Former President Trump is threatening Republican ex-Rep. Liz Cheney with execution, sparking a new round of angry recriminations in the home stretch of the White House campaign.
With just a few days before Election Day, the Republican presidential nominee told right-wing media host Tucker Carlson that Cheney deserves to face death by firing squad.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Trump made the remarks during an event with Tucker Carlson on Thursday in Phoenix, Arizona. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Cheney, who crossed the political aisle to endorse Democrat Kamala Harris, hit back at Trump Friday, saying the threat shows he would be an authoritarian ruler if he wins a second term in the election Tuesday.
“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” Cheney tweeted. “We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
The Trump campaign claimed Friday that the former president was only suggesting that Cheney should not promote foreign wars when she would not face combat in them.
Cheney has spend the past several weeks criss-crossing the nation urging conservative Republicans and GOP women in particular to vote against Trump and for Harris.
She appeared alongside Harris at the birthplace of the Republican party, the Little White Schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, to underline her claim that Republicans should vote against Trump for the good of the nation.
Trump derides Cheney as the prototypical hawkish Republican, blaming her for plunging the U.S. into foreign conflicts like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and risking a wider global conflict with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
The daughter of conservative ex-vice president Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney was once a rising Republican star in Congress.
But she broke with Trump over the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, sparking an epic feud with the leader of the GOP that has only escalated in the past three-plus years.
Cheney played a prominent role in the Democratic-led House committee that mounted a damaging investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
Republicans responded by kicking her out of the leadership and ousting her from Congress altogether in the midterm elections.
