Jeb Bush has been going around the country claiming his brother, President George, "kept this country safe." Donald Trump has been repeatedly declaring that 9/11 happened under George Bush's watch. I'll give you no guesses as to which one of these things former vice president and walking war crime Dick Cheney finds outrageous.
Appearing on Fox News'"Special Report with Bret Baier," Cheney listened to the anchor read a list of the candidate's recent comments about Bush and 9/11 earlier in the day and during Saturday night's debate, including Trump's assertion that Bush and Cheney "lied" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as an impetus to invade the country in 2003.“He sounds like a liberal Democrat to me, Bret. He’s wrong, and he’s I think, deliberately promoting those views in order to advance his political interests," Cheney responded.
Mind you, the evidence that 9/11 happened during George W. Bush's administration continues to be quite compelling. And evidence that the administration deliberately withheld information that would have debunked their preferred—and, in the end, provably false—WMD claims continues to surface even now. But good conservatism requires denying both of those things, possibly while burying one's head in cat litter and flashing rude hand gestures to passersby, and so Donald Trump mentioning either of them sounds "liberal" to someone like Dick Cheney.
"The other areas, for example, if you look at what we did in the aftermath of 9/11, we did in fact keep the nation safe for seven and a half years," Cheney said.
Neoconservatives are very, very serious about national security. Seven and a half-ish out of every eight years, they promise to be all over that.
Of note: Dick Cheney did mutter that he'd support whoever the Republican nominee was, suggesting that he'll indeed grit his teeth and rally around Trump if Trump gets more delegates than the other guys. Whether you think this is noble or not depends on how you're grading these things. If you, as a Republican, think Donald Trump would be a disaster of a president who is secretly "liberal" then tossing all of your supposed ideological beliefs into the trash chute so that you can vote for the Republican anyway seems not very noble at all.
If Republicanism is simply a tribal affiliation at this point, such that every core belief (say, about whether a sitting president is even allowed to nominate Supreme Court justices at all, during even-numbered years) can morph into the opposite belief if it will score your team a point in the great political game of Calvinball, then it makes a bit more sense. But we may be overthinking things, and Dick Cheney probably puts no more effort into political decisions than he does national security ones.