Donald Trump is rebutting the “fascist” charge in the final days of the campaign by publicly fantasizing about one of his leading critics facing what sounds an awful lot like a military firing squad.
Speaking with Tucker Carlson, an ex-Fox News anchor who recently interviewed a Holocaust denier and claimed that he was physically attacked by a “demon” — such is the state of American conservatism — Trump lambasted former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., as a “deranged person” who only dislikes him because, in his telling, he’s reluctant to invade other countries.
“The reason she couldn’t stand me is that she always wanted to go to war with people. If it were up to her we’d be in 50 different countries,” Trump claimed. “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with the 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.”
The former president and three-time Republican nominee has in recent weeks repeated his call for using the military to go after “the enemy within.” Over the summer, he also shared a post on social media declaring Cheney “GUILTY OF TREASON” and calling for her and other such traitors to be subjected to “TELEVISED MILITARY TRIBUNALS.”
A generous assessment of Trump’s remarks would be that he’s just engaged in typical antiwar rhetoric, lambasting the militarism of those who would start a war but never fight in one themselves. In this telling, Trump is not calling “for Cheney’s execution,” as the Drudge Report put it, but merely engaged in some opportunistic criticism, if not rank projection.
During the Vietnam War, a 22-year-old Trump got out of the draft by having a friend of his father claim that he had “bone spurs” (that friend later described the diagnosis as a “favor”). There is no record of him then protesting that conflict.
As president, the 78-year-old Republican was anything but antiwar, escalating every military conflict he oversaw, from Syria to Yemen to Somalia — within hours of taking office, he authorized a disastrous Special Forces raid that killed an 8-year-old girl (and U.S. citizen) — while eliminating safeguards meant to protect civilians from American drone strikes. He threatened to start a war with North Korea, before befriending its dictator, and dropped a $16 million “MOAB” (or, “Mother of All Bombs”) on Afghanistan — the largest non-nuclear munition in the U.S. military’s arsenal. Thousands of people were directly killed by the U.S. military during Trump’s four years in office.
“What I do is authorize my military,” Trump said as a way of explanation, meaning: He got the lawyers out of the way and told the armed forces to do as they please, at whatever cost to foreign life. The man who campaigned in 2016 on not just killing “terrorists” but their families took that ethos to the presidency. As The Washington Post reported, Trump, as president, was shown a video of a CIA air strike in Syria, in which the operator opened fire only after the target walked away from the home in which their wife and children resided. Instead of praising their diligence, Trump demanded to know: “Why did you wait?”
All of which is to say: When Trump criticizes Cheney for being a “war hawk” he does so because her last name is Cheney and that’s the most obvious criticism. It’s no different than Trump calling his former ally Chris Christie “fat”: It’s an easy, superficial attack that many critics would say applies to him too.
Consider Iraq: In 2000, per CNN, Trump was advocating a preemptive strike. “I’m no warmonger. But the fact is, if we decide a strike against Iraq is necessary, it is madness not to carry the mission to its conclusion,” he wrote. Two years later, he told Howard Stern that he backed a U.S. invasion, lamenting only that it hadn’t been “done correctly” during the first Gulf War. He turned against the war only after everyone else did, around 2006; by the time he was running for president, in 2016, he was attacking former President Barack Obama for getting out, accusing him of “founding” the Islamic State by ending the U.S. occupation.
Cheney, recall, voted for Trump twice, while her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, even appeared at a Trump campaign fundraiser in 2020. Both only broke with Trump after Jan. 6, 2021, when they saw him incite a mob and try to seize power after losing a free and fair election. They may well be “hawks,” but that is not their issue with Trump and it is certainly not Trump’s real issue with them.
Having established that Trump himself is a militarist — one actively encouraging his allies in Israel to ignore the haters (from human rights lawyers to President Joe Biden) and “do what you have to do” to Gaza and Lebanon; one who argues that might makes right and that Ukraine should have never even tried to fight off Russia — we can safely dismiss his fantasy about Liz Cheney as being about matters of war and peace.
It seems, really, that the former president can’t get over Cheney abandoning him (for a Black woman, no less) and that he’s treating his narcissistic injury by publicly imagining scenarios in which she might die, complete with the number of armed men (nine, the same as a U.S. Army Infantry Rifle Squad) who would be pointing their guns at her.
To Cheney, at least, the implication was clear.
“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” she wrote on social media. “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.”
