Trump suggests pointing guns at Liz Cheney's face

Less than a week before Election Day, Donald Trump last night called for one of his prominent political opponents to be put in front of a firing squad. In an onstage interview with Tucker Carlson in Arizona, Trump called Liz Cheney, the former Republican representative from Wyoming, “a very stupid person” and “a radical war hawk.”

“You know they’re all war hawks when they sit in a nice building in Washington and say: Ooh man, let's send 10,000 soldiers straight into the enemy's mouth,“said Trump. “Let’s put her with a gun that shoots at her with nine barrels, okay. Let’s see how she feels, you know, with the guns pointed at her face.”

Like Trump's hate-filled rally at Madison Square Garden last weekend, these comments are a good summary of what he would bring to the White House if re-elected. His campaign is based on violence, disregard for the rule of law and retribution for anyone who might disagree with him.

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“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” Cheney responded to “I want to be a tyrant.”

Trump's campaign team said that Trump “talked about Liz Cheney wanting to send America's sons and daughters to wars, even though she has never been in a war herself.” Trump is not wrong that Cheney has often advocated foreign military intervention. She can and should be criticized for many of her views. But Trump is not calling for a debate. He vividly imagined Cheney “with guns pointed at her face.” Normalizing discussion of political opponents being shot is a step in a dangerous direction.

These remarks cannot be dismissed as a joke, the excuse Trump usually uses when he oversteps boundaries. (He seems less concerned about disapproval these days.) Trump wasn't laughing when he said that. Neither Carlson nor the audience. Trump has also repeatedly called for the use of the armed forces against his political critics. He has proposed using the military against the “enemies from within,” a group that generally includes “radical left-wing lunatics” but also includes former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff, both California Democrats. On Truth Social, he is increasingly calling for former President Barack Obama to be tried by military court (for which crimes one can only speculate). He said retired Gen. Mark Milley, whom he appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed.

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Still, some voters may go to the polls without fully knowing his rhetorical achievements. Trump makes so many outrageous remarks that it is difficult to keep track of them all, and some sections of the press stubbornly tone down even his most dangerous comments. The headline in The New York Times As of this writing, Trump's comments about Cheney read, “Trump attacks Liz Cheney with violent war imagery,” which isn't entirely false, but misses the point.

In these comments, Trump blatantly displayed his hypocrisy. Although the former president has morphed into a perceived dove, he once supported some of the same conflicts as Cheney, including the war in Iraq. And although he claims he wants to avoid adventurism abroad, in his first term he was discouraged from attacking Venezuela, North Korea and Syria's Bashar al-Assad, among others. He and his allies are now proposing that the US military launch attacks on cartels in Mexico.

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Trump is also proposing new uses of the military domestically, not only against his enemies but also to carry out mass deportations. He has encouraged brutal policing and vigilante attacks by citizens. Trump may hate war, but he loves violence.

Maybe voters shouldn't put this man in command of so many people armed with guns.