Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday that Donald J. Trump had disqualified himself from serving as the nation’s chief executive by suggesting that Liz Cheney, one of his most prominent Republican critics, should be put on a battlefield “with nine barrels shooting at her.”
Mr. Trump, the Republican candidate for president, made his remarks Thursday night in an end-of-campaign burst of vitriol that intensified his dispute with one of the most prominent political families in the nation and drew criticism from leaders of both parties. The attacks on Ms. Cheney became a dominant theme of this final Friday of the general election campaign, when early voting was already well underway.
Ms. Harris, speaking to reporters Friday as she stood on the tarmac in front of Air Force Two after landing in Madison, Wis., said that Mr. Trump had “increased his violent rhetoric” when he “in great detail suggested rifles should be trained on former Representative Liz Cheney.”
“This must be disqualifying,” said Ms. Harris, the Democratic candidate for president. “Anyone who wants to be president of the United States who uses that kind of violent rhetoric is clearly disqualified, and unqualified, to be president.”
Mr. Trump made his remarks imagining violence directed at Ms. Cheney — a former congresswoman and the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney — on Thursday night during an onstage interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host.
“She’s a radical war hawk,” Mr. Trump said during the event, which was held 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.”
Mr. Trump expressed disdain for those in Washington who wanted to see the United States involved in foreign conflicts. “You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building, saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’”
Ms. Cheney, one of the first and highest-profile Republicans in the nation to break with her party and endorse Ms. Harris, responded on Friday morning in a post on social media that “this is how dictators destroy free nations.”
“They threaten those who speak against them with death,” she said in the post. “We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
Ms. Harris called Ms. Cheney “a true patriot who has shown extraordinary courage in putting country above party” and described Mr. Trump as “someone who considers his political opponents the enemy, is permanently out for revenge, and is increasingly unstable and unhinged.”
Mr. Trump’s campaign said in a statement earlier on Friday that Mr. Trump had been assailing Ms. Cheney’s hawkish foreign policy stance and that his remarks were being misrepresented in media outlets. Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the campaign, called it a “fake media outrage.”
Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters Friday afternoon in Dearborn, Mich., called Ms. Cheney a “disaster.”
“All she wants to do is blow people up,” Mr. Trump said. “She’s a war hawk and a dumb one at that. And if you ever put her into the field of battle, she’d be the first one to chicken out. She wouldn’t fight. She’d chicken out so fast, and that’s all I’m saying.”
“And I said, if you ever gave her a rifle, let her do the fighting,” he said. “If you ever do that, she wouldn’t be doing too well. I will tell you right now.”
Mr. Trump’s remarks to Mr. Carlson were denounced by leaders in both parties. In Pennsylvania, which has emerged as a critical battlefield in the final days of this race, Tom Corbett, a former Republican governor and attorney general of the state, said he was “totally shocked” by Mr. Trump’s remarks.
“When you see actions like that, you certainly have to question the ability of someone to function in the role of president,” Mr. Corbett said on CNN Friday morning. He declined to say whether he would vote for Mr. Trump.
Gabby Giffords, the former Democratic member of Congress from Arizona, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011 that left her with a grievous brain injury, said that Mr. Trump’s remarks were “un-American.”
“As a survivor of political violence, I ask my fellow Arizonans and American patriots to reject Trump’s calls for violence and retribution,” she said.
The Arizona attorney general, Kris Mayes, a Democrat, announced that she was investigating whether Mr. Trump violated state law by making a threat against Ms. Cheney. “I have already asked my criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona’s laws,” she said in a taping for “Sunday Square Off” on 12News.
“I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t, but it is not helpful as we prepare for our election and as we try to make sure that we keep the peace at our polling places and in our state,” Ms. Mayes told the NBC affiliate.
Mr. Trump has recently intensified the dark and at times threatening language he uses toward his political opponents. The former president, whose false claims about winning the 2020 election spurred some of his supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, once again on Thursday referred to a pernicious “enemy within” that needed to be addressed. Ms. Cheney was the top Republican on the House committee that investigated Mr. Trump’s role in the Capitol riot.
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