Former President Donald J. Trump assailed Liz Cheney, one of his most prominent Republican critics, in an end-of-campaign burst of vitriol on Thursday, saying she should be put on a battlefield “with nine barrels shooting at her face.”
Mr. Trump’s invoking of violence intensified his dispute with one of the most prominent political families in the nation and drew criticism from leaders of both parties.
Mr. Trump criticized and insulted Ms. Cheney — a former congresswoman and the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney — during an onstage interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host.
“She’s a radical war hawk,” Mr. Trump said during the event Thursday night at the Desert Diamond Arena 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.”
He continued by expressing disdain for those in Washington who wanted to see the United States involved in foreign conflicts. “You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building, saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’”
Ms. Cheney, one of the first and highest-profile Republicans in the nation to break with her party and endorse Ms. Harris, responded on Friday morning in a post on social media that “this is how dictators destroy free nations.”
“They threaten those who speak against them with death,” she said in the post. “We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
Mr. Trump’s remark was denounced by leaders in both parties. In Pennsylvania, which has emerged as a critical battlefield in the final days of this race, Tom Corbett, a former Republican governor and attorney general of the state, said he was “totally shocked” by Mr. Trump’s remarks.
“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. He added: “This is a government of laws. The rule of law is how we function. This is clearly not a lawful action.”
He declined to say whether he would vote for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump’s campaign said in a statement on Friday that Mr. Trump was assailing Ms. Cheney’s hawkish foreign policy and said that his remarks were being misrepresented in media outlets.
“President Trump is 100 percent correct that warmongers like Liz Cheney are very quick to start wars and send other Americans to fight them, rather than go into combat themselves,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the campaign. “This is the continuation of the latest fake media outrage days before the election in a blatant attempt to interfere on behalf of Kamala Harris.”
Gabby Giffords, the former Democratic member of Congress from Arizona, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011 that left her with a grievous brain injury , said that 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. “Let’s elect Kamala Harris and put this dark chapter behind us once and for all.”
Ms. Harris, boarding Air Force Two on Friday morning, did not respond to a shouted question about Mr. Trump’s comments about Ms. Cheney, though it was not clear if she heard it.
Ian Sams, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign, said on MSNBC on Friday morning that Mr. Trump was “all-consumed by his grievances” and denounced him for “going after Liz Cheney with this dangerous, violent rhetoric.”
“I mean, think about the contrast between these two candidates,” he said. “You have Donald Trump, who is talking about sending a prominent Republican to the firing squad, and you have Vice President Harris talking about sending one to her Cabinet. This is the difference in this race.”
Mr. Trump’s violent hypothetical came as he 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 some of his supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, once again on Thursday referred to a pernicious “enemy within” that needed to be addressed. He has previously described his enemies as “vermin” that needed to be rooted out. (Ms. Cheney was the top Republican on the House committee that investigated Mr. Trump’s role in the Capitol riot.)
His language reflects the charged environment surrounding this year’s election. Democrats and some Republicans have increasingly warned that Mr. Trump exhibits authoritarian tendencies, with Ms. Harris recently calling him a “fascist.” Mr. Trump and his allies have argued that such language has fueled an overheated political climate that they argue has led to political violence, ignoring that Mr. Trump has long used similar language to describe Democrats.
During the event with Mr. Carlson, Mr. Trump repeatedly denigrated Ms. Harris, used profanity to refer to President Biden and attacked the physical appearance of Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who was the lead investigator in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. While reminiscing about his 2016 campaign, he gleefully recalled the “extremely destructive” nicknames he bestowed upon his opponents.
Mr. Carlson did little to curb Mr. Trump’s freewheeling impulses, rebut his exaggerated claims or interrupt his digressive answers.
The former president alluded to unfounded, debunked claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. He repeated a baseless theory that Democrats were encouraging undocumented immigrants to vote illegally, misrepresented gender-affirming surgeries for transgender people and revived old grievances about the investigation led by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his impeachments that he had not been asked about.
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