Day: November 4, 2025

When Dick Cheney was George W. Bush’s vice president, he wielded his power quietly and behind the scenes. Having been elected on the ticket, he was the only person in the West Wing Bush couldn’t fire. And he was also that rare ambitious person in Bush’s orbit who didn’t want to be President himself. He gave few public speeches. He didn’t seek public credit. He exercised his power in other ways. He had control over White House personnel decisions and populated the executive branch with his allies. He used his influence in the Bush Administration to carry out a larger project: to increase the power of the Presidency.

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It was a project that was often criticized, but largely successful, as Bush’s successors proceeded to at times act more unilaterally, often citing reasons tied to national security. Two decades later, as Cheney’s death on Tuesday comes as President Donald Trump has killed dozens of people on alleged drug boats in Caribbean and Pacific waters and takes steps toward a military strike on Venezuela without consulting Congress, some argue the former Vice President’s efforts helped set the stage for such actions.

“One of the dangers of Cheney’s theory of the presidency was that someone who didn’t care about the Constitutional balance of power would take advantage of those powers,” says Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs

Cheney had first worked in the White House under Richard Nixon, and stayed on to work for his predecessor, Gerald Ford, after Nixon resigned in disgrace for misusing presidential power to feed his personal political ambition. Cheney eventually rose to be Ford’s White House chief of staff, was elected as Wyoming’s only Congressman, and served as Secretary of Defense during the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s. One of his conclusions after all that government service was that Congress had scraped too much power away from the presidency after the fiasco of Vietnam and scandal of Watergate.

When he became Vice President, he set about rectifying that. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, Cheney orchestrated the U.S. response. He advocated for Bush to sweep away American restraint and moral high ground and begin torturing suspected Al Qaeda terrorists. He endorsed the National Security Agency sweeping up American communications. And, convinced he’d left unfinished business by not deposing Saddam Hussein in Iraq a decade before, cherry-picked flawed intelligence reports about Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction to justify a wholesale invasion of the country.

On a flight aboard Air Force Two in December 2005, more than two years into the ill-fated U.S. occupation of Iraq, Cheney told reporters, “Yes. I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of presidential power and authority,” Cheney said. He said he believed that the War Powers Act of 1973, which required a president to report to Congress before committing forces to a war “was an infringement upon the authority of the President.”

Naftali interviewed Cheney in 2007, as part of the Richard Nixon Oral History Project, when 

Naftali was director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. Cheney, he says, had “concluded that Congress has taken advantage of the weakening of the presidency by Vietnam and Watergate and that was not good for the country. He believed the presidency had to be strengthened.”

Cheney helped cement his expansive view of presidential power while in the Bush White House by pushing for legal opinions to bolster it. But by the end of Trump’s first term in office, Cheney was appalled by what the first Republican to follow Bush to the White House done with the office. He was especially outraged by Trump’s unwillingness to accept the results of the 2020 election and his role on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters beat police officers to storm the Capitol and delay the certification of results. During the 2024 election, Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris and called Trump a “coward” and a “threat to our republic.”

Cheney may not have foreseen how Trump would use the powers of the presidency that Cheney had helped reclaim. “Dick Cheney was a proponent of a powerful presidency. Unfortunately, he lived to see the dark side of that policy when someone uses the office for personal rather than national interests,” Naftali says.

But not everyone is convinced that Trump’s aggressive use of presidential power during his second term can all be laid at Cheney’s feet.

“Would Trump have behaved this way if Cheney didn’t create such an active presidency? I think he would have,” says Lauren Wright, a political scientist at Princeton University, and author of Star Power: American Democracy in the Age of the Celebrity Candidate.
While Cheney pushed the envelope on executive authority, Wright argues that Trump didn’t need Cheney’s example to take it even further. “I do think he absolutely played a role in asserting executive authority,” says Wright of Cheney. “But I think Trump would have done these things anyway.”

• Jad Tarifi, 42, worked at Google from 2012 to 2021 and was part of their first generative AI team.
• Tarifi relocated to Google’s office in Tokyo in his final year with the company.
• He stayed in Japan to found Integral AI, an AI startup, in 2021.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jad Tarifi, the founder and CEO of the AI startup Integral AI. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified his employment and academic history.

When I graduated from the University of Florida with a Ph.D. in AI in 2012, I didn’t see myself starting a company.

My goal, both then and now, is to use AI to positively impact the world. That first led me to Google, where I worked for nearly a decade.

Working at Google was a great experience. Many breakthroughs in the field that we see today, like the transformer, were either invented or developed at Google.

A lot of my management philosophy comes from my experience at Google. At my startup, I try to empower my engineers by leading with compassion and creating a safe environment for them to voice their opinions.

Google is good at generating revenue from advertising and is very much invested in that business model. But if you want to do something different, like build a personal AGI, that might not fit with their advertising model.

It dawned on me that I needed to chart a path to pursue my interest in robotics. A startup would allow me to iterate fast, take risks, and be nimble.

Moving to Japan

In my final year at Google, I persuaded my manager to send me to Google’s Tokyo office. That was in 2020, and I spent a year there before I left to launch Integral AI.

Why Japan? That goes back to my interest and passion for applying AI to robotics.

I spent the bulk of my career in Silicon Valley, and I saw firsthand that the US is a world leader in AI. The US, however, isn’t as strong in robotics. That’s partly because it has been outsourcing manufacturing to the rest of the world.

Japan, on the other hand, is the world leader in robotics. It makes most of the world’s industrial robots. Going to Japan allowed me to combine the best of AI from Silicon Valley with the best of robotics in Tokyo.

Going to Japan gave me access to the country’s huge robotics ecosystem. There are so many players in robotics, ranging from suppliers to manufacturers to end customers. You need to understand the ecosystem if you want to serve the market effectively.

I was fortunate to spend my final year at Google in Japan. I used it as an opportunity to immerse myself in the language and culture. To become conversant in Japanese, I placed myself in uncomfortable situations where I had to communicate with locals. Today, I feel comfortable talking to people I meet on the street.

After leaving Google, I founded Integral AI in 2021. My company’s goal is to build an AI that can control robots and autonomous vehicles.

Getting the best of both worlds

Running my business in Japan does come with pros and cons.

One thing that took getting used to was Japan’s rigid system of rules and administrative procedures, which can be old-school and inflexible.

For instance, you must use a personal seal, or what the Japanese call a “hanko,” to sign documents.

It’s not just the way documents are handled. It took me three months to open my company’s bank account, despite having a Japanese investor on board. I could have opened a bank account in the US in 30 minutes.

However, I saw these inefficiencies as a small price to pay to access Japan’s robotics market and its many players.

Operating in Japan has given me a deep understanding of the ecosystem and how we should design our products to leverage it.

On a broader level, working in Japan showed me the beauty of taking an iterative approach to building products. In the US, the ethos is to move fast and break things. In Japan, you are forced to think small and take a step-by-step approach to solve problems. This systematic approach to working feels healthier and more sustainable.

If you want to accelerate your tech career, Silicon Valley should still be your primary goal, even though the culture there is more individualistic and work-oriented.

But if you want to live and work in a country that values work and community, then Japan may be the place for you. You can get the best of both worlds by working in a Silicon Valley-style tech company in Japan. This is where you can have your cake and eat it too.