“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay?” said former President Donald Trump said Thursday of former Wyoming congresswomen Liz Cheney. “Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Trump, the current GOP candidate for president, was speaking at a live event in Glendale, Ariz., with former FOX News host Tucker Carlson. Now, Arizona’s attorney general plans to investigate the comment.
Attorney General Kris Mayes – a first term Democrat – told local station News 12 this: “I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona's laws.”
Carlson kicked off discussion of Cheney, calling her “Dick Cheney’s repulsive little daughter” and asking how he felt about the Republican turning against her own party to endorse the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. Cheney’s father served as vice president for two terms when George W. Bush was president.
“Look, she’s a deranged person,” said Trump of Cheney. He went on to describe her as a “war hawk” and said they didn’t get along because she wanted the U.S. to be involved in more wars than Trump wanted when he was president.
While Dick Cheney was vice president, the U.S. became embroiled in expensive wars in the Middle East. Trump said that he was always critical of the Bush administration’s approach to war.
“We bombed the whole Middle East, and then we left,” he said. “What did we get?”
Although he recounted some positive interactions with Cheney’s father early on in his term – mostly related to Trump’s decision to pardon Scooter Libby – Trump said he didn’t know the man well. He expressed disappointment that the elder Cheney, who he said supported him at first, has now gone to his daughter’s side. Still, he said he understands that choice.
“His daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb,” Trump said to Carlson. “She’s a radical war hawk.”
Cheney, along with former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger, were Republican members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Nearly two years ago, that committee approved criminal referrals for Trump. Trump has called for her to be prosecuted and alleged that she withheld information during the committee hearings.
“They learned a lot of phony things,” he told Carlson Thursday of the committee.
In response to Trump’s comments, specifically the ones about being pointed at with a gun, Cheney said this in a Friday morning X post: “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.”
Later that day, Trump also posted about the comments on social media.
“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,” he said. “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!”