Former President Donald Trump doubled down Friday on his remarks about former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming being incapable of surviving the same kind of war zones she usually wants to send U.S. troops into.
Mr. Trump told his supporters at a rally in Warren, Michigan, that he had just met with Arab and Muslim American voters in Dearborn who are supporting him and contrasted his relations with them to Vice President Kamala Harris’ relationship to Ms. Cheney.
“Many Muslim and Arab Americans have friends and family living in the Middle East, and Kamala is campaigning with war mongers like Liz Cheney,” Mr. Trump said.
The former president mocked the Harris campaign, saying that they want to win the Arab-American and Muslim votes but chose to campaign with Ms. Cheney, “whose father virtually destroyed the Middle East. I don’t think that it’s working out too well.”
Ms. Cheney’s father is former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney. Both endorsed Ms. Harris this election.
Ms. Cheney helped lead the Jan. 6 select committee to investigate the 2021 attack on the Capitol when House Democrats last controlled the lower chamber, and her father served under President George W. Bush at the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
“Liz Cheney, she talks big. ‘I want war.’ She always wants war. Every time I was with her in the White House, [she said,] ‘We should attack this nation, that nation, nations of people I never even heard of,” Mr. Trump said.
“She’s a tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun and put her into battle 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.
“These war hawks. They want to draft your kids to die in wars, that they will never fight themselves. Liz Cheney wouldn’t fight,” he said. “I’ll go with her. I’ll go to the Middle East. I’ll go wherever she wants, and we’ll fight. She doesn’t have the guts to fight.”
Mr. Trump earlier in the day said on his Truth Social platform that his original comments made about Ms. Cheney on Thursday in Arizona were taken out of context by the media, Ms. Cheney and Ms. Harris, who all accused him of calling for Ms. Cheney’s execution.
“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face,” Mr. Trump said when telling Tucker Carlson during a conversation at the Arizona rally that Ms. Cheney was too eager to send troops into war zones.
“You know they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh gee, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’”
Democrats and media outlets seized on the comment, specifically the part about Ms. Cheney having “guns trained on her face.”
“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,” Mr. Trump said Friday on Truth Social. “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!’”
Ms. Cheney responded in an X post on Friday.
“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” Ms. Cheney wrote on X with a clip of Mr. Trump’s Thursday night comments. “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.”
Ms. Harris told reporters on the tarmac in front of Air Force Two after landing in Madison, Wis., Friday that Mr. Trump had “increased his violent rhetoric” when he “in great detail suggested rifles should be trained on former Representative Liz Cheney.”
“This must be disqualifying,” Ms. Harris 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.”
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.