Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump clashed on Friday over violent comments he made suggesting that Liz Cheney, one of his fiercest Republican critics, should be put somewhere “with nine barrels shooting at her.”
Ms. Harris suggested that the remarks should disqualify Mr. Trump from serving as the nation’s chief executive, while he tried to clean up his comments by repeating them in marginally softer terms. He also attacked the vice president for campaigning with Ms. Cheney.
The initial outburst by Mr. Trump, which came at an event the night before, intensified his dispute with one of the most prominent political families in the nation and drew criticism from leaders of both parties. His attacks on Ms. Cheney became a dominant theme of the final Friday of the race as the two presidential rivals campaigned in the Upper Midwest, converging at night with a pair of scheduled rallies in Milwaukee.
Ms. Harris, speaking to reporters in front of Air Force Two after landing in Madison, Wis., said that Mr. Trump had “increased his violent rhetoric.”
“This must be disqualifying,” she said. “Anyone who wants to be president of the United States who uses that kind of violent rhetoric is clearly disqualified, and unqualified, to be president.”
Mr. Trump made his remarks imagining violence directed at Ms. Cheney — a former Wyoming congresswoman and the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney — on Thursday night during an onstage interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host.
“She’s a radical war hawk,” Mr. Trump said during the event in Glendale, Ariz. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Ms. Cheney, one of the highest-profile Republicans in the nation to break with her party and endorse Ms. Harris, responded on Friday morning that “this is how dictators destroy free nations.”
“They threaten those who speak against them with death,” she wrote on social media. “We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
Ms. Harris called Ms. Cheney “a true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above party” and described Mr. Trump as “someone who considers his political opponents the enemy, is permanently out for revenge, and is increasingly unstable and unhinged.”
Mr. Trump repeated the thrust of his remarks at campaign events on Friday, calling Ms. Cheney a “disaster” and a “coward,” and saying that he was attacking her hawkish foreign policy views. But the former president, who previously called for Ms. Cheney to be jailed, backed away slightly from the menacing hypothetical that provoked alarm from his political opponents.
“If you gave Liz Cheney a gun and put her into facing the other side with guns pointing at her, she wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” he said at a rally in Warren, Mich., a Detroit suburb.
Mr. Trump’s repeated attacks on Ms. Cheney as a warmonger came as he continued to court Michigan’s sizable population of Arab Americans, trying to harness anger at the Biden administration over its support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
Before his rally, the former president stopped to shake hands with voters at a restaurant in Dearborn, the center of the state’s Arab American community. Onstage in Warren, he attacked Ms. Harris for stumping with Ms. Cheney given her father’s key role in the Iraq war.
At the same time, Mr. Trump’s attempt to woo both Jewish American voters and Arab American voters away from Democrats has resulted in some clumsiness. Standing in front of about three dozen Arab American voters in Dearborn, he blamed the lack of peace on “the clowns you have, uh, in the Middle East” and in the United States.
He would not answer a question about whether he thought Israel’s military actions in Gaza were tantamount to genocide, and though he insisted that he had discussed a specific plan to end the conflict in the Middle East, he again declined to offer any details.
At his Warren rally, he opened by focusing on the economy, pointing to a report that showed weak job growth in October, which he said bolstered his argument that Ms. Harris would be bad for the economy. “If she gets four more years, your family is never going to — you’re never going to recover from these stupid people,” he said.
Mr. Trump bluntly acknowledged that the numbers could be politically beneficial. “Our economy is a total disaster and is expected to get very substantially worse,” he said. “It’s a wonderful time for me coming in, you know — this is what I want. Now, I would rather come in when things are going in the right direction, but we’re going to get it straightened out fast.”
Ms. Harris did not mention the Cheney controversy at her first two rallies in Wisconsin on Friday. At an early evening stop in Little Chute, she implored supporters to find people who had yet to vote and persuade them to go cast a ballot. “Wisconsin, truly, we need everyone to vote,” she said. “You will make the difference.”
Mr. Trump’s initial remarks about Ms. Cheney were denounced by leaders in both parties.
In Pennsylvania, one of the top battleground states, Tom Corbett, a former Republican governor and state attorney general, said he was “totally shocked.”
“When you see actions like that, you certainly have to question the ability of someone to function in the role of president,” Mr. Corbett said on CNN on Friday morning. He declined to say whether he would vote for Mr. Trump.
Gabby Giffords, the Democratic former member of Congress from Arizona, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011 that left her with a grievous brain injury, said Mr. Trump’s remarks were “un-American.”
“As a survivor of political violence, I ask my fellow Arizonans and American patriots to reject Trump’s calls for violence and retribution,” she said.
The Arizona attorney general, Kris Mayes, a Democrat, announced that she was investigating whether Mr. Trump had violated state law by making a threat against Ms. Cheney.
Mr. Trump has recently intensified the dark and at times threatening language he uses toward his political opponents. The former president, whose false claims about winning the 2020 election spurred the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, referred again on Thursday to a pernicious “enemy within” that needed to be addressed. Ms. Cheney was the top Republican on the House committee that investigated Mr. Trump’s role in the Capitol riot.
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