Former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the most polarizing and hated figures of the George W. Bush administration, received an unexpected tribute this week from one of his longtime political adversaries: Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California.
Following Cheney’s death, Pelosi offered glowing praise for the man once derided by Democrats as the chief architect of the Iraq War, calling attention to his “patriotism” and his family’s service in public life.
In a social media post, Pelosi acknowledged the deep policy divisions that once defined her relationship with Cheney but claimed they were bridged by what she saw as a shared devotion to country. “We strongly disagreed on most policy issues,” she wrote, “but his patriotism was clear when he returned to the House Floor to commemorate the first anniversary of January 6th.”
The remark referenced Cheney’s appearance in Congress in January 2022, when he joined Democrats to mark the first anniversary of the Capitol riot—an event that many conservatives viewed as an overtly political commemoration meant to damage President Donald J. Trump and his supporters.
Cheney’s decision to stand alongside Pelosi and other Democrats that day cemented his break from the Republican Party’s populist wing and aligned him publicly with those who have sought to marginalize Trump’s influence within the GOP.
Dick Cheney was a patriotic American who loved his country.
While we strongly disagreed on most policy issues, his patriotism was clear when he returned to the House Floor to commemorate the first anniversary of January 6th. We all saw then how proud Vice President Cheney was to…
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) November 4, 2025
Pelosi went on to praise Cheney’s daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who became one of the most prominent Republican critics of President Trump during her time in office. “We all saw then how proud Vice President Cheney was to see his daughter, Liz, follow in her father’s footsteps to serve in the House with courage and integrity,” Pelosi wrote.
Liz Cheney, who played a leading role on the January 6th Committee—widely denounced by conservatives as a partisan effort to criminalize political opposition—has since left office but continues to attack Trump and his allies.
Both she and her father endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 election, a move that further distanced them from the party they once helped define.
Pelosi’s tribute, while couched in the language of civility and bipartisanship, reflects a broader political realignment in Washington, where establishment figures from both parties increasingly find common cause in opposition to the populist right.
For many conservatives, Cheney’s late-life embrace of the Democratic establishment confirmed what years of foreign wars and bureaucratic entrenchment had already suggested: that his vision of American leadership was rooted less in representing voters’ interests than in maintaining elite consensus.
Still, Pelosi’s comments were gracious in tone. She extended condolences to Cheney’s family, mentioning his wife, Lynne, and their daughters, Liz and Mary. “May his family find comfort,” she wrote, in what amounted to one of the more conciliatory gestures between two figures who once stood at opposite poles of American politics.
For many Americans, Pelosi’s statement marked a final, symbolic reconciliation between two faces of the old Washington order—one Republican, one Democrat—bound less by ideology than by a shared nostalgia for a political establishment now being reshaped by forces neither could fully control.
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