Trump Fantasized About Liz Cheney’s Violent Death. The Rest Is Trivial.
Trump Fantasized About Liz Cheney’s Violent Death. The Rest Is Trivial.
The firing squad vs. combat debate misses the ambiguity—and the importance—of the former president’s remarks.
SO HERE WE ARE, IN THE HOME STRETCH of the 2024 presidential campaign, debating whether one of the two principal candidates was publicly fantasizing about a prominent political opponent being executed by firing squad, or merely shot in the face in combat.
And the answer is complicated—but also simple.
The origin of this surreal debate was a clip of Donald Trump being interviewed by Tucker Carlson in Glendale, Arizona and saying the following:
I don’t blame [Dick Cheney] for sticking with his daughter. But his daughter’s a very dumb individual, very dumb. She’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. You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, “Oh, gee, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.” But she’s a stupid person. I’d have meetings with a lot of people, and she always wanted to go to war with people.
To many people, Trump’s babbling sounded like a grisly fantasy about sending Cheney before a firing squad. Others—and not just the pro-Trump or anti-anti-Trump crowd—protested that the quote was being taken out of context. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, for example, wrote that “Trump didn't threaten to execute Liz Cheney” but was “calling her a chickenhawk, something liberals said about her for ages.” Trump made the same claim the next day at a campaign stop in Michigan.
And in fact, it’s clear, even from the abridged clip that initially went viral, that Trump was talking about sending Cheney into combat: People executed by firing squad are generally not handed a rifle to give them a sporting chance. But it’s not just “Trump Derangement Syndrome” that caused many people to see his repulsive monologue as an invitation to a firing squad.
One reason is that he has explicitly called for Cheney and other members of the House January 6th Committee to be prosecuted for “treason.” In June, he shared a post that declared Cheney “GUILTY OF TREASON” and called for “televised military tribunals.” He also has a habit, according to his own former Attorney General William Barr, of calling for his opponents to be executed (even if Barr, who is currently back on the Trump Train, is quick to add that he doubts his ex-boss “would have actually carried it out”).
Another reason is that Trump’s description of what should happen to Cheney sounds a lot more like a firing squad than modern combat involving the United States military. As John Bolton put it on CNN, “It would be a pretty unusual situation in the field for one lone American soldier suddenly to be confronted by nine enemy soldiers pointing their rifles at her head.”
Maybe Trump got carried away, and his “send the chicken hawk to war” riff escalated into a firing-squad revenge fantasy. (It’s that Trumpian weave, dontcha know.) Or maybe it’s only a brutal-death-in-combat revenge fantasy. Either way, as Bolton pointed out, “In his mind, this violent image is very real.” That’s the important part here: Having repeatedly called for Cheney to face a military tribunal for trying to hold him accountable for the January 6th insurrection, Trump has now visualized, in fairly graphic terms, a situation in which she has nine rifles aimed at her face. And he has followed up on this by saying that Cheney “kills people.”
Let’s grant that it’s hyperbolic to say that Trump was calling for Cheney to be executed. But to claim that he simply “condemned sending Americans into combat” (Carrie Sheffield of the hilariously misnamed, pro-Trump Independent Women’s Voice), or to paraphrase his comments as “these pro-war people wouldn’t be talking such a big game if they were on the front lines” (anti-anti-Trump Free Press columnist Kat Rosenfield), is disingenuous. Whether this point is valid or not, people normally manage to make it without fantasizing about direct and grotesque violence against the “pro-war people.” And I know pointing out double standards is old hat, but imagine the reaction if these comments about Liz Cheney had come, say, from Barack Obama in 2015.
What’s more, the full context of the quote undermines the notion that Trump was making the point Sheffield and Rosenfield grant him. He wasn’t discussing foreign policy or American wars; he was responding to Carlson’s question about how he felt when he saw “Dick Cheney’s repulsive little daughter” campaigning against him with Kamala Harris. It is also worth noting that Trump’s response was—shocker!—a string of lies.
Trump claimed, for instance, that “the reason she doesn’t like me is that she wanted to stay in Iraq.” In reality, the U.S. combat mission in Iraq didn’t end until December 2021; Trump is presumably referring to Cheney’s opposition in late 2018 to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from parts of Syria until ISIS was defeated. (That pullout was in fact partly reversed, due, among other things, to pressure from Republicans in Congress.)
Despite those disagreements, in January 2019 Politico described Cheney as “a loyal defender of President Donald Trump on cable news at a time when plenty of other top Republicans have spurned such PR duties.” Trump, in turn, singled her out for enthusiastic praise at the National Republican Congressional Committee annual dinner in April 2019 and at a White House event that July: “A friend of mine and a wonderful person and somebody that has, I don't know, pretty unlimited future I would say—I hear a lot of very positive things.” Later that year, Cheney strongly opposed Trump’s first impeachment and even called it “a political setup.”
The unraveling of this alliance began in the summer of 2020. Partly, it was because of a conflict over military policy: Cheney strongly criticized Trump’s plan to redeploy or bring home 12,000 of the 36,000 U.S. soldiers stationed in Germany (hardly “in the mouth of the enemy”). But what probably mattered more was that she started to buck Trump on culture-war issues on which he was increasingly aligned with the lunatic right, from his increasingly overt hostility to public-health experts on the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic to his flirtation with the QAnon conspiracy cult (she denounced the group as “dangerous lunacy”). Finally, after November 3, Cheney became so fierce an opponent of Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the election that he attacked her by name in his January 6, 2021 pre-riot rally speech, saying, “We got to get rid of the weak congresspeople . . . the Liz Cheneys of the world.”
So no, Trump’s violent, garbled fantasy wasn’t about Cheney being a “war hawk” or itching to “go to war with everybody,” as Trump reiterated in Michigan on Friday. Plenty of other hawkish Republicans, including Sens. Graham and Marco Rubio, took similar positions to Cheney’s. But they bend the knee to Trump, so they don’t get the “imagine nine guns trained on their faces!” treatment. Trump wasn’t talking about “war hawks”; he was talking about a political opponent (and, in his mind, a traitor who turned against him).
It’s misguided for the Arizona attorney general to investigate Trump’s comments as a death threat under Arizona law; while loathsome, they are pretty clearly constitutionally protected. But it should be clear to people outside the Trump cult that, regardless of whether Trump was invoking the image of a firing squad for one of his “enemies from within” or only gleefully fantasizing about her being outgunned and killed in combat, his remarks are a new and stark demonstration of why he is unfit for the presidency.