Grace and Disgrace: Amidst the Latter, We're Reminded of the Former

Jeff Robbins on Nov 25, 2025

In an America presently diseased by crudeness and cruelty, the scene last week at Washington's National Cathedral for the funeral of former Vice President Dick Cheney was a welcome display of grace by leaders who embrace an ethos currently out of vogue. It's an ethos of bipartisanship, of respect for public service. It's an ethos of affirming human decency, of affirming democracy itself -- regardless of sharp political differences.

Fierce political enemies of Cheney's and of one another came to church to pay homage not only to Cheney's career spent trying to defend America as he deemed necessary, but to what one of Cheney's daughters said was her father's credo. "Bonds of party," former Representative Liz Cheney said he believed, "must always yield to the simple bond we share as Americans."

There was former President Joe Biden, routinely trashed by President Donald Trump in language that casts considerably more doubt on Trump's mental condition than Biden's. Fresh from treatment for an aggressive form of prostate cancer, Biden nevertheless made a point of being there -- because that is what being a model of moral leadership is about. There was former Vice President Al Gore, present to pay tribute to the man who succeeded him in an election not just bitter but subject to permanent doubt. "There's an old saying," Gore took to saying after his gracious concession speech in 2000, "You win some, you lose some -- and then there's that little known third category."

Cheney was eulogized by the president he served, George W. Bush, who entered the White House courtesy of a Supreme Court that ordered a recount of Florida's dispositive election terminated before the votes could be tallied. It must be painful for Gore to be in Bush's presence, but he came. It was an act of grace.

There was former Vice President Kamala Harris, sitting just feet from former Republican Vice Presidents Mike Pence and Dan Quayle. There was former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi chatting with former Republican House Speaker John Boehner.

Cheney, reviled by those on the left and some on the right for his support for the Iraq war, was as conservative a Republican as the mainstream GOP had to offer. But he had stepped forward to condemn Trump and his wrecking crew in stark terms. Trump, Cheney said after the unsuccessful coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, was a "coward," who "tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him."

In September 2024, rather than stay silent, Cheney went out of his way to announce that he was voting for Harris. "In our 248-year history," he said, "there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He can never be trusted with power again."

Liz Cheney has pulled even fewer punches than her father and has paid dearly for it. She promptly condemned Trump after Jan. 6 for inciting the mob and for placing America in "maximum danger." For this truth-telling, she was stripped of her leadership position in the House Republican Conference and then defeated for reelection in a Republican primary. Repeatedly threatened by Trump, who accused her of being a criminal who should be jailed, she is already properly recorded as a profile in courage, an honor that historians will reaffirm.

It was another week proving how right Dick and Liz Cheney were. "Quiet, piggy!" snapped the President of the United States at a female journalist who asked him a question he didn't like. When Democratic members of Congress, who, unlike Trump, had actually served in the military, reminded America's soldiers of the truism that it is illegal to follow illegal orders, the president who faked "bone spurs" to avoid serving his country called them "traitors" who could be punished "by death." Kissing Vladimir Putin's extremities for the umpteenth time, Trump blamed Ukraine for "starting" the war that Putin had started by invading Ukraine.

When even Marjorie Taylor Greene can no longer bear Donald Trump, things have turned truly ugly in our beloved country. Whatever one's critique of Dick Cheney, his funeral did remind us that, with a great deal of luck, that beloved country may conceivably be returned to us.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.