Trump Attacks Liz Cheney Using Violent War Imagery

Trump Attacks Liz Cheney Using Violent War Imagery

In an onstage interview in Arizona with Tucker Carlson, former President Donald J. Trump slammed a top Republican critic as he criticized U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts.

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By Michael Gold

Reporting from Glendale, Ariz.

At his final campaign event in Arizona, former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday night insulted Liz Cheney, one of his most outspoken Republican critics, and used menacing imagery to suggest she should be sent into the line of fire.

During an onstage interview with Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News host and a top Trump ally, Mr. Trump hurled personal attacks at Ms. Cheney, who is campaigning with Vice President Kamala Harris. Then, taking issue with her foreign policy approach, he suggested she should be put in a war zone.

“She’s a radical war hawk,” Mr. Trump said, in front of thousands at the Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Ariz. “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.”

He continued by expressing disdain for those in Washington who wanted to see the United States involved in foreign conflicts. “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.’”

Ms. Cheney responded on Friday morning in a post on X: “This is how dictators destroy free nations.”

Mr. Trump’s violent hypothetical came as he has recently intensified the dark and at times threatening language he uses toward his political opponents. The former president, whose lie that he won the 2020 election spurred some of his supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, once again on Thursday referred to a pernicious “enemy within” that needed to be addressed. He has previously described his enemies as “vermin” that needed to be rooted out. (Ms. Cheney was the top Republican on the House committee that investigated Mr. Trump’s role in the Capitol riot.)

His language reflects the charged environment surrounding this year’s election. Democrats and some Republicans have increasingly warned that Mr. Trump exhibits authoritarian tendencies, with Ms. Harris recently calling him a “fascist.” Mr. Trump and his allies have argued that such language has fueled an overheated political climate that they argue has led to political violence, ignoring that Mr. Trump has long used similar language to describe Democrats.

Throughout Thursday night’s interview, Mr. Trump’s third event of the day, he gave a series of rambling answers in which he flung personal insults at his critics, at one point relived his 2016 presidential campaign and used dark language to make exaggerated claims about immigration.

He repeatedly denigrated Ms. Harris, used profanity to refer to President Biden and attacked the physical appearance of Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who was the lead investigator in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. While reminiscing about his 2016 campaign, he gleefully recalled the “extremely destructive” nicknames he bestowed upon his opponents.

Mr. Carlson did little to curb Mr. Trump’s freewheeling impulses, rebut his exaggerated claims or to interrupt his digressive answers. With no teleprompter in front of him, Mr. Trump seemed to use Mr. Carlson’s short questions as jumping off points for whatever topic came to mind.

The former president alluded to unfounded, debunked claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. He repeated a baseless theory that Democrats were encouraging undocumented immigrants to vote illegally, misrepresented gender-affirming surgeries for transgender people and revived old grievances about the investigation of the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his impeachments that he had not been asked about.

And he again revived his fixation on crowd sizes. At one point, he falsely insisted that people did not leave his rallies early. Then, he compared his audiences to Ronald Reagan’s.

“If Ronald Reagan came back from the dead — at the height of Ronald Reagan, if he went to California to have a rally, he would have 250, 300 people in a ballroom some place,” Mr. Trump told the crowd. “We have fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred thousand people.”