1 of 4 | Former Rep. Liz Cheney on Friday responded to violent rhetoric aimed at her by former President Donald Trump, saying, “This is how dictators destroy free nations.” Arizona’s attorney general is investigating the verbal attack as a possible death threat. File Photo by Pat Benic/UPI | License Photo
Nov. 1 (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.