US honors former Vice President Dick Cheney, with Trump not on the guest list

Dick Cheney was honored Thursday at a funeral service that excluded president Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

George W. Bush and fellow former President Joe Biden were among more than 1,000 guests at the Washington National Cathedral.

All of the living former vice presidents - Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, Al Gore and Dan Quayle - were also in attendance, along with generals, foreign dignitaries and judges from the Supreme Court.

"Vice President Dick Cheney was an American patriot who served this country like few others in our history, and I was always inspired by his calm and steady leadership," Pence told cable news network MS NOW outside the cathedral.

Dick Cheney, a Trump critic

President Trump has had a particularly bad relationship with Cheney's family in recent years. Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president, helped lead the investigation into the House of Representatives into Donald Trump's alleged role in the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The former congresswoman from Wyoming, who lost the Republican primary to a Trump-backed challenger, said in September that she would vote for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in the November election and claimed her father was doing the same.

Dick Cheney criticized the Republican Party’s shift and became a stern critic of Trump, whom he considered a "threat to (...) the republic."

The Republican was a staunch supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His assertion that "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction" marked his record.