Left-wing media outlets including CNN, ABC, MSNBC, CBS and others blatantly misrepresented comments about ex-congresswoman Liz Cheney, made by former president and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at an event Thursday night in Arizona, hosted by popular American journalist Tucker Carlkson.
Cheney, the former vice chair of the House select committee on Jan. 6, lost re-election to a Trump-backed Republican primary challenger in the 2022 election. She's the daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, a notorious warhawk under President George Bush admoinistration.
A neocon warhawk herself, Cheney has campaigned for Democrat presidential candidate and vice president Kamala Harris.
While commenting on Cheney's support for American military interventions overseas, and referencing her father, 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..." This is the clip that set the tone for MSNBC and CNN’s Friday morning programming.
Other left-wing outlets also led with headlines and reports claiming that Trump was fantasizing or suggesting violent actions against Cheney, like having her shot or placed in front of a firing squad. This interpretation focuses on the imagery of "guns trained on her face" or similar phrases, often without providing the broader context of his critique on her foreign policy stance.
"They're all war hawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let's send 10,000 troops into the mouths of the enemies,’ but she’s a stupid person and I used to have meetings with a lot of people and she always wanted to go to war with people," Trump added.
Hopping on the blatant media misrepresentations of Trump's remarks, Cheney said that they were “how dictators destroy free nations” and that they threatened those who speak against them with death. She also accused Trump of being a “petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
Responding , Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, "President Trump is 100% correct that warmongers like Liz Cheney are very quick to start wars and send other Americans to fight them, rather than go into combat themselves. This is the continuation of the latest fake media outrage days before the election in a blatant attempt to interfere on behalf of Kamala Harris."
Critics slam left-wing media outlets for blatant propaganda desperately aimed at tarnishing Trump, and helping Harris, their prefered candidate in the 2024 presidential elections coming up next week.
