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Dick Cheney, Most Powerful V.P. In Modern History, Dies At 84; Today: Voters Delivering Early Report Card On Trump Presidency; Mamdani, Cuomo & Sliwa Face Off In NYC Mayor's Race. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired November 04, 2025 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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DANA BASH, CNN HOST, INSIDE POLITICS: Welcome to Inside Politics. I'm Dana Bash in Washington, and we're following two major political stories. Millions of Americans are casting their ballots in Virginia, New Jersey, California and New York City. These marquee races are serving as a report card for President Trump's second term so far and Democrats' ability to regain their political footing. But on this Election Day, we begin with another story, the passing of a political titan.

You're looking at the White House, where the flags are at half-staff in honor of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died last night at the age of 84. Cheney was the most influential, perhaps the most controversial, vice president in modern times. History will remember him as the architect of the Bush administration's war on terror and war in Iraq, but his far reaching impact on America stretches well beyond his time in the George W. Bush administration.

He was Gerald Ford's White House chief of staff. He served as a House foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution and George H. W. Bush's defense secretary during the first Gulf War. But in his final years, the man who helped define conservative politics for a generation broke with his party over Donald Trump.

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DICK CHENEY, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT: In our nation's 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: I'm joined by a terrific group of reporters, including those who knew Dick Cheney well and covered him for a while. Jamie Gangel, I'm going to start with you, his legacy.

JAMIE GANGEL, CNN SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT: So, I -- there's no question. As you said, he will be remembered, as if not, the most powerful vice president in history, one of the most. He changed it from what had long been a ceremonial role to -- he really was a partner to George W. Bush. Bush would tell you that while people said that Dick Cheney was the puppet master, that he was not that Bush was the decider.

He was the advisor, but he was a very powerful and experienced advisor, which is one of the reasons Bush picked him. He'll also be remembered as very controversial. He was a lightning rod for critics of his positions, the Iraq War, on enhanced interrogation. And he was vilified for those he never backed down on those positions. He felt that 9/11 when he was sitting in the White House and no one knew what was coming next, that he was a changed man, and that his job was to keep the country safe. So, he never changed on that.

I think there's one thing, there are some people -- there's a generation that does not remember Dick Cheney as vice president and think of him as Liz Cheney's father, and--

BASH: Which he probably loved.

GANGEL: He loved it. And I've spoken to Liz several times in the last couple of weeks. And she really hopes that people will know that the way her father raised her, it didn't just influence her career. She followed him into the House representing Wyoming, but it gave her, as she says, the courage of her convictions to vote to impeach Donald Trump, to break with him, to be vice chairman of the January 6 committee, and that there was no daylight between her and her father. As we know, he blasted Trump. He voted for Kamala Harris. As Liz would say, he picked country over party.

BASH: And we both covered the Bush, Cheney administration. And one of the things that he was very open about with reporters who he talked to a lot, maybe surprisingly given his reputation, was how much being in the Ford White House as the chief of staff to Gerald Ford after the Nixon resignation changed his view of the executive branch, because he was very upset that so much power was taken away post Nixon.

And when he was sort of overseeing that as the chief of staff at the White House, and in his second go round as vice president, he was working very hard to pull some of that power back into the executive branch.

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JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: And ironically, even though he reviled Donald Trump, Dick Cheney's role as vice president that White House could end up helping Donald Trump at this very moment because there were two George H -- George W. Bush had two pictures of Supreme Court, John Roberts the Chief Justice and Samuel Alito. Dick Cheney was involved in that process.

You know, and the one thing he cared about was presidential power because of his experience in the Ford White House after the Nixon White House, the Nixon and the Ford White House. That he thought the power of the presidency had been stripped post-Watergate and the president needed more power.

And that's what he weighed in on in looking for judicial picks. What are their views of presidential power? And the Supreme Court in over the next weeks and months is going to make a number of decisions about Donald Trump's presidential power.

So far, Alito has been with Trump on most of these things. Roberts is a bit of a wild card as we watch it go through, but so, there's a bit of an irony there. I don't know if that's the right word, that you know, that Dick Cheney's role in the Bush White House may help Donald Trump here.

The other point I would just make is that he was such a willing foot soldier in the first revolution in the Republican Party. He was a Nixon, Ford Republican who loved the Reagan Revolution, who got his footing in the Reagan Revolution, who was a proud conservative in the Reagan Revolution, but he could not stomach the Trump takeover.

He thought it was not conservative. It was not Republican. And what bothered him most was the point Jamie was making about Liz that even back in his Wyoming. He thought that would be the safe place that these were westerners, these were true conservatives, these were people with principle. And when his daughter-in-law, he really realized, oh, my God, this is everywhere.

BASH: Well, yeah, it's so true. And I want you to weigh in on this -- on that. But I also just want to go back to 9/11, and just reminder to people that President Bush was traveling and couldn't get back. Dick Cheney was the guy in charge in the Situation Room in the White House.

And there's the famous -- a very famous picture in the Situation Room, and then ultimately in the bunker. And he talked very openly about the fact that that day changed him, having to be not just in charge, but make a decision on whether or not the U.S. military would potentially have to shoot down a civilian aircraft filled with innocent Americans because it was being used as a missile.

GANGEL: Absolutely. And he wrote about it in his memoir, and he -- there is no question. Look, he was a conservatives-conservative, Republicans-Republican, but there is no question that 9/11 changed him. He felt his job was to keep the country safe after that, and so all of these other policies that became so controversial, he never backed down on any of them.

BASH: And one of those, obviously, is the war in Iraq. And the fact that he said that the United States would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people. Let's play the sound bite. He said it on Meet the Press, March 16, 2003.

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CHENEY: I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people. My belief is, we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.

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BASH: Well, America wasn't greeted as liberators. In fact, Amy, I can tell you that the first time he actually went to Iraq after the war was several years -- two years later. I was on that trip with him. We landed in pitch black dark, with a corkscrew landing on a military airplane. It was definitely not the greeting of liberators. And I actually talked to him in the mountains of Pakistan during that lengthy trip about this very issue.

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BASH: I wonder if you're looking back and some of the things that that you thought at the time, maybe you said at the time that the United States would be greeted as liberators, for example. Do you think looking back that might have raised expectations for the American people about what to expect in Iraq that maybe weren't that?

CHENEY: No, I don't think so. I think on Iraq, we got the big, big issues right. I think when all is said and done, from the perspective of history, the vast majority of the Iraqi people -- grateful for what we did far better to have their democracy that's now in place, rather than Saddam Hussein ruling. And the world is a far safer place because of what we did.

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BASH: Amy?

AMY WALTER, PUBLISHER & EDITOR IN CHIEF, THE COOK POLITICAL REPORT WITH AMY WALTER: Yeah. What's remarkable about this is the way in which the Iraq war didn't just agitate one branch of -- one side of the aisle in Washington. But it literally, you could argue, was a deciding factor in the rise of Trumpism.

BASH: Definitely.

WALTER: And that, you know, again, growing up, covering Republicans in Washington, there was the three-legged stool that made up the Republican Party. It was hawkish, fiscal conservatism and social conservative. That was who Dick Cheney was. Two of those legs are now gone, fiscal conservative and the hawkishness on military involvement and the role that America plays in the world. And the fact that it is a Republican Party that is standing just on one leg of the stool that Dick Cheney helped to build is quite remarkable.

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NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, BLOOMBERG POLITICAL & POLICY COLUMNIST AND CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: No, I think that's exactly right. Part of Trumpism, when he comes on the scene in 2016 is to say that the establishment from both parties has lied to you. And look at the way the Iraq war was prosecuted, the lost blood and treasure from that war, and how has it improved your lives? It hasn't in any way.

And so, you know, you obviously get in that moment, Barack Obama's rise, after Bush and Cheney, that Democratic primary is fought along. What was the right war and what was the wrong war? What vote did you take in regards to those -- to those wars? And then, of course, after Obama, you get Donald Trump engaging again with the establishment and essentially saying that the Republican establishment. In so many ways, Dick Cheney was -- in some ways more the face of the war than Bush. BASH: On that note, because this is a trip down memory lane. Let's go back to June 22, 2006. You asked Dick Cheney about him being known as Darth Vader.

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CHENEY: I suppose sometimes people look at my demeanor and say, well, he's the Darth Vader the administration. It's the other thing that's working here, John, is, I'm not running for anything. My career will end politically with this administration. I have the freedom and the luxury, as does the president, of doing what we think is right for the country.

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KING: So, the most interesting part here, in this interview, in this conversation, that was at the VP's residence. and he's much more personal there. I think people forget that Dick Cheney was stoic. Dick Cheney, as you we all know, was the toughest interview on the Sunday shows, that he never said anything, he didn't want to say.

You were not going to crack him. You were not going to crack him. He showed up knowing what he wanted to say, and there was no way to crack him. I had a conversation with Tim Russ about this. Once he said, kid, don't even try. He's going to say what he's going to say. Just do it.

And so, you know, but there he said that he intentionally took on the role after 9/11 of being Mr. Worst case scenario. He said there needed to be somebody from that day on, and he meant forever, who thought about the terrorism, thought about the threats to the United States, and always said, I'm going to plan for the worst-case scenario.

Because he said with every day and month and year that passed, memories would fade and then the pain would fade, and that somebody had to keep that and he knew that he had the discipline to keep it, and he was worried others wouldn't. So, he said, that's my job. And some people are pulled back by that. But I have decided that the administration, the president, needs the person who sits around and says, worst-case scenario.

And he made the case, and he said, that's my label. I'll take it. And I just want to say very quickly, a very serious interview there. And then we took a walk with the grounds. He had two great dogs when he was vice president, Jackson and Dave. You want to see somebody go from being public servant, stoic, serious to just a decent, wonderful, fun- loving human being. It was Dick Cheney and his dogs walking the grounds.

BASH: All right, everybody stand by. We have a lot more to talk about on Dick Cheney later in the show. But up next, it is Election Day. The first referendum on President Trump's agenda during this second term. There are key states where voters are at the polls right now. You see some there. We'll talk about that after the break.

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ZOHRAN MAMDANI, (D) NEW YORK MAYORAL CANDIDATE: When we think about how best to fight Donald Trump, one way we can do so is by understanding Andrew Cuomo for what he is, the candidate endorsed by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Stephen Miller.

ANDREW CUOMO, (I) NEW YORK MAYORAL CANDIDATE: The president does not support me. The president opposes Zohran Mamdani.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: It's Election Day in America and in New York and everywhere else. The elephant in the room once again, it's President Donald J. Trump. Today is the first real electoral test of his second term. It's not just New York. Voters in Virginia and New Jersey are choosing new governors.

CNN is live at the polls. Omar Jimenez is in Queens, New York. Danny Freeman is in Passaic County, New Jersey. Omar, let me go to you first. What are you hearing from voters there? It's such a crucial part of New Jersey that will determine who wins that governor's race.

OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN ANCHOR AND CORRESPONDENT: Well, one of the things that we've heard, I was actually just speaking to a voter a few minutes ago, just before we came here. And I asked who he voted for. He said he voted for Andrew Cuomo for mayor and then voted Republican down the ticket. I asked, why didn't you vote for Curtis Sliwa? And he essentially said that he didn't think Sliwa was going to be able to win.

And so that dynamic is going to be really interesting to watch for over the course of today. Since leading into today, many polls had shown Mamdani as a clear leader. Now at this place, this particular spot, in Queens, we've been sort of watching as voters have been coming in and out over the course of the day, because enthusiasm has been incredibly high. This is a voting center here in Queens. Voter enthusiasm had been incredibly high on the early voting scale, coming into today, more than four times what we saw in early voting over the course of 2021, the previous time.

And then on Sunday, it was a record-breaking day in terms of early vote totals. And then already today, from what we've heard from the board of elections, over 1.2 million -- over 1.1, excuse me, million voter check-ins total, counting early voting, and we're just getting to noon here. So, that enthusiasm aspect another crucial thing to watch for as we get this Election Day going here, Dana?

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BASH: You didn't even flinch when I said you were in New Jersey. That's some really smooth reporting there, Omar, from Queens, New York. There's a difference. And Danny Freeman will tell us that, because Danny, you are actually in New Jersey. What are you seeing?

DANNY FREEMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, I am, indeed, Dana. Listen, it's been a very fascinating day here in Passaic County, New Jersey. This county, of course, so important because it's one of the counties that had a really intense switch from voting for Biden back in 2020 and ultimately voting for Trump, then about a year ago to the date.

What we've been hearing from voters is a mix of different things. One thing that was interesting to your intro, Dana is, a woman that I spoke with. Her name is Janelle. She told me that she voted for Mikie Sherrill. She likes Mikie Sherrill, but she really cast the vote for the Democrat here to be a check specifically against the Trump administration.

But the big question here, specifically in Passaic also, is the question of Latinos. Latinos obviously drifted very much to President Trump in the last election. So, the question has been, can Republican Jack Ciattarelli hang on to that momentum? Well, there was one Latino man, William Guzman, who came out and said, listen, I vote Democrat, no matter what.

But then I spoke to another man, Cesar Tavares, who told me. Listen, my perspective here is that I was a Democrat. I voted Democrat before. Now I vote Republican because I feel like they have my best interests in mind, and I believe Republicans and Jack Ciattarelli can do more for my individual community. So, a lot of different perspectives from out here in North Jersey on a very, very windy day outside of this polling place right now, Dana?

BASH: All right, but it does look pretty. Thank you to you and to Omar. Appreciate it. My panel is back now. John, you've been out and about, particularly in all five boroughs of New York. What are you looking for tonight?

KING: Well, there's a key question here, men of color, both in Passaic, where he is in New Jersey in the governor's race, which was surprisingly close. Donald Trump earned a lot better in New Jersey in 2024 than he did in 2020. Men of color have moved toward Trump. Blue collar men of color moved toward Trump.

Are they Republicans, or are they Trump voters? I did meet a lot in Queens, where Omar is. You look at how much Kamala Harris won New York City by you say, oh, it's a blue city. Donald Trump was up 10 points in Queens and 11 points in the Bronx. He still lost big, but he is growth among men of color.

So, were they Trump voters, angry about prices or Biden, or do they think Harris was too liberal? Or are they Republicans, who think that's the party of their future? That's one of the big questions tonight. Democrats can win with anti-Trump anger. That does not solve their problems. So, you might see -- that's the thing we have to go through tonight when we see the results and what happened. And what happens.

And then how many -- the last thing I'll say is, how many Republicans in New York who've never voted for a Cuomo in their life, Mario or Andrew say, I don't think Curtis Sliwa can win, so I'm going to do this. They're still outnumbered overwhelmingly, so it's pulling to an inside straight flush for Andrew Cuomo to win this race.

But I do think, as we read through the extra polls again, are people making these strategic decisions? But my biggest thing is these are -- these races and the Virginia governor's race, you do have Latino voters, black voters, who were drifting toward Trump. I would say even more than drifting toward Trump, where do they go now?

WALTER: Agree with both of that. And then we can look on the other side, where do Democrats go? There was also part of the challenge that Democrats are dealing with at this point. And also in 2024, there was lower turnout. In 2024, they were not excited, energized by the standard bearer, whether it was Biden or Kamala Harris.

And also, we're seeing democratic approval ratings lower than we've seen them 20, 30 years. That is driven by that same sort of democratic inter party angst. They may be upset at the direction of their party, but they still don't like Donald Trump. And so, is that a bigger factor to John's point, it's not going to solve Democrats bigger problem for 2028, but it could be the deciding factor in 2026. That disapproving, disappointing Democrats still show up and vote for Democrats as a way to say no to Trump.

BASH: Yeah. And at the same time, you have that, you know, that national Democrats are hoping appall over the electorate that is given by Donald Trump, but so many really important local issues that are connected to the national mood but are very much driving the voters in New York -- well, New York and New Jersey and Virginia. But I'm thinking specifically of New Jersey and Virginia.

HENDERSON: No, that's right. I mean, you think about Virginia. All the federal workers who were there, that played very heavily into what voters were doing, the economy. On the Republican side in Virginia, you had Winsome Earle-Sears doing the culture war thing, essentially saying that all of the rights that LGBTQ folks have, should be -- should be rolled back. How does that play in that race?

And then, you know, New York, this is all about affordability. And you've got this young, very charismatic candidate in Mamdani who has really galvanized a cross section of the population there. So, we'll see how he does, you know, in that race. But listen, I think, you know, if you think about Virginia, that other issue with Jay Jones, the attorney general there. How does that play some of his text messages from a while back.

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Do you see the kind of ticket splitting in Virginia that you're apparently going to see in New York? We'll see, or does -- you know, I think partisanship. Democrats are so anxious to put up some points against Donald Trump. The resistance hasn't really been what it was in the first iteration of Donald Trump, and this, I think, is the first kind of blow that Democrats get to strike against Donald Trump. We'll see if it's decisive, if it exists or not. BASH: And in Virginia, it's worth noting that President Trump has not endorsed the Republican candidate. He called into a teller rally last night said to, vote for the Republican attorney general and then vote up and down the ticket Republican. I don't want to forget about California, Jamie? And you know, who isn't forgetting about California?

GANGEL: Nancy Pelosi.

BASH: Well, that's true. Also, Donald Trump.

GANGEL: Right,

BASH: He just -- he's doing a slew of posts on his social media platform, including in California. The unconstitutional redistricting vote in California is a giant scam. In that the entire process, and particularly voting itself, is rigged. All mail in ballots where the Republicans in the state are shut out is under very serious legal and criminal review. Stay tuned!

GANGEL: So, let me just say clearly Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi are very concerned about what's happening in California for exactly the same reason. You know, I spoke to Pelosi about this a couple of weeks ago. This is an existential issue for both parties. How will it affect the midterm elections in '26?

The Democrats think it is an existential threat if they don't take back the House. Donald Trump wants to hold on to the House for all the reasons we've already seen. I just think there are two things to add. One is, I believe we're still in a shutdown today, on Election Day.

You know what impact that will have, and each of these states, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, very, very different races. But Republican elected officials on the Hill are watching and will be dissecting the numbers, because they have been doing what Donald Trump has asked them to do, but they want to win their elections in '26. So, they're going to be looking at this.

BASH: All right, everybody stand by. First, don't miss our coverage of Election Night 2025. You can watch two ways, starting at 5 pm Eastern here on CNN, and streaming exclusively on the CNN app. Coming up. Voters are making their voices heard. But how well off your results echo the 2026 midterms? We have two very smart people on both sides of the aisle who will join us in minutes.

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