Nov. 2 (UPI) — Arizona’s attorney general said Friday she has launched an investigation of violent rhetoric aimed by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at former Rep. Liz Cheney as a possible death threat.
Trump, who has verbally attacked Cheney repeatedly during this year’s presidential campaign, intensified the pattern Thursday during an interview with right-wing media commentator Tucker Carlson in Glendale, Ariz.
After denouncing the stated intention of the Republican’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, to join his daughter in voting for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, Trump said, “I don’t blame him for sticking with his daughter, but his daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb.
“She’s a radical war hawk. 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. You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, oh, gee, we’ll, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.”
Cheney on Friday responded forcefully to the violent comments, saying they amounted to a death threat and smacked of the rhetoric of a “dictator.”
“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” she said Friday in a post on the social platform X. “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.”
A wide array Democrats, as well as some Republicans, similarly reacted with outrage at the comments while Trump’s campaign defended them as being taken out of context in order to benefit Harris.
Meanwhile, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said her office is looking into whether Trump’s statements violated state law as a “death threat” against Cheney.
“I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” Mayes, a first-term Democrat, told KPNX-TV in Phoenix.
“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” she added.
The former Republican congresswoman from Wyoming, arguably Trump’s biggest critic within the GOP, has endorsed Harris in Tuesday’s election while calling the former president “dangerous.”
Cheney has been a vocal critic of Trump since the 2020 presidential election. She lost her leadership role in the House after voting to impeach him several months after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Cheney served as a vice chair of the House select committee that investigated the Capitol riot. She lost her House seat in the 2022 primary to a Trump-backed challenger.
Trump had launched several other incendiary verbal attacks against Cheney prior to Thursday’s episode. Last week during an appearance in Novi, Mich., while trying to court votes from the state’s large Muslim-American minority, he called her “a Muslim-hating warmonger” while linking her to the 2002 invasion of Iraq launched by her father and President George W. Bush.
The latest comments brought a strong reaction from Harris campaign adviser Ian Sams, who highlighted the rhetoric during an appearance on MSNBC Friday, saying, “Trump is talking about sending a prominent Republican to the firing squad. Vice President Harris is talking about sending one to her Cabinet.”
Former Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin urged Republican members of Congress to denounce her ex-boss’ “unpresidential” and “reckless” attacks.
“It’s unconscionable,” she said on CNN. “I don’t know how Republican leaders, many of whom served with Liz Cheney and at one point considered her a colleague and friend, cannot denounce this. It’s dangerous; it’s escalatory.”
The Trump campaign, however, defended the remarks, criticizing opponents for taking them “out of context.”
“President Trump is 100% 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,” Trump Campaign National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement issued to media outlets. “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.”
