“Trump Fantasizes About Guns Pointed at Liz Cheney’s Face,” screamed Rolling Stone.
The Drudge Report put it even more bluntly: “Trump Calls for Cheney’s Execution.”
Just what had former President Donald Trump said to ignite this firestorm of media outrage? He suggested that ex-Congresswoman Liz Cheney was a warmonger who would crumble in the face of actual combat.
Liz and Dick
At a Thursday campaign event in Arizona, Tucker Carlson asked Trump if he found it “weird” that Cheney, a member of a once-exalted Republican family, was “running against [him] with Kamala Harris.”
“I think it hurts Kamala a lot, actually,” Trump replied. “[Cheney’s] a deranged person.”
He elaborated:
The reason she couldn’t stand me is that she always wanted to go to war with people. I don’t want to go to war…. She wanted to stay in Syria — I took [the troops] out. She wanted to stay in Iraq — I took ’em out. I mean, if it were up to her, we’d be in 50 different countries.
In that respect, he observed, she is no different from her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who famously engineered the disastrous, unconstitutional invasion of Iraq during the George W. Bush administration.
Then he made the remark that has the media in a tizzy:
[Liz Cheney’s] a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.
Perfectly Executed Smear
Instantly, the smear machine went into action.
“Trump Says ‘War Hawk’ Liz Cheney Should Be Fired Upon in Escalation of Violent Rhetoric Against His Opponents,” trumpeted CNN. The network connected Trump’s words to his “long history of violent rhetoric.”
Rolling Stone claimed Trump’s comments were yet another example of his “increasingly fascist rhetoric.”
The New York Times, in an article headlined “Trump Assails Liz Cheney and Imagines Guns ‘Shooting at Her,’” wrote that “Trump’s violent hypothetical came as he has recently intensified the dark and at times threatening language he uses toward his political opponents.”
ABC News, The Washington Post, and The Independent, among many other outlets, also jumped aboard the Trump-wants-to-kill-Cheney bandwagon.
On Friday, Harris said Trump’s comments “must be disqualifying.” At the same time, she lauded Cheney as “a true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above party.”
Cheney, for her part, took to X to express her outrage:
This is how dictators destroy free nations. 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.
How’s that for “dark and at times threatening language”?
Chickenhawk Cheney
Even a moment’s consideration of his partial quotation should make it clear that the former president was not calling for Cheney’s assassination. In fact, Trump went on to make his meaning plain:
You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, “Oh, gee, well, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.”
The implication was unmistakable: It’s easy to call for war when you don’t have to participate in it. Liz Cheney, of course, has never been in a war. Dick Cheney got five draft deferments during the Vietnam War. Put either one of them in a combat zone, and he or she would be much less eager to get the U.S. involved in foreign wars.
Trump confirmed this understanding in a Friday Truth Social post:
All I’m saying about Liz Cheney is that she is a War Hawk, and a dumb one at that, but she wouldn’t have “the guts” to fight herself. It’s easy for her to talk, sitting far from where the death scenes take place, but put a gun in her hand, and let her go fight, and she’ll say, “No thanks!” Her father decimated the Middle East, and other places, and got rich by doing so. He’s caused plenty of DEATH, and probably never even gave it a thought. That’s not what we want running our Country!
Civil Warmongers
That certainly isn’t what Democrats allegedly wanted running the country a decade ago, when Salon ran a piece on “Dick Cheney’s dark legacy.”
But today, with the Cheneys enthusiastically in the Harris camp, they are personae gratae among progressives. Even that avatar of progressivism the New Yorker feted Liz Cheney at its annual festival last week.
The Daily Caller summarized the situation aptly:
This entire fake fiasco perfectly sums up the modern ruling class in America. Our political leaders are allowed to invade countries and send American troops to their deaths with impunity, yet they never have to fight themselves. The prestige liberal media gushes over pro-war figures like [Liz] Cheney while demonizing the man who exposes the dark underbelly of the whole racket.
Everyone in the media knows it’s true that politicians who advocate for war are complete cowards who would never step foot in a combat zone. But they are too blinded by their hatred for Trump, too loyal to their class, ever to hold those politicians accountable. In their minds, you are a hero for starting wars that lead to the death of millions of innocent civilians as long as you act civil at home; you are a villain if, in an uncouth manner, you tell the truth.
