Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump’s suggestion Thursday that former Rep. Liz Cheney should stand “with nine barrels shooting at her” cast a menacing new shadow over the final days of the presidential race, stoking fresh backlash against the former president’s frequent and increasingly violent threats targeting political opponents.
During a rally in Glendale, Arizona, on Thursday night, Trump referred to Cheney as a “radical war hawk” before suggesting he hoped to see her staring down multiple gun barrels.
“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?” Trump said. “And let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
In a statement defending his remarks, campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump was “clearly explaining that warmongers like Liz Cheney are very quick to start wars and send other Americans to fight them, rather than go into combat themselves.” Trump’s language evoked the image of a critic of the former president being threatened with execution — the latest instance of the GOP nominee suggesting violence against a political foe.
Cheney, a one-time member of GOP House leadership who was ousted from Congress over her vocal Trump criticism, warned on Friday that Donald Trump is an “unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” she wrote on X. “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.”
Condemnation of Trump’s remarks flowed in on Friday morning, capping an extraordinary final full week in the presidential race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, which started last Sunday with a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden featuring vulgar, racist and sexist speeches, stirring outrage from the Puerto Rican community in particular.
Days after the MSG rally, a gaffe from President Joe Biden calling Trump’s supporters “garbage” left the White House scrambling to clean up his remarks and prompted both Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz to distance themselves from the president.
But Trump’s vision of Cheney with guns trained on her head seems poised to unleash backlash of a different order, stoking alarm among some voters and conjuring memories of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, which followed another Trump speech laced with violent rhetoric in which he singled out Cheney for abuse.
It was the aftermath of the Capitol riot, and Cheney’s seat on the Congressional committee investigating it, where her rivalry with Trump came to a head. Now, Cheney has been unleashed as a Harris surrogate to court anti-Trump Republicans in swing states, a voting bloc that could prove crucial to an electoral college victory.
In an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Harris spokesperson Ian Sams immediately compared Trump’s message of revenge to Harris’ commitment to appoint a Republican to her cabinet. “This is the difference in this race,” he said, adding that Trump “will sit in the Oval Office stewing over his enemies list.”
“He spent the last month talking about the enemy from within the United States,” Sams said. “Now, he’s going after Liz Cheney with this dangerous, violent rhetoric.”
Former Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin called on Republican members of Congress to denounce Trump’s language, which she called “unpresidential” and “reckless.”
“It’s unconscionable,” she said on CNN. “I don’t know how Republican leaders, many of whom served with Liz Cheney and at one point considered her a colleague and friend, cannot denounce this. It’s dangerous; it’s escalatory.”
