Liz Cheney and Trump's "war hawk" line

What Trump said, how critics responded, and what's more important

It seems to me that the debate over this comment has missed the larger point. Vice President Harris’s camp denounced former President Trump for his words about Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming representative who is among Trump’s most prominent Republican critics. As reported on NPR:

Trump late Thursday described Cheney as a “radical war hawk” during an onstage conversation with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson in Glendale, Ariz. Cheney, who was one of only two Republicans on the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 riot, is Harris' most prominent Republican supporter.

"Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her," Trump said to Carlson. "Let's see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face."

This led to an eruption of commentary and headlines. The Trump campaign insisted he was “clearly describing a combat zone," not “fantasizing” about her killing, or saying that she “should” be shot at, as some headlines suggested.

I have so many thoughts! If you don’t mind, stick with me through all of them before you race to reply. First, the most reasonable guess to me is that Trump was talking about Cheney in a combat zone, and to that extent his campaign has a point.

Like many Trump riffs, this one is not original. Americans have a long history of criticizing leaders, politicians, elites, the rich, and so forth for sending other people’s sons (and, in recent times, daughters) off to war. Seems to me that that’s what he did with Cheney. “They’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in a nice building in Washington,” he said as the interview went on.

But why, in such a tense time, would a leader paint the image of his critic being shot at? Dramatic statements like this are Trump’s brand, and if some in “the media” give a harsh interpretation to them, then that fits Trump’s preferred narrative too. He has leaned more and more into extreme language as the years pass. His enemies are not just wrong but “communists” and “fascists,” for example, using a word he doesn’t like to hear when his own former chief of staff directs it at him. “They” have “destroyed” a country that somehow remains the richest and most powerful in history, “poisoning the blood” and so forth.

It’s my impression that in years past, Trump more often described his critics as merely hypocrites or “stupid people,” which seems restrained by comparison! Just yesterday I had occasion to see some video of Trump from 2019—and compared with the Trump of 2024, he seemed younger, more vigorous, and also more constrained. It reminds me of when I watched (and wrote about) Joe Biden’s 2016 Democratic convention speech and compared him with the Biden of 2023. The passage of time works on us all.

But this is only the start of our analysis, because there is a lot in Trump‘s “nine barrels” remark. The implication of Trump’s remark is that Cheney is a coward and wouldn’t want to serve in war. Setting aside Trump’s own failure to serve during the Vietnam war, this personal attack seems off base. Cheney has not served in war, but has exhibited what supporters would call political courage, because she was willing to risk something for her beliefs—losing her House leadership post and then her House seat because she disagreed with Trump’s actions in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. It’s a course that many other Republicans who disapproved of January 6 were unwilling to take.

And that is Trump’s true point of difference with Cheney: she says he is unfit for the presidency, that he is opposed to the Constitution, and that he proved it by trying to overturn a democratic election.

Next let’s explore this matter at face value, as a question of war and peace. Trump called Liz Cheney a “radical war hawk.” I don’t know if “radical war hawk” is a reasonable description of her policy views in 2024. Her father did a lot to engineer the invasion of Iraq. And it’s true that Cheney served in the Bush administration that launched that costly war 21 years ago.

Trump says he is opposed to endless wars, and that he opposed the Iraq war (though his opposition was retroactive). He talks of peace through strength. In his discussion of world affairs, he appears to suggest that peace relies mainly on defense spending and a president’s force of personality. Also his personal relations with the world’s dictators and strongmen. If Trump seems unstable, his allies cast this as a strength, that other nations might fear what he will do next.

In speeches and interviews that I have analyzed over the past year, Trump generally says everything would just be different with Trump in charge. Wars in Ukraine and Israel just wouldn’t have happened. Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan was based on a plan negotiated under Trump, but Trump insists he just would have done it better.

His opponent—Vice President Harris, not Liz Cheney—also talks of peace through strength, and casts Trump as fundamentally weak: subject to the flattery of foreign despots and willing to sell out American interests if he thinks it helps himself.

In Harris speeches that I have analyzed, she expresses an idea of American strength based not on one personality, but on American alliances. Military power rests on economic power—you need to pay for your army, for starters. China, America’s great global rival, might someday surpass the United States in economic power (unless the demographic disaster of its declining population prevents that). But it‘s hard to imagine that China would ever surpass the United States plus Japan plus Australia plus the UK plus its other European allies. So who is better at keeping those alliances together?

A Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, set the example—patiently keeping US allies together as a general during World War Two, championing the creation of NATO afterward, and leading the U.S. through early phases of the Cold War. Arguably his diplomacy was as important as his military skill. The system of alliances and partnerships has evolved since then, as have the threats they confront. One question in 2024 is which candidate would have the skills to extend and strengthen those alliances in a new era. That’s a far more important question than what exactly Trump meant in his interview.