President Trump on Thursday torched Rep. Liz Cheney when he tweeted, “Liz Cheney is only upset because I have been actively getting our great and beautiful Country out of the ridiculous and costly Endless Wars.” He was responding to tension between Republican House allies and Cheney during a closed-door conference meeting on Tuesday.
But more importantly, this tweet was a Republican president criticizing a high-ranking GOP congresswoman who is also the daughter of the last Republican vice president.
Dick Cheney was considered to be responsible for shaping President George W. Bush’s foreign policy, including the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Pre-Obama, what most Republicans thought about foreign policy would have been mostly indistinguishable from what the hawkish Cheney believed.
Now, Trump calls Cheney’s primary legacy, the Iraq War, the “worst single mistake” in U.S. history. Predictably, Dick and Liz Cheney still defend it.
Most people, including veterans, agree with Trump on Iraq. But far more interesting, many Republicans today agree with Trump’s “America First” anti-war rhetoric, again exemplified by the president’s Thursday tweet.
How did we get here?
After the country souring on the prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan helped Barack Obama win the 2008 presidential election, conservative Republicans were often opposed to the new Democratic president’s military interventions abroad. Tea Party-affiliated GOP leaders were vocally opposed to Obama’s U.S. military policies regarding Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2013.
In September 2013, the Washington Examiner’s David Drucker pointed to the popular influence of then-Rep. Ron Paul and his son, Sen. Rand Paul, on the Tea Party, as guiding forces behind this new anti-war faction within the GOP. “The GOP’s unusually dovish opposition to intervening in Syria, as expressed by a vocal cadre of Tea Party-affiliated Republicans, has suggested a possible drift and retreat from the muscular, internationalist foreign policy that has defined the party since Ronald Reagan’s presidency.”
Opposing Obama was one thing. But would the Republican Party drift in a less interventionist direction when the GOP regained control of the White House?
In 2014, Dick Cheney would visit House Republicans to call Obama “weak” internationally and dispense his hawkish foreign policy advice to a largely receptive audience, except for a minority of libertarian Republicans.
As the 2016 Republican presidential primaries began, virtually every candidate in that crowded field except for Rand Paul and Trump espoused basically a Bush-Cheney-era foreign policy.
One of the more notable controversies of that primary was getting the GOP candidates to admit that the Iraq War was a mistake. Sen. Lindsey Graham (who many believed entered the race just to take down Paul) immediately said it was not a mistake. Sen. Marco Rubio struggled with the question before finally defending the war. Admitting that his brother’s foreign policy legacy was a mistake had to be dragged from the lips of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush before he finally relented.
It’s not hard to imagine a President Rubio or Jeb Bush today re-cementing Republican foreign policy as exclusively hawkish.
Candidate Trump, on the other hand, declared total war on the old guard.
In February 2016, Trump stood on a South Carolina debate stage (definitely “Bush Country,” I’m a Charleston native) and blasted the war and Bush in no uncertain terms. “He got us into the war with lies,” Trump thundered. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none.”
Trump no doubt angered some Republicans in the audience that night.
The Washington Examiner’s Byron York observed post-debate that Trump “was taking a risk, calculated or not, on saying [those comments] in South Carolina. George W. Bush remains popular among state Republicans … slamming the Republican former president so hard is a significant gamble for Trump.”
“So once again, as he has so many times in this campaign, Trump has gambled,” York wrote. “Maybe his frankness will allow other Republicans to loosen up and admit their doubts about the wisdom of the Iraq War.” York concluded, “Or maybe he has touched the third rail of South Carolina GOP politics. He’ll know more in a week.”
A week later, Trump won the South Carolina GOP primary with a 10-digit lead.
Today, Trump’s frankness on this subject appears to have changed many Republican minds. Critics would note that Trump’s promise to end the war in Afghanistan has not been fulfilled and his anti-war rhetoric doesn’t always match his actions. Yet also today, this Republican president is retweeting Rand Paul, who led the only anti-war faction within his party, however small, prior to Trump’s arrival.
Most importantly, the current Republican president is retweeting Paul’s criticisms of Liz Cheney precisely on foreign policy.
Who would have predicted this scenario a decade ago?
But that’s where we’re at today. It’s a long way from 2003. Whatever happens in November, the hawkish and noninterventionist factions within the Republican Party likely aren’t going anywhere. But where future Republican foreign policy discussions and policies end up could look radically different than anyone would have once expected thanks to Trump.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
