Whom the 21^st century gods would destroy, they first afflict with Trump Derangement Syndrome. The latest to succumb to this pathology is the man who had been the most powerful vice president in U.S. history, Dick Cheney.

Cheney is ending his career with a petty and self-destructive gesture, aiming his middle finger at Republican Party policies, leaders, and—most of all—voters.

With a well-known hatred of Donald Trump, Cheney always was expected to withhold support from the Republican nominee. Not content with that course, he has plunged himself into a Faustian abyss, selling his soul to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, embracing all their works and all their pomps.

It’s one thing not to like Trump. It’s quite another thing for a public figure who owes all of his success and fortune to the Republican Party to work actively to put the Democratic candidates in the White House. No matter how he might attempt to justify his action, the elderly Cheney is plainly motivated by a personal vendetta against Trump. He cannot forgive Trump for having won the presidency in 2016 on a platform repudiating Cheney’s Iraq and Afghanistan war policies.

Trump Derangement Syndrome has made the actual stakes for America in the 2024 election unimportant to Cheney.

Softness on Hamas and indulgence towards the alarming new outbreak of anti-Semitism? The former vice president apparently now thinks, “So what’s the big deal?”

Walz’s stolen valor and ties to the Chinese Communist Party? “Really now, why fuss over that?”

Green New Deal? “Hey, I don’t work for Halliburton anymore. And don’t you know the oil business is for suckers?”

Rampant crime and out-of-control cost of living? “I don’t see any of that in Jackson Hole.”

Cheney ably performs a Nancy Pelosi impersonation with his shrill pronouncement that Trump is a threat to the Constitution. This is from a man who, based upon his extreme positions on waterboarding, “renditions,” warrantless searches and wiretaps, war powers, domestic spying, executive branch privileges, and habeas corpus, was in his way a cheerless counterpart to Tammany Hall’s sanguine George Washington Plunkitt. Both men adhered to the motto, “What’s the Constitution among friends?”

For all of the sardonic phrases I’ve just put forward, my true mood is great sadness.

I was briefly a small-time player in Cheney’s troupe. He gave me a valuable opportunity, and I deeply respected him and his senior associates.

In July 1994, I accepted a job involving writing and policy preparation at Cheney’s political action committee. This was Cheney’s vehicle for exploring whether to become a candidate for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination. The job was to end after the November election, unless Cheney launched a presidential candidacy. In such an event, I was to be considered for a position on the campaign staff.

Cheney traveled the country campaigning for Republican candidates in House, Senate, and governor’s races, and as the drawing card for fundraisers for these candidates. Cheney’s aide David Addington, who ran the PAC, meanwhile raised money for the PAC so that Cheney could distribute it to the same candidates’ campaigns. Political IOUs were collected.

Addington was thoughtful and gracious, and a great person to work for. The best experience of this brief time was to work with Cheney’s advisers Scooter Libby and Steve Hadley, who provided the background information and policy guidance for a long article I drafted for Cheney. Hadley impressed me as a man of the utmost prudence. I had been acquainted with Libby for a number of years before 1994, and I always enjoyed his company. He was a man of great intelligence, charm, and good humor.

Cheney did not run for president, and after 1994 I never saw him or Addington or Hadley again. I left their team holding them and Libby in high esteem as seemingly sober, balanced, careful, pragmatic decision makers with a deep understanding of international realities and risks. I have no dark revelations to report from my brief time in Cheney’s service.

After Cheney had become vice president, Libby and Addington were his two top aides. Hadley became George W. Bush’s national security adviser, promoted to that position when Condi Rice was made secretary of state. I recall seeing Libby one last time, crossing paths in 2004 in a corridor of the Capitol Hill Club. “Joe,” he said, turning to the bespectacled, pink-faced man with whom he was walking, “I’d like to introduce you to Karl Rove.”

As an outsider to the Bush-Cheney White House, I followed its doings as closely as possible through the media and other sources. I came to be surprised and dismayed by its course of events. At first, I supported the invasion of Iraq, because I trusted Dick Cheney. I had listened carefully to every public pronouncement he made on the situation.

Cheney and Rice both had been mentored by the colorless, cold-eyed, just-the-facts-ma’am foreign policy realist Brent Scowcroft. This made me trust that they would be moored to a realist foreign policy,, stabilizing our national security against the sort of utopian rhetoric that came from the fevered imagination of Bush’s chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson.

Yet it is clear that Rice willingly imbibed the Kool-Aid spiked with Dubya’s recipe of a hyper-Wilsonian vision of universal democracy and “an end to evil in the world.” If you doubt that, go back and read the speeches she gave as secretary of state, laden as they were with risible nonsense about “transformational diplomacy” and “women in development.”

Rice promoted fantasies about building sturdy new bulwarks of “democratic capitalism” on the basis of starry-eyed NGO workers trying to find new markets for basket weavers in primitive tribal villages. Cheney did not believe in such absurdity, but he was convinced that the massive use of American military force to bring about “regime change” would keep us secure.

Thus, Bush and Cheney tossed chief economic adviser Larry Lindsey overboard when he truthfully said that, instead of the Iraq war costing us nothing because Iraqi oil revenue would pay for it, the war was going to be very costly. They dumped Attorney General John Ashcroft after he concurred with Justice Department staff that the Bush-Cheney domestic intelligence program was illegal. They defenestrated Secretary of State Colin Powell because he was an independent thinker who recognized that the United States was establishing the opposite of freedom, democracy, and prosperity in Iraq.

The endless wars of the Bush-Cheney administration were the offspring of an unholy union between sentimental, moralistic utopians and ruthless, amoral proponents of military action. An improbable marriage? Not according to Flannery O’Connor, who famously observed, “In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness. And tenderness leads to the gas chamber.”

Everyone who wants some insight into why things went so wrong in the Bush-Cheney endless wars should read John Agresto’s book, Mugged by Reality: The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions. As the publisher’s summary explains, “the sober truth is that we have been thwarted not simply by failures to ‘understand the culture of the Middle East,’ but by failures of Americans in Iraq to understand their own culture and what America really stands for.”

If, say in 2007 or 2008, Bush and Cheney had admitted error in the invasion of Iraq, they would have lost nothing pertaining to their political futures, and they would have started America’s foreign and military policy on a course correction.

In such a scenario, maybe the 2008 nominee would not have been John McCain, who believed that, compared with his own prowess at warmongering, Cheney was a wuss. Maybe Barack Obama would not have won the Democratic nomination and the presidency.

How does the story of Scooter Libby’s perjury conviction fit into Cheney’s actions today? It was a case that raised more questions than it answered. There is a plausible argument that Libby was a victim of leftist lawfare, prosecution motivated not by respect for the law but by political vendetta. That’s certainly what Cheney insisted was the case, and he fought to win clemency for Libby.

Cheney lobbied George W. Bush, who had nothing to lose at the end of his second term in the White House, to pardon Libby. Bush, who knew Libby well, spurned his own vice president’s urgings. Donald Trump, who had much to lose and owed nothing to Cheney or Libby, pardoned Libby in 2018 during the middle of his presidential term.

Who has been magnanimous? Where is Cheney’s gratitude for the Libby pardon? Since Cheney denounced what might have been lawfare against Libby, why is he not militantly opposed to what is certainly egregious lawfare waged against Trump?

What would have happened if Barack Obama had appointed Jack Smith to empanel a District of Columbia grand jury to investigate Dick Cheney? Hint: vice presidents do not have presidential immunity.

Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, whom I wrongly used to think were lesser leaders than Dick Cheney, were insulted by Trump more crudely and savagely than Cheney ever was. Yet they support Trump and have in some cases modified their policies to make them closer to Trump’s. Rubio in particular used to be as staunchly in favor of endless wars as Dick Cheney. Cruz and Rubio have lined up with Trump not because they like Trump but because they respect Republican voters who support Trump’s policies. That’s magnanimity.

J. D. Vance once compared Trump to Hitler. Trump looked at the complete picture of Vance and chose him as his running mate anyway. That’s magnanimity.

Pelosi’s January 6 committee violated the rules of the House. It was a kangaroo court that mocked the Constitution. It was not aimed at finding facts to discover the truth. It was conducted to hide facts that might have gotten in the way of a preconceived narrative to smear Trump. Cheney’s daughter Liz, then a member of Congress, defied House rules and almost all House Republicans by joining in Pelosi’s travesty. The former vice president supported, and perhaps even spurred, his daughter’s spiteful effort.

None of Cheney’s actions against Trump are based on reverence for the Constitution, a document that Cheney regarded as a huge nuisance when he was vice president. Trump is an irritant to Cheney’s wounded pride, that’s all. A man who once was looked up to as a figure of magnanimity and judiciousness is ending his career and endangering America’s future with a pathetic fit of nihilism.