Breaking:Liz Cheney hits back at Trump’s violent rhetoric
Former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney is striking back at Donald Trump after the former president ominously recommended Cheney be put in the line of fire as he slammed her as a “war hawk.”
“This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten people who speak against them with death,” Cheney tweeted Friday on X. “We cannot commit our country and our freedom to a selfish, vengeful, violent, unbalanced man who wants to be a tyrant.”
Trump attacked Cheney at an event with Tucker Carlson in battleground Arizona on Thursday night.
“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said of the former Wyoming congresswoman as he went after her and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.
“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay?” Trump stated. “Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are pointed on her face.”
The Harris campaign called Trump saying “nine barrels” a reference to a traditional nine-gun “firing squad.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, responding directly to the comments later Friday, said they should be “disqualifying.”
“Anyone who wants to be president of the United States, who employs that type of violent speech, is clearly unfit and unqualified to be president,” Harris said. “Representative Cheney is a great patriot who has demonstrated amazing courage in putting country above part. Trump is increasingly, however, someone who considers his political opponents the enemy, is permanently out for retribution and is increasingly unstable and unhinged.”
Cheney, a Republican but a vocal critic of Trump over his behavior after the 2020 election and on Jan. 6, 2021, has endorsed Harris in the 2024 election.
While campaigning alongside Harris, Cheney cast Trump as a danger to democracy and the Constitution.
“We see it on a daily basis, somebody who was willing to use violence in order to attempt to seize power, to stay in power, someone who represents unrecoverable catastrophe, frankly, in my view, and we have to do everything possible to ensure that he’s not reelected,” Cheney told ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl on ABC’s “This Week” earlier this fall after publicly backing Harris.
Trump’s attacks against Cheney are the latest in a run of increasingly dark and deadly campaign language.
The former president doubled down on his “enemy from within” phrase after he earlier indicated Democrats are more of a threat to the U.S. than major foreign rivals such as China and Russia when it comes to the 2024 race.
