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.
More: Dick Cheney, a longtime Democratic bogeyman, became an ally opposing Trump
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.
