Watch: Trump Makes His Chilling Liz Cheney Comments So Much Worse

Donald Trump doubled down Friday on his disturbing comments about placing Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad.

During a noisy campaign stop in Warren, Michigan, Trump refused to back down on his wild comments attacking Cheney, a moderate Republican who has been campaigning extensively with Kamala Harris ahead of the election.

“She’s a war hawk. She kills people. She wanted uh, even in my administration, she was pushing that we go to war with everybody,” Trump said. “And I said that if you ever gave her a rifle, [indistinguishable] if you ever do that, she wouldn’t be doing too well.”

“If she had to do it herself, and she had to face the consequences of battle, she wouldn’t be doing it. So it’s easy for her to talk, but she wouldn’t be doing it,” Trump continued. “She’s actually a disgrace.”

Trump also called Cheney a “disaster” and a “coward,” during his stop in Dearborn, Michigan, according to the Associated Press.

Trump’s original remarks to Tucker Carlson from a rally Thursday night suggested that Cheney ought to be viscerally confronted with her own hawkishness.

“They’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh gee, let’s send 10,000 troops into the mouths of the enemies.’ She always wanted to go to war with people,” Trump said.

“She’s a radical war hawk,” he continued. “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.”

(Trump reportedly dodged the Vietnam War draft by saying he had bone spurs.)

Arizona’s attorney general announced Friday that she will be investigating Trump over his violent comment about Cheney and whether it qualifies as a “death threat.”

The Republican ticket has redoubled its efforts to paint Trump as a peacemaker as it attempts to siphon support from Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan, who have expressed disappointment with Harris’s nonstatements about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. (A particularly ridiculous pitch given Trump’s insistence that Israel should “go further” in its military campaign in the Middle East.)

Trump’s phony antiwar farce also comes as he faces criticism from moderate Republicans such as Cheney and retired generals, including Trump’s former Chief of Staff John Kelly, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

Cheney is a veritable war hawk, but Trump’s pitch as an antiwar president is blatantly dishonest and evidence of some strange memory hole about the Trump presidency.

During his campaign, Trump has repeatedly asserted there were no wars under his administration and claimed that not a single U.S. soldier in Afghanistan was killed for an 18-month stretch while he was in office. Both claims are completely untrue.

During Trump’s presidency, there were U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as ongoing civil wars in Yemen, Syria, and Ethiopia. While he was in office, there were 45 hostile deaths and 63 total deaths in Afghanistan, with no alleged 18-month gap in casualties. In fact, Trump increased the number of airstrikes in Afghanistan, which led to a 330 percent increase in civilian casualties.

The reality of Trump’s time in office was much more volatile. Trump regularly stoked international conflict, nearly tweeting us into a nuclear war with North Korea on several occasions. He withdrew from a nonproliferation agreement with Iran, allegedly helped to incite a failed coup in Venezuela, and supported a Saudi-backed war in Yemen.

Editor’s Note: This piece was written after Cook Political Report noted on its website that Colorado’s 4th congressional district has been moved to “lean Republican.”

The political forecaster has since corrected an error in its original update. Cook is predicting a greater chance of Democratic victory in Colorado’s 3rd congressional district, Boebert’s old district—not the 4th congressional district, where she is now running.

Boebert won the 3rd district in 2022 by a mere 546 votes. Her Democratic challenger at the time, Adam Frisch, is running again this election against Republican Jeff Hurd.

Could Representative Lauren Boebert actually lose her spot in the House? Recent polling shows it may be possible.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report on Friday reported that Boebert has lost ground in Colorado’s 4th congressional district, and moved the race from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican. Though the MAGA Republican is still holding onto a small lead, that seems to be mostly thanks to the heavily Republican makeup of the district, rather than any tactful campaigning by Boebert.

The Republican congresswoman barely hung onto her seat in Colorado’s 3rd congressional district in 2022, winning by only 546 votes. After that narrow victory, and after becoming the center of a national scandal for her behavior during a performance of Beetlejuice, Boebert made a surprise switch to run in the neighboring 4th district.

She aims to fill the seat left empty by Republican Representative Ken Buck who retired this year. At the time of her announcement, Buck didn’t have many kind words for Boebert, whom he said made “George Santos look like a saint.”

On Tuesday, Boebert will face off against Democrat Trisha Calvarese, a first-time candidate, who has attacked the Republican on IVF and veterans rights.

And though Republicans make up nearly 34 percent of registered active voters in the conservative stronghold—with Democrats holding onto only 15 percent of the electorate—Boebert has not been universally embraced in Colorado’s 4th.

“I don’t appreciate, as a Christian, people saying they’re Christian to get your vote and then turning out to be a lowlife, and now I just kind of think of her as a lowlife,” one voter told The Wall Street Journal earlier this year. While some Republicans said they’d hold their nose, despite Boebert’s “antics,” just to avoid voting for the Democrat, that may not be the case for everyone. 

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is launching another frivolous legal attack against a media outlet. This time, it’s The Washington Post.

The Trump-Vance campaign filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against the Post, alleging that the newspaper made “illegal in-kind contributions to [Kamala] Harris for President.” In their complaint, the campaign’s lawyers said that the Post spent money boosting stories on social media that were critical of Trump, citing a Wednesday report from Semafor.

The FEC complaint, filed Thursday, came despite the Post’s decision not to endorse any presidential candidates and nix an already written endorsement of Harris from its editorial board, due to an order from the paper’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos. The decision has cost the Post more than 250,000 subscribers but apparently didn’t curry any favor with Trump or his campaign.

Also on Thursday, Trump’s campaign filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS, claiming that the network engaged in election interference for favorably editing a 60 Minutes interview with Harris. Previously, he threatened to have CBS’s license revoked because of the edits, and had backed out of a planned interview of his own with 60 Minutes. After his poor showing at ABC’s presidential debate with Harris in September, Trump complained that it was rigged and called for that network’s broadcast license to be revoked.

With Election Day only four days away, Trump’s attacks on the media appear to be calculated attempts at intimidation in order to force favorable coverage and undermine trust in political journalism. The former president has reportedly asked Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, to hide negative political ads against him.

On Wednesday, Trump even proudly bragged, at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, about driving down trust in the news media’s credibility. His plan seems to be ensuring that critical reports of his behavior won’t be believed and that if election returns come in showing him losing, his supporters won’t trust them, creating chaos.

Elon Musk’s America PAC has Republican operatives more than a little concerned about Donald Trump’s ground game.

Nine Republican operatives and canvassers seemed alarmed about issues with the super PAC, which has reportedly collected a plethora of faked canvassing data, NBC News reported Friday.

As the PAC’s phony canvassing numbers were revealed, an operative close to the effort told NBC that “all hell has broken loose” inside the America PAC.

The PAC has reportedly received a large quantity of suspicious data from its canvassers, following reports that some had learned how to spoof their location to create the impression that they’d visited voters’ homes.

Earlier this month, data leaks revealed that roughly 24 percent of door-knocks in Arizona and 25 percent of door-knocks in Nevada in a single week had been flagged as “unusual,” an internal metric used to indicate fake door-knocks. America PAC has spent more than $54 million on its vendor in those states, Blitz Canvassing, which is also organizing efforts in Michigan and North Carolina. Blitz Canvassing is one of four vendors employed by the PAC.

The PAC has pushed back on reports that fake canvassing was impeding Trump’s get-out-the-vote effort.

America PAC has also reportedly engaged in dubious treatment of its canvassers. Two canvassers anonymously told NBC News they were made to knock on doors outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, as Hurricane Helene rolled in on September 27. One of them said that their direct manager told them to go door to door, despite leadership instructing them to make calls instead.

“If I go into the troubles that we went through just getting into the field, working, I’m talking about soggy literature, right?” the canvasser told NBC News. “Ponchos on ponchos.”

“It was very bad,” they added.

The second canvasser said that many canvassers quit after that experience.

In Michigan, some canvassers funded by America PAC were reportedly given unrealistically high expectations, under extremely poor working conditions. They claimed that they were threatened financially if they performed poorly. Canvassers said that they’d been misled by the PAC and a video showed that they’d been carted around in the back of a U-Haul, instead of the rental cars they were promised. One canvasser even said they were surprised to learn that they were canvassing on behalf of Trump.

Trump’s allies have practically begged the former president to ditch Musk, and his malfunctioning canvassing efforts, as conservative activists and leaders in battleground states reported that they’ve seen little return from the America PAC’s efforts.

The western Pennsylvania borough of Mount Pleasant is drawing negative attention over an exceptionally violent Halloween parade float depicting Donald Trump leading Kamala Harris in chains.

On Wednesday night, the borough held its parade, and one float featured a person with a Trump mask riding in a golf cart, with a fake sniper rifle mounted to the top of the vehicle. And trailing the vehicle was a rope or chain tied around the wrists of a woman dressed as Harris, who was also wearing handcuffs.

The depiction set off a backlash online and even within the borough, which is located 45 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. The borough’s Democratic mayor, Diane Bailey, criticized the float on Pittsburgh TV news channel WXPI along with at least one local resident. Bailey said she was looking into how the float was even approved in the first place.

The NAACP’s Pittsburgh chapter condemned the float, with its president Daylon Davis issuing a statement saying in part, “This appalling portrayal goes beyond the realm of Halloween satire or free expression; it is a harmful symbol that evokes a painful history of violence, oppression, and racism that Black and Brown communities have long endured here in America.”

The parade’s organizer, the Mount Pleasant Volunteer Fire Department, released a statement apologizing for the float.

“We, the members of the Mount Pleasant Volunteer Fire Department, want to take a moment to sincerely apologize for allowing the offensive participants to take part in the Mount Pleasant Annual Halloween Parade last evening,” the statement read. “We do not share in the values represented by those participants, and we understand how it may have hurt or offended members of our community.”

Displays like this in a battleground state only days before the election do a lot of harm to the political atmosphere, particularly in an election where the Republican presidential nominee has threatened violence against his enemies and called them “the enemy within.” The racial component of the display can’t be overlooked, either, with one resident saying the float “is simulating a lynching down Main Street in Mount Pleasant.” Hopefully, this small-town float isn’t a harbinger of what’s to come.