adults in the room and (Cheney) was one of the most adult, almost a granddaddy in the room,” said Duke University political science Professor Peter Feaver, who worked on the National Security Council during the Bush administration. “This was not his first rodeo, it wasn’t his second rodeo, it was like his fifth or sixth rodeo.”

The type of experience that Cheney brought to the Bush administration was more extensive than most, but a record of high-level service used to be the norm for top officials.

Trump upended that.

Cheney was "an insider," Upton said, "he knew how things worked and how things should work." A real estate scion with no governing experience, Trump ran as an outsider and has promoted likeminded people in his second administration.

Cheney the hawk

The late 46th vice president of the United States came of age politically in the post-World War II, Cold War era and was hawkish about military intervention and confronting adversaries abroad, from the former Soviet Union to perceived threats in the Middle East.

“Cheney was a piece of the Reagan rock,” Upton said of Reagan, the two-term Republican president from 1981 to 1989 who was known for a hardline foreign policy approach that emphasized military might.

Parts of Trump's second term foreign policy agenda, such as bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, align with Cheney's philosophy, according to those who worked with the former vice president. Trump also has taken an expansive view of executive power, something Cheney championed.

But Trump has been much more diplomatic with some autocratic figures, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping, than some GOP hardliners would like.

"Cheney would’ve been more hawkish with both," Feaver said.

Trump also has taken direct aim at some of the military interventions Cheney helped initiate, criticizing the Iraq war and moving during his first term to wind down military operations in Afghanistan, which the U.S. invaded during the Bush-Cheney administration after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.

Trump was channeling popular opinion among many war-weary Americans. But there also has long been an isolationist streak in the GOP that he tapped into, and which Bush and Cheney resisted.

“Bush was very much against the Republican Party pursuing a populist agenda, which Bush at the time defined as isolationism, nativism and protectionism, and Bush was against all three, as was Cheney,” Bolten said.

Trump, meanwhile, has aggressively pursued tariffs and the deportation of immigrants without legal status, while wavering at times in his support for Ukraine against Russian attacks.

A funeral for Cheney's GOP

The mourners gathering at Cheney’s funeral are likely to skew heavily toward the old GOP over the new MAGA version. Bush and Liz Cheney are speaking during the service at the National Cathedral, where services have been held for six presidents.

Whether Cheney’s death is also the death of what he represented in the party will play out in the coming months and years, especially as Trump starts to exit from the political scene and debate ramps up about what comes next for the party.

Former Cheney aide John Hannah said “it’s increasingly dubious” that the GOP returns to something resembling the party Cheney helped define.

“We’re beginning to put the final period on an era that has passed,” said Hannah, who worked for Cheney for eight years when he was vice president, including more than three years as his national security adviser.

Yet some conservatives still hold out hope that traditional GOP will see a resurgence.

“It’s a little premature to say that wing is dead and will be buried with Cheney,” Feaver said.

There are still conservatives who question Trump’s approach. Their voices have largely been silenced by the MAGA revolution, but Feaver expects them to grow louder in the runup to 2028 as candidates jockey over the future of the party.

Contributing: Bart Jansen, Reuters

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A funeral for Dick Cheney, and the 'adults-in-the-room' GOP establishment

Reporting by Zac Anderson, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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