Trump fantasized about Liz Cheney’s violent death. The rest is trivial.

So HERE, ON THE HOME STRETCH of the 2024 presidential campaign, we are debating whether one of the two main candidates publicly fantasized about shooting a prominent political opponent, or whether he was simply shot in the face in combat.

The answer is complicated – but also simple.

The source of this surreal debate was: clip Donald Trump’s interview with Tucker Carlson in Glendale, Arizona, in which he said the following:

I don’t blame (Dick Cheney) for sticking with his daughter. But his daughter is a very stupid person, very stupid. He is a radical warhawk. Let’s put her with a rifle, standing there, shooting at her with nine barrels. All right? Let’s see what she thinks about it. You know when guns are pointed at her face. You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington, D.C., in a nice building and saying, “Oh shit, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.” But she is a stupid person. I dated a lot of people and she always wanted to go to war with people.

To many people, Trump’s babbling sounded like a macabre fantasy about Cheney being sent to a firing squad. Others – and not just the crowd of Trump supporters and opponents – protested that the quote stuck occupied outside With context. VoxFor example, Zack Beauchamp he wrote that “Trump did not threaten to execute Liz Cheney” but “called her a hawk, as liberals have called her for centuries.” Trump did same claim the next day at a campaign stop in Michigan.

And indeed, this is clear, even in a nutshell clip what initially went viral was that Trump talked about sending Cheney into combat: People who are shot are generally not given a rifle to give them an athletic opportunity. But it wasn’t just the “Trump Disorder Syndrome” that caused many people to view his outrageous monologue as an invitation to the firing squad.

One reason is that he specifically called for Cheney and other members of the House January 6 Committee to be present pursued for “betrayal”. In June he shared a post which found Cheney “GUILTY OF TREASON” and called for “television military tribunals.” He also has a habit According to to his former Attorney General William Barr about calling for the execution of his opponents (even though Barr, now back on the Trump Train, is quick to add that he doubts his former boss “would actually do it” ).

Another reason is that Trump’s description of what should happen to Cheney sounds more like a firing squad than a modern-day fight involving the United States military. As John Bolton put it on CNN“It would be quite an unusual battlefield situation if a lone American soldier suddenly found herself face to face with nine enemy soldiers pointing rifles at her head.”

Perhaps Trump got carried away and his “send a hawk to war” riff turned into a firing squad revenge fantasy. (It’s the Trumpian weaveI don’t know.) Or maybe it’s just a brutal revenge fantasy involving death in combat. Either way, as Bolton noted, “In his mind, this brutal image is very real.” This is the important part here: Trump, having repeatedly called for Cheney to be put on trial by military tribunal for trying to hold him accountable for the January 6 insurrection, has now, quite vividly, visualized a situation in which he has nine guns pointed at his face. He then stated that Cheney “kills people“

Let’s admit that the claim that Trump called for Cheney’s execution is hyperbole. But the claim that he was simply “condemning sending Americans into combat” (Carrie Sheffield a hilariously misnamed Trump supporter Independent Voice of Women) or to paraphrase his remarks as follows: “these pro-war people wouldn’t be talking about such an important game if they were on the front lines” (anti-anti-Trump Free press columnist Kat Rosenfield) is unfair. Whether this is right or wrong, people usually manage to portray it without fantasizing about direct and grotesque violence against “pro-war people.” And I know it’s outdated to point out double standards, but imagine the reaction if these comments about Liz Cheney had come from, say, Barack Obama in 2015.

What’s more, full the context of the quote undermines the idea that Trump meant what Sheffield and Rosenfield admitted to him. He didn’t talk about foreign policy or American wars; he was responding to Carlson question about how he felt when he saw “Dick Cheney’s disgusting little girl” campaigning against him with Kamala Harris. It’s also worth noting that Trump’s response was – shocking! – a string of lies.

For example, Trump claimed that “the reason she doesn’t like me is because she wanted to stay in Iraq.” In fact, the US combat mission in Iraq did not end until December 2021; Trump probably means Cheney opposition at the end of 2018 to withdraw American troops from parts of Syria until ISIS is defeated. (This recall was actually partial overturned(including under pressure from Republicans in Congress.)

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Despite these disagreements, in January 2019 Policy described Cheney as “a loyal defender of President Donald Trump on cable news at a time when many other top Republicans have spurned such PR responsibilities.” Trump on the other hand he singled her out for their enthusiastic praise at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual dinner in April 2019 and at Event at the White House that July: “A friend of mine and a wonderful person and someone who has, I don’t know, a pretty unlimited future, I would say – I hear a lot of very positive things.” Later that year Cheney definitely opposed Trump’s first impeachment and even called it a “political arrangement.”

The unraveling of this alliance began in the summer of 2020. This was partly due to conflict over military policy: Cheney heavily criticized Trump’s plan to transfer or bring home 12,000 of the 36,000 US troops stationed in Germany (barely “in the mouth of the enemy”). But what was probably more important was that she started Trump’s buck on culture war issues where he found himself increasingly aligned with the lunatic right, starting with his increasingly overt hostility towards public health experts in dealing with Covid-19 pandemic to his flirtation with the QAnon conspiracy cult (she condemned group as “dangerous madness”). Finally, after November 3, Cheney became like this a fierce opponent Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results attacked her by name in his speech before a January 6, 2021 rally, saying, “We need to get rid of weak congressmen. . . The Liz Cheneys of the world.”

So no, Trump’s brutal, distorted fantasy was not about Cheney being a “war hawk” or wanting to “go to war with everyone” like Trump he repeated on Friday in Michigan. Many other hawkish Republicans, including Sens. Graham AND Marco Rubiotook a similar stance to Cheney. But they kneel before Trump so they don’t get the “imagine nine guns pointed at their faces!” treatment. Trump wasn’t talking about “war hawks”; he was talking about a political opponent (and, in his opinion, a traitor who turned against him).

This is the wrong approach on the part of Arizona’s attorney general examine Trump’s comments constitute a death threat under Arizona law; while repugnant, they are quite clearly constitutionally protected. But it should be clear to those outside the Trump cult that whether Trump was conjuring up images of a firing squad for one of his “enemies from within” or merely gleefully fantasizing about being defeated and killed in combat, his remarks are new and clear evidence of why this is so he is not fit to be president.

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