Joe Scarborough launched an angry tirade against Donald Trump on Friday morning for suggesting Liz Cheney should be shot at with guns trained on her face because she objected to his handling of Jan. 6.
Calling Cheney the “conservative’s conservative,” Scarborough denounced the former president for treating her as an “enemy of the state” because she was disloyal to him.
On Morning Joe, he went into chilling detail about the horrors of the Capitol riot and compared Trump’s treatment of Cheney with his verbal attacks on Gen. Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump said last year that the “embarrassing” U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would once have been punishable by death for Milley.
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“Donald Trump is talking about Republicans, here,” said Scarborough, referencing Trump‘s “war hawk” remarks about Cheney. “He’s talking about somebody… that has been the conservatives’ conservative for years. So more conservative in every way than Donald Trump.
“And yet just because she’s disloyal to him, just because she said, ‘There’s something deeply wrong with a commander-in-chief allowing riots to go on, refusing to stop those riots.’”
“And in fact,” he continued, “going into his dining room alone, staring and looking at some of the most violent parts of the riot, rewinding them, watching them again, rewinding them, watching them again, while his vice president and Secret Service detail are locked up in the basement... and Mike Pence is calling their families and saying they don’t think they’re going to make it out alive.
“While cops are getting their heads crushed inside doors, getting beaten up, getting clubbed almost to death, within inches of their death, getting bear spray sprayed on them.
“This is what is so dismissed day in and day out and day in and day out, and that is what Liz Cheney objected to, which is what The Wall Street Journal editorial page objected to at one time.
“And now, because Liz Cheney objected to those riots and the way things were handled, she’s an enemy of the state to Donald Trump, and on his closing weekend he’s calling for nine guns to be pointed at her face to execute her.”
Trump had said of Cheney on Thursday night: “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. You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh, gee, we’ll— let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’"
The Trump campaign later released a statement dismissing reports that the former president said Cheney should be put in front of a “firing squad” as “malicious or dumb.”
“President Trump was clearly describing a combat zone,” she statement said. “Liz Cheney and Kamala Harris, if elected, would continue to plunge the U.S. deeper into war leading to World War 3 and allow innocent men and women to die in that conflict.”
