Watch: Trump Makes His Chilling Liz Cheney Comments so Much Worse
Donald Trump doubled down Friday on his disturbing comments about placing Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad.
During a noisy campaign stop in Warren, Michigan, Trump refused to back down on his wild comments attacking Cheney, a moderate Republican who has been campaigning extensively with Kamala Harris ahead of the election.
“She’s a war hawk. She kills people. She wanted uh, even in my administration, she was pushing that we go to war with everybody,” Trump said. “And I said that if you ever gave her a rifle, [indistinguishable] if you ever do that, she wouldn’t be doing too well.”
“If she had to do it herself, and she had to face the consequences of battle, she wouldn’t be doing it. So it’s easy for her to talk, but she wouldn’t be doing it,” Trump continued. “She’s actually a disgrace.”
Trump defends his Liz Cheney comments by amping up the incitement even further: "She kills people." pic.twitter.com/ObIwZsTm46
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 1, 2024
Trump also called Cheney a “disaster” and a “coward,” during his stop in Dearborn, Michigan, according to the Associated Press.
Trump’s original remarks to Tucker Carlson from a rally Thursday night suggested that Cheney ought to be viscerally confronted with her own hawkishness.
“They’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh gee, let’s send 10,000 troops into the mouths of the enemies.’ She always wanted to go to war with people,” Trump said.
“She’s a radical war hawk,” he continued. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
(Trump reportedly dodged the Vietnam War draft by saying he had bone spurs.)
Arizona’s attorney general announced Friday that she will be investigating Trump over his violent comment about Cheney, and whether it qualifies as a “death threat.”
The Republican ticket has redoubled its efforts to paint Trump as a peacemaker as it attempts to siphon support from Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan, who have expressed disappointment with Harris’s non-statements about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. (A particularly ridiculous pitch given Trump’s insistence that Israel should “go further” in its military campaign in the Middle East.)
Trump’s phony anti-war farce also comes as he faces criticism from moderate Republicans such as Cheney and retired generals, including Trump’s former Chief of Staff John Kelly, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.
Cheney is a veritable war hawk, but Trump’s pitch as an anti-war president is blatantly dishonest, and evidence of some strange memory hole about the Trump presidency.
During his campaign, Trump has repeatedly asserted there were no wars under his administration and claimed that not a single U.S. soldier in Afghanistan was killed for an 18-month stretch while he was in office. Both claims are completely untrue.
During Trump’s presidency, there were U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as ongoing civil wars in Yemen, Syria, and Ethiopia. While he was in office, there were 45 hostile deaths and 63 total deaths in Afghanistan, with no alleged 18-month gap in casualties. In fact, Trump increased the number of airstrikes in Afghanistan, which led to a 330 percent increase in civilian casualties.
The reality of Trump’s time in office was much more volatile. Trump regularly stoked international conflict, nearly tweeting us into a nuclear war with North Korea on several occasions. He withdrew from a nonproliferation agreement with Iran, allegedly helped to incite a failed coup in Venezuela, and supported a Saudi-backed war in Yemen.