Appalling.

AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili – FILE

One of the most appalling things to happen in this appalling chapter in American politics is that former vice president Dick Cheney has endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

Kamala Harris, despite her current efforts to hide the fact, is a radical, far-left San Francisco liberal. She is by an order of magnitude the most far-left candidate the Democratic Party has ever nominated.

How a guy who was vice president in a Republican administration and who was one of the earliest endorsers of Ronald Reagan’s candidacy for president could endorse Kamala Harris seems to defy understanding.

But look a little deeper and understanding begins to emerge.

Save for the four and a half years during which he was chairman and CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney spent his entire career in the elite circles of official Washington. Dick Cheney is a part of the Washington establishment that managed – irrespective of which party was momentarily in charge – to put the nation $35 trillion in debt while concurrently diminishing the personal wealth of average Americans.

The term “average Americans” for this discussion is defined as the 160-plus million people who live between the coasts, get up and go to work every day, raise their children, and pay their taxes. This is the pool from which Donald Trump draws the lion’s share of his support.

By 2016, disgust among these voters with establishment Washington was sufficient to give rise to Trump’s otherwise improbable presidency. In this space in November 2022, I wrote this:

We’ve been led for decades by a small, inbred group of elitist Ivy Leaguers and they have made a pig’s breakfast of it. By this time in its history the United States should be substantially debt free, economically strong, and well-capable of deterring the world’s bad actors.

Racial animus in America should be on the wane.

Prosperity should be making its way through every demographic group in the country. Today’s generation of black and Hispanic parents should be approaching their old age secure in the knowledge that their children will be better off than they were.

Today, none of those things is true.

Trump’s arrival caused the scales to fall from the eyes of people like you and me who once were excited about a guy like Mitt Romney. (How the hell were we ever excited about Mitt Romney?) Trump brought long overdue clarity. We owe him for that.”

Though I admit to being blind to it during his time as VP, Cheney is the embodiment of the disdain expressed in the preceding paragraphs. His fealty to the customs and niceties of establishment Washington now exceeds any fealty to conservative governance he might have once had.

Cheney can support whomever he wants. It’s a free country. But his public endorsement of Kamala Harris is a slap in the face to the good people who once supported him and who valiantly defended him against the same vile, truth-starved slander that is now routinely visited upon Donald Trump by Democrats and their media handmaidens.

Cheney should be ashamed.