Washington — WASHINGTON (AP) — Dick Cheney, a career Republican who still faces criticism from Democrats for his staunch support of the Iraq war as vice president, abandoned his partisan loyalties in an unusual way last week when he endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris for the White House.
Alberto Gonzalez’s tenure under the George W. Bush administration was rocked by controversy over interference in government wiretapping and the sudden purge of U.S. attorneys who Democrats strongly suspect are being shunned. But the former attorney general is choosing Harris over Republican Donald Trump.
The endorsement underscored the remarkable evolution of the Republican establishment, which dominated Washington during the Bush years but was pushed aside after Trump took control of the party. These men, once reviled by Democrats, are so alarmed by the prospect of a former president returning to power that they are prepared to oppose their own party’s nominee for the White House.
In the process, they are giving Harris a vital opportunity to expand her support base.
“It’s easier for prominent Republicans like Cheney and Gonzalez to say, ‘I’m for Kamala Harris,’ because their old homes have been looted and destroyed,” said Will Marshall, founder of the center-left think tank Progressive Policy Institute. “The partisan bonds that have always been strong in both parties have been undermined by the fact that Trump has made today’s Republican Party very unwelcoming to prominent Republicans who served in previous administrations.”
Bush himself will not comply. A spokesman said the former president has no plans to endorse or say publicly how he will vote.
Harris has embraced the support of Republicans with whom she has little in common, and their support is likely to have more to do with opposition to Trump than support for her policy positions. She frequently notes that more than 200 Republicans have endorsed her, and her campaign said in an email highlighting Gonzales’s endorsement that it welcomes “all Americans (regardless of party) who value democracy and the rule of law.”
Former Georgia lieutenant governor Jeff Duncan, a Republican who endorsed Harris and spoke at the Democratic National Convention last month, said the effect of having an “honorable, time-tested Republican” backing Harris could persuade other Republicans who dislike Trump to vote against him rather than sit out the election.
“I don’t know if we can convince anyone to go from Trump to Harris,” Duncan said. “It seems like it’s going to be about convincing someone to sit home and not vote for someone, to vote for Kamala Harris.”
But it is unclear how much influence the Republican Party, long criticized by Democrats, actually has, especially given Cheney’s decades of intense emotion and polarizing persona in Washington.
While the Harris campaign was soaking up the support, comedian Jon Stewart mocked Cheney’s endorsement on “The Daily Show,” hurling expletives at the former vice president and shouting, “You almost destroyed the world. That’s what we were like.”
“My goodness, who is that going to affect?” Stewart asked. “‘Well, I like the Democrats’ child tax credit policy, but are they bombing enough Middle Eastern countries?’”
For a long time, it would have been unthinkable for Cheney to vote Democratic. He served in a variety of positions, from White House chief of staff to secretary of defense to vice president, and served under three Republican presidents.
Cheney has been criticized on several fronts by Democrats, including for his enthusiastic promotion of Halliburton, a defense contractor he once led, and his involvement in the scandal involving the leak of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, who denied that U.S. intelligence had been used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
When Cheney accidentally shot a friend during a hunting trip in 2006, even Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter and veteran of the Bush re-election campaign, said he might have to step down.
“At some point, the hate magnet attracts so much hate that you don’t want to hold it anymore; you want to drop it,” she wrote in the Wall Street Journal at the time.
Nonetheless, Cheney endured Bush’s two terms.
“The fact that Cheney is now considered mainstream Republican is a sad commentary on the party and all the more reason to keep Trump and the GOP out of power in 2024,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.
In a 2005 speech, Cheney derided critics of the Iraq war as “opportunists” and said that the Bush administration’s intentional misleading of the public about the existence of weapons of mass destruction was “one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever made” in Washington. He later said that the Democrats’ approach to the war “would vindicate the al Qaeda approach,” drawing a rebuke from then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
The ideological divide within the Republican Party has long been evident. Trump built his 2016 campaign around his rejection of the old GOP base, including falsely claiming he was always against war.
Cheney has been a prominent critic of President Trump’s foreign policy, and in a private meeting in 2019, he criticized the then president for publicly expressing discontent with NATO’s role and for his surprise announcement that he would withdraw troops from Syria.
That disconnect was on display again after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Cheney visited the Capitol on the first anniversary of the attack and sat in the front row of the House GOP chamber with her daughter, then-Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, as the only two members of her party to attend a formal meeting.
Liz Cheney, who co-chaired the House inquiry into the siege before losing her seat in the 2022 Republican primary, announced her support for Harris last week, and her father followed up by saying Trump “will never be in power again.”
Crystal McLaughlin, 53, a health care compliance worker from Greensboro, North Carolina, said she was “very, very nervous” when Cheney was vice president, but she appreciated the support of the Cheneys and their families and hopes other Republicans will follow suit.
“I don’t trust him, but I appreciate your support,” McLaughlin said. “And I hope you’ll support me financially, too.”
Former Attorney General Gonzalez said she had only spoken to Trump once. But Gonzalez emerged as Trump’s latest high-profile Republican detractor in a Politico opinion piece Thursday. Gonzalez cited the Capitol attack, Trump’s criminal cases and other factors to accuse him of being unfit for office and a disgrace to the rule of law.
“As our country heads into a crucial election, I cannot sit idly by and watch Donald Trump return to the White House. He may be the most serious threat to the rule of law in a generation,” he wrote.
This is notable given that Gonzalez had been criticized by Democrats and some Republicans before resigning amid a scandal involving a group of U.S. attorneys’ abrupt firings.
Some of the fired prosecutors said they were pressured to investigate Democrats before the election. Gonzalez argued the firings were a result of the prosecutors’ poor track record.
As White House counsel in 2004, Gonzalez pushed to reauthorize a secret domestic surveillance program over the Justice Department’s protests. Republican leaders had advocated for stronger government surveillance since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but support for that within the party has waned significantly as lawmakers have taken their cue from Trump’s skepticism of the FBI.
“At some point, most Republicans are going to have to take a pill and admit that Donald Trump is not for them,” said Duncan, the former lieutenant governor of Georgia. “The question is when they do that.”
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Associated Press writer Makiya Seminara in Greensboro, North Carolina, contributed to this report.
