Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney and former President Donald Trump are in a proverbial war over his suggestion she should be forced to go into a war zone.
Speaking as the special guest at the Tucker Carlson Live Tour in Glendale, Arizona, Trump derided Cheney as a “very dumb individual” and then suggested she should be sent to war.
“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle, standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. OK? let’s see how she feels about it,” he said. “You know, when the guns are trained in her face. You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh, gee … let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’”
“But she’s a stupid person,” Trump continued. “I’d have meetings with a lot of people, and she always wanted to go to war with people.”
Cheney interpreted the remarks as a death threat.
“This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant,” Cheney said in a post on X, along with the hashtags #Womenwillnotbesilenced and #VoteKamala.
The Harris campaign was quick to portray the event likewise, with Harris senior adviser Ian Sams and other surrogates suggesting Trump was calling for Cheney to face a firing squad.
“Trump is talking about sending a prominent Republican to the firing squad. Vice President Harris is talking about sending one to her Cabinet,” he said on MSNBC.
The Trump War Room X account called Sams a “disgusting liar.”
The anti-Trump Drudge Report ran the headline, “TRUMP CALLS FOR CHENEY’S EXECUTION.”
Others defended Trump, saying Harris’s surrogates were misrepresenting his comments.
The Trump campaign reposted a message on X by an Axios journalist criticizing the framing of Trump’s comments as a threat to Cheney’s life.
“Folks, Trump didn’t threaten to execute Liz Cheney,” Zack Beauchamp wrote. “He actually was calling her a chicken hawk, something liberals said about her for ages.”
Beauchamp followed up the post with other criticisms of the former president, saying, “Trump does so many offensive things and makes so many anti-democratic promises, that it’s actually counterproductive to get outraged about fake ones.”
“It is simply a lie to claim that Trump was calling for Cheney’s assassination here. A lie,” conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said.
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“I watched the clip. Trump obviously did not call for Cheney’s execution. He was calling her a chicken hawk. This is a bizarre, deranged lie,” journalist Brad Polumbo wrote.
Cheney has emerged as one of Trump’s most vocal critics, going so far as to campaign alongside Harris. Harris has touted her support as evidence of bipartisanship.
