Analysis: Business as usual at White House as former officials, family honor Dick Cheney

WASHINGTON — It was business as usual Thursday at the White House as a list of American political luminaries and family members gathered across town to remember Dick Cheney, the late former vice president with the aggressive foreign policy that helped spawn the “Make America Great Again” movement.

White House aides chatted and laughed with reporters ahead of a press briefing, and the same aides went about their usual daily tasks. Squirrels sprinted across the North Lawn as heavily armed U.S. Secret Service officers surveyed the scene. Inside, a television reporter said “good morning” to colleagues in an unbuttoned grey overcoat as winter neared in Washington.

The loud banging from President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom construction site rippled across the campus and into the briefing room as not far away, former President George W. Bush, former staff members and family members praised Cheney as a dedicated public servant, avid outdoorsman and devoted family man.

“I arrived at the conclusion they do not come any better any better than Dick Cheney,” Bush said during his eulogy for Cheney at the Washington National Cathedral. He called his former No. 2 “everything a president should expect as a second-in-command.”

Other speakers who knew the former Defense secretary well told a Cathedral crowd that included former Cheney critics like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and MSNBC primetime host Rachel Maddow that the man they gathered to honor was one of few words.

“In a profession that attracts talkers,” Bush said, “he was a thinker and a listener.”

No eulogizer brought up Cheney’s role in the Bush administration’s post-9/11 military operations — particularly the 2003 Iraq war, of which Cheney was perhaps the lead proponent.

Though omitted at the upbeat Cathedral ceremony, 4,492 U.S. servicemembers were killed in the Iraq conflict, with 32,292 U.S. servicemembers wounded, according to the Pentagon. Around 200,000 Iraqi citizens were killed, according to the Watson School of International and Public Affairs — though America achieved few strategic long-term objectives and saw new violent extremist groups form. During his first presidential campaign in 2015 and 2016, Trump often blasted the Bush administration for its conduct of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

Also in the crowd were former vice presidents Al Gore, Mike Pence, Kamala Harris and Dan Quayle.

Trump and Vice President JD Vance both were absent from the Cheney funeral, but the latter did vaguely allude to how Cheney’s interventionist foreign policy created unbridgeable differences between teams Bush-Cheney and Trump-Vance.

“My condolences go to Dick Cheney and his family,” Vance said during an event hosted by Breitbart. “Obviously, there’s some political disagreements there. But he was a guy who served his country, and we certainly wish his family the best in this moment of grieving.”

Several hours later, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt began her first briefing of the week without mentioning Cheney, instead giving a lengthy — and rosy — assessment of the economy under Trump’s watch.

“President Trump … will not stop working until he solves it,” she said of still-high prices for a list of items and services. “As the president recently stated, he is never satisfied. … Cooking Thanksgiving dinner will cost less this year than it did last year, and is down 5% overall.”

She then launched into a call for the Department of Education to be fully terminated, arguing it was not needed to properly educate American children. Instead, she said, it should be run at the state and local levels.

“The Democrats’ reckless government shutdown did manage to do one valuable thing: It proved that America does not need a federal Department of Education,” she said. “During the longest shutdown in history, the Department of Education furloughed 90% of its staff.

“And America’s education system was not impacted whatsoever,” Leavitt added. “Schools stayed fully open across the country. … And our wonderful teachers received their paychecks, uninterrupted.”

On Nov. 4, the day after the former vice president died, Leavitt gave a chilly response to a reporter’s question about funeral service plans. The lowering of the White House flags after Cheney’s death the previous day was done to comply with federal statute, she added stoically — before immediately moving to the next question.

All American flags at the executive mansion — including the two massive ones Trump had installed earlier this year — had been returned to full staff by Thursday.

In a further display on Thursday that folding the Department of Education was the White House’s narrative of the day — not honoring Cheney — Leavitt then called Education Secretary Linda McMahon to the briefing room’s lectern.

Nary a mention of the late 46th vice president from Wyoming while the former World Wrestling Entertainment executive addressed the press corps. Once Leavitt took questions, a list of issues came up — but not Richard B. Cheney.

Immigration and drug cartels. Presidential powers. A planned Friday Oval Office meeting between Trump and New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, whom Leavitt, echoing Trump, called a “communist.” And the press secretary defended Trump’s insults toward a female reporter on Air Force One as an example of his “openness.”

In so many ways, it was just another day at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.