Trump embraces violent rhetoric, suggests Cheney should have guns ‘trained on her face’

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Republican nominee Donald Trump faced a fresh controversy on Friday after he suggested former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) should have guns “trained on her face,” escalating his vilification of a prominent critic from within his party, as well as his use of violent imagery.

The former president’s campaign reacted by criticizing media coverage that interpreted his remark to imagine putting Cheney in front of a firing squad rather than sending her into combat. Cheney said Trump’s intent was to intimidate anyone who challenges him. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) said her office is investigating whether Trump’s comments could have violated state laws involving intimidation of public officials, spokesperson Richie Taylor said.

“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” Cheney, who lost her position in House Republican leadership for condemning Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, and went on to serve as vice chair of the committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol, said Friday on social media. “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.”

Trump’s latest attack on Cheney came late Thursday during a live interview here with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host.

“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said of Cheney, following a tangent about his pardon in 2018 of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, her father. “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 followed up with a social media post on Friday saying his point was that Cheney herself would not fight. He also doubled down on insulting her intelligence, calling her a “War Hawk, and a dumb one at that.”

“If you ever put her into the field of battle, she’d be the first one to chicken out,” Trump told reporters at a campaign stop at a coffee shop in Michigan on Friday. “She wouldn’t fight, she’d chicken out so fast, and that’s all I say.”

Later, at a rally in Warren, Michigan, Trump again repeated his attack on Cheney and falsely suggested they fell out over disagreements on foreign policy. The former congresswoman supported Trump through the 2020 election, until he refused to accept defeat and tried to overturn the results.

“If you gave Liz Cheney a gun and put her into battle, facing the other side with guns pointing at her, she wouldn’t have the courage or the strength of the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said. “She sits back in Washington, ‘We have to go and attack Iran, Iraq. We’re going to attack everybody.’ That’s why I broke up with her.”

The Harris campaign seized on Trump’s original comment to reinforce a contrast the vice president is trying to make as part of her closing message in a razor-thin-margin race that could tilt on any comment or action in the final days. On Tuesday, Harris vowed to work for all Americans and consult with people who disagree with her during a speech on the Ellipse in D.C., the same place where Trump spoke on Jan. 6.

“This must be disqualifying,” Harris told reporters in Wisconsin on Friday afternoon. “Trump is increasingly, however, someone who considers his political opponents the enemy, is permanently out for revenge, and is increasingly unstable and unhinged.”

Cheney and her father have endorsed Harris, and the former congresswoman has campaigned with the vice president, focusing on the suburbs in several battleground states - regions once part of the Republican coalition. Cheney’s frequent appearances with Harris and on her behalf have drawn Trump’s ire.

Former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona), who was shot in the head in a 2011 assassination attempt in Tucson in which six people were killed, spoke out on social media against Trump’s latest attack on Cheney.

“I ask my fellow patriots to reject Trump’s calls for violence and retribution,” Giffords said. “Let’s elect Kamala Harris and put this dark chapter behind us once and for all.”

Former congressman Reid J. Ribble (R-Wisconsin) said Trump’s “type of rhetoric is just plain wrong.”

“It’s almost pleading for an act of violence against Liz,” said Ribble, who said he left the top of his ballot blank in this election. “He’s pandering to men, but this certainly won’t help him with women.”

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s remarks.

“President Trump is 100 percent correct that warmongers like Liz Cheney are very quick to start wars and send other Americans to fight them, rather than go into combat themselves,” she said.

(Trump received deferments from the Vietnam-era draft for college and a medical diagnosis of bone spurs.)

Trump’s speeches frequently dwell on gory descriptions of heinous crimes or scenes of mayhem that are embellished or completely imagined. Since 2015, he has encouraged his supporters to rough up hecklers at his rallies, encouraged police officers to injure suspects during arrests, and urged authorities to respond to looters by shooting on sight.

“Sometimes he gets into a level of detail that feels overwrought or over the top,” said Matthew Dallek, a George Washington University professor who studies right-wing politics. “It’s as if he revels in it.”

Trump has repeatedly suggested that his critics are committing treason, a crime punishable by death - a connection he once made explicit regarding retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump has also shared online memes depicting violence against Democrats such as President Joe Biden and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. He consistently defends and glorifies people charged in the Jan. 6 riot, including some convicted of attacking police, vowing to pardon them if he is elected president.

Trump again downplayed the Jan. 6 riot during the Carlson interview. At least five people died during or immediately after the violence, which injured 140 officers and delayed Congress’s certification of the 2020 election results. Federal prosecutors have charged more than 1,500 people in the Capitol breach, including 1,200 who pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial. More than a dozen people have been charged with bringing weapons to D.C., and others acknowledged stashing them at hotels or other locations.

“We had more people than I’ve ever seen up at the Ellipse, up on top, and a small group went down to the Capitol,” Trump said on Thursday.

Trump also dismissed the backlash to his recent references to an “enemy from within” that he considers a bigger threat than the dictator of North Korea, and he suggested using the military against his political rivals. He has sometimes specified that he was referring to individual Democrats, such as former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) or the party as a whole.

“They go crazy when I say ‘the enemy from within,’” Trump said Thursday night, before reiterating: “We do have an enemy from within. We have some very bad people. … They would like to take down our country.”

Trump on Thursday also attacked several other prominent Republicans who have criticized him, closing out one of his final days on the campaign trail with an event that seemed geared toward his base rather than swing voters.

He called his former national security adviser John Bolton a “nutjob” and a “moron.”

He mocked “crying Adam Kinzinger,” the former Republican congressman from Illinois who was part of the Democratic-led House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack.

“They’re not select - they’re scum,” Trump said of the committee members.

And he went after Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California), describing him as a “watermelon head,” “real scum” and “unattractive both inside and out.”

Arnsdorf reported from Washington. Yvonne Wingett Sanchez in Phoenix contributed to this report.