Republican presidential candidate 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, prompting new reactions to the frequent threats from the former president to political opponents.
At a rally in Glendale, Arizona, on Thursday evening, Trump called Cheney a “radical war hawk” before suggesting he hoped to see her staring down multiple gun barrels.
“Let’s just put her there with a gun while nine barrels shoot her, okay?” Trump said. “And let’s see how she feels about, you know, having the guns pointed at her face.”
In a statement defending his comments, campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump “clearly explained that warmongers like Liz Cheney are very quick to start wars and send other Americans to fight them, rather than taking up the fight themselves.” Trump’s language evoked a critic of the former president being threatened with execution — the latest example of the Republican candidate suggesting violence against a political enemy.
Cheney, a former member of the Republican leadership who was expelled from Congress for her outspoken criticism of Trump, warned 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 with death those who speak out against them. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vengeful, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
Cheney and Trump have long feuded, and their rivalry came to a head when Cheney served on the congressional committee charged with investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
In the final weeks of his campaign, revenge was at the forefront of Trump’s message, often calling his opponents “the enemy from within.”
Cheney, a lifelong Republican and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, said she would vote for Harris in September, and Harris has since used her to court anti-Trump Republicans in swing states.
