Harris calls Trump’s violent language about Liz Cheney ‘disqualifying’
Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday that Donald Trump had disqualified himself from serving as the nation’s chief executive by suggesting that Liz Cheney, a prominent Republican critic, should be put on a battlefield “with nine barrels shooting at her.”
Trump, the Republican candidate for president, made his remarks Thursday night in an end-of-campaign burst of vitriol that intensified his dispute with one of the most prominent political families in the nation and drew criticism from leaders of both parties.
Harris, speaking to reporters Friday as she stood on the tarmac in front of Air Force Two after landing in Madison, Wisconsin, said that Trump had “increased his violent rhetoric” when he “in great detail suggested rifles should be trained on former Rep. Liz Cheney.”
“This must be disqualifying,” said Harris, the Democratic candidate for president. “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.”
Trump made his remarks imagining violence directed at Cheney — a former member of Congress and the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney — on Thursday night during an onstage interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host.
“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said during the event, which was held at the Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona. “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.”
Cheney, one of the first and highest-profile Republicans in the nation to break with her party and endorse Harris, responded Friday morning in a post on social media that “this is how dictators destroy free nations.”
“They threaten those who speak against them with death,” she said in the post. “We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
Harris called Cheney “a true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above party.”
Trump’s campaign said in a statement earlier Friday that Trump had been assailing Cheney’s hawkish foreign policy stance and that his remarks were being misrepresented in media outlets. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the campaign, called it a “fake media outrage.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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