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At a campaign event in Arizona on Thursday, Donald Trump continued his pattern of using violent rhetoric to attack his political rivals, criticizing former Rep. Liz Cheney’s hawkish foreign policy stance and suggesting she might not be a “war hawk” if “the guns are trained on her face.”
“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson onstage, calling Cheney a “very dumb individual.”
“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face,” the Republican presidential nominee said. “You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building, saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let’s send — let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’”
Trump has used increasingly crude and violent rhetoric to attack his opponents in recent weeks, as polls show him and Kamala Harris in a dead heat in this election. At the Thursday event, he also called President Joe Biden a “stupid bastard” and referred to Harris as “a sleazebag.”
Trump has vowed to use the powers of the executive office to punish and prosecute his political rivals if elected to a second term — a scenario that former federal law enforcement officials and legal experts told NBC News would cause chaos and division.
He has also singled out Cheney, who became one of his major targets for vocally criticizing his efforts to steal the 2020 election. In June, Trump shared an image on Truth Social calling for a televised military tribunal for Cheney.
She has recently campaigned with Harris, urging her fellow anti-Trump Republicans to vote for the Democrat. Her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney — an architect of the Iraq War in the early 2000s — has also crossed party lines to support Harris this election.
The younger Cheney responded to Trump’s remarks early on Friday, saying they amounted to a death threat.
“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” she wrote in a post 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.”