While the bitterly contested 2000 presidential election may have helped kick off this era of polarization, both Cheney and former President George W. Bush have transcended their previous status as partisan lightning rods.

Former Vice President Al Gore, the Democrat who lost the 2000 race to the Bush-Cheney ticket, was at Cheney’s funeral while Trump and Vice President JD Vance were not (neither was invited). During the Florida recounts and the protracted legal fights over the 2000 election, Republican protesters gathered outside the vice president’s residence and shouted at Gore, “Get out of Cheney’s house!”

Former Vice President Mike Pence was the closest thing to a senior Trump administration official on hand for Cheney’s funeral. Pence broke with Trump over Jan. 6 and the certification of the 2020 election results. He attended former President Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration and did not endorse Trump’s successful 2024 campaign to return to the White House. 

“If anybody needed more evidence of how politics have changed in America: Rachel Maddow is at Dick Cheney’s funeral,” New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker wrote on X.

Less than two decades ago, Maddow’s commentary on Cheney would have focused on Iraq, torture, Haliburton, and alleged war crimes. Now it would revolve around his daughter Liz, the former congresswoman who served on the Democrats’ Jan. 6 committee, defending democracy against Trump, and endorsing former Vice President Kamala Harris — also present at Friday’s funeral — for president last year.

Seated near Maddow was Anthony Fauci and longtime Democratic consultant and Clinton family consigliere James Carville. Carville has been married to veteran Republican operative Mary Matalin, who worked as counselor to Cheney when he was vice president, since 1993.

To Trump’s detractors, this is the cordial political world that the current president disrupted, even if the Bush-Cheney years were not viewed as some era of good feelings at the time.

But to Trump’s admirers, it was a reminder that no matter how divided Washington often appeared to be, the political class and managerial elite could come together for what really mattered: themselves.

Other political funerals have been seen as a rebuke of Trump, most notably services for John McCain and Barbara Bush, from which he was excluded during his first term as president. There were awkward moments at former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, both of which Trump attended. The latter two events underscored that while the ex-presidents make up an exclusive club, they are also a bipartisan team of Trump rivals. 

Trump supporters, by contrast, often hail the president as a slayer of political dynasties. 

Later in the same day that Cheney’s life was celebrated, there was confusion in MAGA world as Trump celebrated socialist New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and watched friend-turned-foe Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announce her abrupt resignation from Congress.

DICK CHENEY REDEFINED THE VICE PRESIDENCY 

Maybe Trump isn’t immune from the cozy political class’s games after all. Or perhaps Trump, more than Greene, was pointing the way to a powerful left-right populist coalition. 

But a divide at the heart of the Trump era was on full display, with Cheney the latest symbol. Some people are still in mourning for the political world as it was before Trump came down the escalator a decade ago. Others don’t ever want to go back.