Former Vice President Dick Cheney believes presidents should have wide latitude in selecting cabinet nominees. | Getty Cheney emerges as surprise Trump surrogate The president-elect trashed his foreign policy during the campaign, but they've found common cause in Rex Tillerson.

During the campaign, Donald Trump trashed the hawkish foreign policy of the second Bush White House. But now, he and his team are relying on the man most closely identified with that regime — Dick Cheney — to help ensure that Rex Tillerson is confirmed next year as Trump's secretary of state.

As Republicans have voiced reservations about Tillerson’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Cheney — himself a former oil executive, a longtime Tillerson friend, and perhaps the country’s most famous foreign policy hawk — is serving as a bridge between the Trump team and skeptical Republican senators.


It’s a scenario no one could have possibly foreseen: that one of the key architects of the Iraq War, which Trump slammed on the campaign trail, is now being enlisted as an emissary for a man Trump wants to help steer his ship of state.

Rick Dearborn, executive director of the Trump transition and a Senate veteran who served as chief of staff to Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions for more than a decade, is looking to leverage Cheney's influence with key GOP senators, according to a transition aide.

Another transition aide said Cheney's imprimatur may serve as "a good housekeeping seal of approval" with Republican skeptics. And indeed, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio received a call from the former vice president earlier this week. The goal: “To move Marco the right way,” according to a source familiar with the conversation. Rubio will cast a pivotal vote on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which must approve the nomination before it proceeds to the full Senate.

The former vice president is also in close contact with senior Trump aides. Cheney speaks frequently with the vice president-elect, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who himself serves as a liaison between the president-elect and Capitol Hill, and who has said he hopes to model his vice presidency on Cheney’s.

“Mike relishes the advice,” said a senior transition aide, who added that Cheney is “willing to do what he’s asked” and “wants to be helpful” to the incoming administration.” The aide denied, however, that Cheney's conversations were part of a coordinated effort between Trump Tower and Capitol Hill to push for Tillerson’s confirmation.

During the campaign, Trump accused the Bush administration of lying about the existence of weapons of mass destruction to embroil the country in the Iraq War. He argued that the move to topple Saddam Hussein “may have been the worst decision” in presidential history.

Cheney was a grudging supporter of the Republican nominee: He spoke out against Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigration and did not attend the Republican convention in Cleveland, and told associates privately that he was backing Trump in large measure to help his daughter Liz, who was a Republican candidate for Congress.

Cheney’s involvement in Tillerson’s selection and nomination is surprising for a candidate who railed against the Republican establishment on the campaign trail and was elected to office because of that posture. Yet his reliance on some of the marquee names in the GOP for advice and counsel as he fills his Cabinet also marks the beginning of his integration into the Republican establishment as he prepares to move to Washington ahead of his inauguration next month.

Cheney’s words carry weight with the Republican hawks most skeptical of Trump’s quasi-isolationist view of the world. Rubio’s vote is a particular concern because the foreign relations panel is tightly divided between Republicans and Democrats — 10 Republicans, 9 Democrats — so one GOP defection could imperil the nomination. The Florida senator said Saturday that he does not want to see a “friend of Vladimir” at the State Department, a reference to an award of friendship the Kremlin bestowed on Tillerson in 2013.

“I think the pitch Cheney should make is that the Senate has traditionally supported the president’s Cabinet nominees,” said a former GOP Senate aide.



Cheney came into the George W. Bush administration having served as chief of staff to Gerald Ford in the wake of the Watergate scandal and seen Congress slowly chip away at the power of the executive. The former VP believes presidents should have wide latitude in selecting Cabinet nominees.

That view is likely to square with Trump’s expansive understanding of executive power. It also helps that Cabinet nominations have rarely been rejected by the Senate — it happened only three times in the 20th century.

It may also mark the beginning of a reconciliation of sorts between Trump and the establishment figures he positioned himself against during the campaign. In addition to Cheney, several prominent officials from both Bush administrations are publicly vouching for Tillerson, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and former Secretary of State James Baker.

“Invariably, the people that know the nominees and have worked with them join hands and work to make sure they are confirmed,” said Spencer Abraham, the former Michigan senator who led the Bush administration’s Department of Energy.

Still, back at Trump Tower there are indications the integration is a work in progress. Indeed, the president-elect and his aides consider some Republican lawmakers’ initial aversion to Tillerson a symptom of the establishment’s fecklessness.

“Lawmakers are overall the reason we have the problems that we have, because they think that they’re the smartest people in the world and they sit in D.C. and talk to themselves, and if you don’t sit on the cocktail circuit there you don’t know anything about anything,” said a senior transition aide. “I think they’re intimidated by a guy like this — they don’t know him and he doesn’t owe them anything.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated James Baker's former position.