Former President Donald Trump is getting some backlash for talking about former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) having guns “trained on her face” as he criticized her foreign policy.
Those remarks were made in a fireside chat Trump had with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in Arizona Thursday evening, per The Hill.
Trump spoke about Cheney’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris — Trump’s rival in the fight for the White House. Liz Cheney is also supporting Harris, a Democrat.
“I don’t blame him for sticking with his daughter, but his daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb,” Trump said.
“She’s a radical war hawk,” the Republican presidential nominee said. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine-barrel shooting at her, OK. Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face. You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, oh, gee, we’ll, let’s send — let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.”
Those words no sooner left Trump’s lips when he started to receive backlash for them.
Ian Sams, senior adviser for Harris’s campaign, spoke out against Trump for his “dangerous, violent rhetoric.”
“You have Donald Trump, who’s talking about sending a prominent Republican to the firing squad. And you have Vice President Harris talking about sending one to her Cabinet,” Sams said Friday morning.
Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” also weighed in on Friday.
Scarborough noted Trump was “calling for Cheney being shot in the face by nine guns — nine rifles — the closing weekend of the campaign.”
“Not only what it says about the Republican Party in 2024, but also what it must look like in London, in Paris, in Madrid, in Warsaw, across the world,” Scarborough said.
Liz Cheney posted on X, formerly Twitter, calling it a death threat.
“This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death,” Cheney said.
Cheney has been an outspoken critic of Trump dating back to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s National Press Secretary, said Trump’s words were simply taken out of context.
“President 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,” Leavitt posted on X.
