“Trump & Vance EXCLUSION From Cheney’s Funeral Leaves DC STUNNED” | Barrack Obama
The Empty Seat: A Reckoning at the National Cathedral
There is a silence that falls over Washington when the old guard gathers, a heavy solemn quiet that usually signals a moment of putting country over party. Today at the National Cathedral, the bells tolled for former Vice President Dick Cheney, a man who shaped history in ways that are still being debated today. Yet, if one looked at the faces in the pews, you saw the full weight of American history sitting shoulder-to-shoulder: former President George W. Bush who gave the eulogy, President Joe Biden, and former vice presidents Mike Pence, Al Gore, and Dan Quayle. Democrats and Republicans, people who have fought tooth and nail for decades, all sat together in respect. But if one looked for the man who currently holds the highest office in the land, if one looked for President Donald Trump, one saw only an empty space.
Reports confirm that the sitting President of the United States and his Vice President JD Vance were excluded—they were not invited. Let that sink in for a moment. It is unheard of in modern history for a sitting president to be deliberately left out of a state funeral for a former vice president. This was not an oversight; this was a message. It was a line drawn in the sand by the Cheney family and, by extension, the entire establishment of American leadership. When you have Mike Pence sitting there, Donald Trump’s own former Vice President, honoring a man like Cheney, while the current President sits at the White House excluded, it tells you that something has fundamentally broken in the way our government relates to itself.
This exclusion carries a symbolic weight that is impossible to ignore. It is not just about a funeral list; it is about decency. It is about the fact that for the first time, we have leadership in the White House that is viewed by the old guard, by the people who know the weight of that office best, as incompatible with the solemnity of our traditions. Dick Cheney was a fierce partisan, a man of strong, often controversial convictions. But the fact that his family felt they could not have the current President pay respects tells us that we have drifted into dangerous territory.
To really understand the silence of that empty seat, one has to look at the noise that preceded it. One has to look at the war—and I do not use that word lightly—between Donald Trump and the Cheney family. This was personal and it was fundamental. We all watched as Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney’s daughter, put her entire political career on the line to stand up against what she saw as a threat to the Constitution. She lost her seat in Congress because she refused to bend the knee to the current President, and Donald Trump celebrated that loss. He mocked it. He thought he had won the battle for the soul of his party. But today, inside the quiet walls of that cathedral, we saw that while he might have won a primary, he has lost the respect of the people who built the very party he claims to lead.
For Cheney’s family to say to the current occupant of that office, you are not welcome here, is a historic rebuke. It tells us that in the eyes of history, character still counts. It tells us that how you treat people, how you respect the rule of law, and how you conduct yourself when the cameras are not rolling actually matters. What we are seeing now with Donald Trump is a leadership style that demands total submission, and if you do not give it, you are cast out. But the irony is, by trying to cast everyone else out, the President has isolated himself.
Look at the image of that funeral again: you see continuity, a thread of shared values stretching from George H.W. Bush’s era through Clinton, through W, through Biden. Donald Trump has taken a pair of scissors to that thread. He has positioned himself outside of the American story, trying to write his own version where only he matters. And when a leader makes it all about himself, he forgets that his job is to be a steward of the house, not the owner of it. This isolation is not just sad for him; it is dangerous for us.
The exclusion of Vice President Vance is perhaps even more telling than the exclusion of Trump. Vance is a young man, a Marine, an author, who seemed poised to bridge the divide between the Rust Belt and Washington. But he was not in that cathedral. He was on the outside looking in, standing next to a President who demands loyalty above all else, even above the dignity of the office. The exclusion of Vance signals that the old guard of the Republican party sees no future in the direction he has chosen. He traded his principles for power, but he cannot trade them for respect.
This matters to the American people because the Vice President is always a heartbeat away from the biggest job on earth. When our Vice President is barred from a gathering of all living Presidents, it diminishes the standing of our country. It makes us look like a house divided against itself, incapable of the basic manners that hold a society together. Think about Mike Pence. Donald Trump’s former Vice President, the man who served loyally right up until the moment the Constitution was threatened, was welcomed with open arms. That visual contrast—Pence in the pew, Vance in the cold—is the story of the modern Republican party. One chose the Constitution and paid a heavy political price for it; the other chose the man and gained a title but lost his seat at the table of history.
This exclusion is a symptom of a much deeper sickness where ego has replaced service. It is a moment of reckoning, a reminder that character is destiny. The fact that the line was drawn today proves that the immune system of our democracy is still working. The people sitting in that cathedral, the former Presidents and the grieving family, have already made their choice: they chose the Constitution over the cult of personality. Now the ball is in our court. We deserve a politics of addition, a government that tries to bring people in, not push them out. The empty seat at the National Cathedral is a physical manifestation of the politics of subtraction, and the old guard is saying that the dignity of our institutions is not negotiable.
