USA Trump provokes critic Liz Cheney with violent fantasy
In the final spurt of the US presidential election campaign, Republican Donald Trump is causing a stir by spreading a violent fantasy about one of his biggest critics. At a campaign event in the state of Arizona, Trump talked about making his party rival Liz Cheney look into nine shooting "gun barrels" during a firefight. The Republican presidential candidate argued that Cheney herself is quick to seek the solution to conflicts in combat, so he would like to see her with a gun in a battle.
01.11.2024, 15:33
SDA
A familiar pattern in a dicey situation
Trump is known for insulting, ridiculing and verbally attacking political opponents. He regularly uses hateful language and is a master of ambiguity to deliberately cause confusion - to make statements glorifying violence, for example, and to deny any overstepping of boundaries afterwards. However, the statement on Cheney just a few days before the presidential election on Tuesday stands out even by his standards.
It also comes at a time when there is already great fear that political violence could occur around the election. Trump himself was the victim of an assassination attempt during the election campaign, in which he was slightly injured. The mood in the USA is extremely tense.
Former Republican Congresswoman Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is one of Trump's harshest critics within the party. Her opposition to the former president cost her re-election to the House of Representatives in 2022, as Trump aggressively opposed her during the election campaign and pulled all kinds of strings. Cheney has not let up with her criticism since then, but is now supporting Trump's Democratic opponent Kamala Harris in the election campaign and has already appeared together with her on several occasions.
"When the guns are pointed at her in court."
During his appearance in Glendale in the politically embattled state of Arizona, Trump called Cheney a "radical warmonger" and then suggested putting her in a situation where she "stands there with a gun while nine barrels of guns are firing at her". He then continued, "Let's see how she feels about that with the guns pointed in her face." Politicians like her are warmongers when they sit in their nice buildings in Washington and decide to send 10,000 soldiers "into the enemy's mouth," Trump continued.
Liz Cheney shared a clip of the video on the X platform and wrote: "This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death." Trump called her a "small, vindictive, cruel, unstable man" who wants to be a tyrant. She also used the hashtag "#VoteKamala" to once again call for Harris to be elected.
Harris' campaign team also distributed a clip on X with Trump's two worst-sounding sentences about Cheney. Trump's team then accused Harris' campaign of taking the statement out of context. This is a familiar strategy after provocative statements by the ex-president.
Trump's comments were made during a conversation with the right-wing presenter Tucker Carlson. The Republican once again referred to his political opponents as the "enemy within" and "enemies of the people".
After Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July - the bullet grazed his ear - some Republican politicians blamed the rhetoric of the Democrats, who portrayed him as a threat to democracy. Yet Trump himself regularly lashes out at his opponents. In Arizona, he said of Harris that she was "dumb as a rock" and described the Democrats as a danger to democracy.
The myth of electoral fraud
Trump also once again spread the narrative - albeit more intensely than before - that he could only win the election through fraud. "The only thing that can stop us is fraud," said the ex-president. He claimed that he was leading in each of the seven contested states - the so-called swing states that will decide the election. Polls do not show this - but they do point to a neck-and-neck race overall. Trump also claimed, without any evidence, that various attempts at fraud had already been uncovered.
Before the 2020 election, which the then incumbent lost to Democrat Joe Biden, Trump had also spread such claims without ceasing. After the vote, he claimed that the Democrats had stolen his victory through large-scale electoral fraud. However, dozens of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign team failed in court. There was never any evidence of irregularities that would have changed the outcome of the vote. Trump nevertheless stuck to his narrative.
His campaign against the outcome of the election culminated in his supporters storming the Capitol in Washington, the seat of the US Congress, on January 6, 2021. Trump had incited his supporters the day before with allegations of electoral fraud and called on them to march to the Capitol and "fight like hell", among other things.
Harris focuses on contrast program
Democratic presidential candidate Harris is trying to create the greatest possible contrast to Trump in the final spurt of the election campaign. The former president wants to divide Americans, she said at a rally. But she is focusing on unity: "We have so much more in common." Commenting on Trump's recent statement that he would protect women "whether women like it or not", she said the Republican was someone who simply did not respect women's freedom.
