In a private session, the former vice president told the current one that Trump’s policy looks too much like Barack Obama’s.
Dick Cheney lit into Vice President Mike Pence behind closed doors over the direction of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, flouting a set of agreed-upon subjects and forcing Pence on the defensive over President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.
The former vice president interviewed Pence at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum in Sea Island, Ga., an off-the-record confab attended by approximately 200 top-dollar Republican donors, lawmakers, and business leaders who flock to the private island every spring.
Cheney pressed Pence about Trump’s proclivity for making major policy announcements on Twitter and his off-and-on commitment to NATO, according to four meeting attendees and a source briefed on their remarks. The former vice president, who has kept a low public profile in recent years, questioned whether Trump places enough value on the findings of the intelligence community, which he has repeatedly and publicly dismissed. He suggested that Trump foreign policy has at times looked more like President Barack Obama’s — which Cheney has repeatedly lambasted — than that of a Republican standard bearer.
At one point, Pence, whom attendees described as taken aback by some of the questions, turned to his predecessor and inquisitor and joked, “Man, who wrote all these softball questions?” Cheney has served on AEI’s board of trustees since 1996 and, although he left office with low approval ratings, is generally held in high esteem by the crowd that gathered in Sea Island.
The civil but tense standoff put a spotlight on enduring fissures in the Republican Party over its foreign policy. Trump has rejected the interventionism and democracy-promotion espoused by George W. Bush, who talked during his second term of “ending tyranny in our time.” But while the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dampened Republican support for the sort of pro-democracy hawkishness embraced by Cheney, many Republicans still believe Trump has gone too far in undermining America’s traditional alliances worldwide.
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Cheney homed in on two key issues, attendees said: the president’s tendency to make policy decisions on Twitter before notifying senior members of his own staff, let alone important allies, and his tendency to make such decisions without properly consulting aides and intelligence reports.
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The standoff between the two, described by one attendee as “confrontational in substance, but not in style,” took place before an audience of approximately 150 influential politicians, donors, and business leaders. The weekend event attracted both pro and anti-Trump lawmakers, donors, and intellectuals including presidential adviser Jared Kushner, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Kevin Hassett, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) as well as New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.
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Cheney ambushes Pence on Trump foreign policy at AEI's Sea Island retreat, per four attendees – https://t.co/YDnIgv1Cc6
— Eliana Johnson (@elianayjohnson) March 11, 2019
Buyer’s remorse? Cheney helped put this incompetent, corrupt fool in office with his endorsement. He doesn’t get to whine about it now. He knew who Trump was when he endorsed him.
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