During a Thursday night appearance in Arizona with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump once again used violent and graphic speech to criticize someone who opposes his campaign for the presidency in an attack against former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney. “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?” the former president said. “Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”Cheneywas once the third-ranking Republican in House leadership and one of two Republicans on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.The former president's comments continue his pattern of violent rhetoric against people who criticized his actions during his one term in office and oppose his bid to win the presidency again. Last year, Trump wrote that Gen. Mark Milley, his former Joint Chiefs chairman, committed "an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH." Milley's act was communicating with his Chinese counterparts that, in the days after Jan. 6, the U.S. would not suddenly attack China.

Trump has long criticized Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, for their support of promoting American interests overseas through military action.Cheney, who has appeared with Vice President Kamala Harris on the campaign trail and endorsed her presidential run, responded to Trump’s comments early Friday morning.“This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death,” Cheney said. “We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”

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