Kamala Harris slammed Donald Trump for his comments on Liz Cheney, saying it ‘disqualified’ him to be president.
Trump, at an event with Tucker Carlson on Thursday, said Cheney, the former Republican congresswomen who endorsed Harris, should be put on a battlefield ‘with nine barrels shooting at her face.’
Democrats immediately criticized him for the comment but Harris took it a step further, saying Trump should no longer be in the presidential race.
‘This must be disqualifying,’ Harris told reporters in Wisconsin. ‘Anyone who wants to be president of the United States who uses that kind of violent rhetoric is clearly is disqualified and unqualified to be president.’
She called Cheney ‘a true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above party.’
‘Trump, however, considers his political opponents the enemy and is permanently out for revenge and increasingly unstable and unhinged. His enemies list has grown longer.’
‘His rhetoric has grown more extreme, and he is even less focused than before on the needs and the concerns and the challenges facing the American people,’ Harris added.
The Democratic nominees said she has not spoken to Cheney since Trump’s remark.
Trump has long railed against Cheney, who criticized him for his role in the January 6th insurrection and was one of two Republican lawmakers who sat on the House committee investigating it.
‘She’s a radical war hawk,’ Trump said of her at event Thursday night at the Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Ariz. ‘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.’
Both Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, have endorsed Harris.
Trump had mentioned Liz Cheney’s father before he unleashed the diatribe.
‘I don’t blame him for sticking with his daughter. But his daughter’s a very dumb individual, very dumb,’ Trump said.
Cheney took to social media to respond to Trump, saying ‘this is how dictators destroy free nations.’
‘They threaten those who speak against them with death,’ she wrote in the post. ‘We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.’
Trump’s campaign said the former president was criticizing Cheney’s hawkish foreign policy and that they were being misrepresented in media outlets.
‘President Trump is 100 percent 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,’ said Trump camapaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt.
‘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.’
But Trump has been a longtime Cheney critic.
Back in March, Trump called for Cheney to be jailed over her role in investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote that Cheney should ‘go to jail along with the rest’ of the select January 6 House committee.