At a campaign event with Tucker Carlson in Glendale, Arizona on October 31, 2024, Donald Trump suggested that former Rep. Liz Cheney should face a firing squad. Trump said: “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.”
The comments targeted Cheney, who had endorsed Kamala Harris and was actively campaigning against Trump. Before her break with Trump over January 6, Cheney had a 93% Trump voting record in Congress and was the third-ranking House Republican. She voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 Capitol attack and served as vice chair of the January 6 Committee.
Cheney responded forcefully: “This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death.” The imagery of guns trained on a political opponent's face — delivered just five days before Election Day — represented one of the most explicit violent threats against a specific individual by a presidential candidate in modern American history.
Correction (October 2, 2026): We removed a citation whose link no longer resolves to the cited article and could not be verified: FiveThirtyEight (“Is There No Place For Liz Cheney In The Modern GOP? — Trump-score voting record”). The remaining sources are listed below.