As the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign drew to a close in early November, rumors began to circulate online that former U.S. president and Republican candidate Donald Trump had called for the execution of former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming (archived):
This post on X had amassed 678,800 views and 34,000 likes as of this writing. Someone else posted that with these remarks, Trump had violated the terms of his bail in an ongoing court case (archived):
Meanwhile, CNN presenter Kasie Hunt argued on "CNN This Morning" the remarks represented an "escalation of his violent rhetoric" (archived):
The Drudge Report, a historically right-wing political blog that turned on Trump during his 2016-2020 administration, claimed the same thing on its homepage (archived):
(The Drudge Report)
Trump's verbal target, Cheney, addressed his comments in a post on X (archived):
But the remarks require some context. Cheney was one of the most prominent Republicans to oppose Trump, and she endorsed his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, for president. While in Congress, she was the vice chairwoman of the committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, seeking to clarify Trump's role in the events. She later lost her seat in the House of Representatives.
Trump's supporters, meanwhile, defended his remarks, saying that his opponents were taking the outrage too far. For example, the presenters of the Fox News show "Fox and Friends" argued that all Trump meant was that it is easy for people to advocate for war when they are safe from combat. "He said — just to clarify — President Trump was talking about how Liz Cheney wants to send American sons and daughters to fight in wars despite never being in a war herself," they said, adding: "She knows better."
Snopes found the recording of the conversation Trump had with former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson, in which he made the remarks in question (at roughly the 01:09:00 mark). It took place in Glendale, Arizona, on Oct. 31, 2024 — five days before Election Day. Here's a transcript of what he said about Cheney, including the context (emphasis ours):
And [former U.S. Vice President Dick] Cheney was so, he said, I really want to thank you. He said, now, I'm so glad that I actually endorsed you. It's amazing but that you would do this and I didn't speak to him about it. But then, you know, go a couple of years forward now and 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. Well, let's send, let's send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy, but she's a stupid person. And I used to have, I have meetings with a lot of people, and she always wanted to go to war with people.
While his supporters' defense of his comment was plausible, Trump's detractors, including Hunt, viewed it in the wider context of what they perceived as the rising stridency of his language as the election approached. For example, on Oct. 13, 2024, he made statements that were widely interpreted as a threat to send the U.S. Military against his political opponents, a point he doubled down on during a town hall in Georgia two days later.
Trump's remarks about Cheney did not amount to an explicit threat of violence against her. However, we reiterate that what Trump did do was describe, in explicit terms, a hypothetical scenario in which Cheney would face the threat of deadly violence from the barrels of nine guns "trained on her face."