Media’s Lie That Trump Threatened Cheney Is Election Interference

If you woke up Friday morning and glanced at the headlines of any major media outlet, you would think former President Donald Trump had threatened former Rep. Liz Cheney with execution by firing squad. Four days before the election, you would think Trump had just said, on a stage in Arizona with Tucker Carlson, that if elected he would have Cheney killed.

He didn’t say that of course. It was and is a massive media and Harris campaign psy-op designed to interfere in the election, suppress and depress GOP voters, and set the stage for denying Trump the presidency if he wins at the ballot box on Tuesday.

Here’s a sampling of what the press said. “Trump threatens ex-Rep. Liz Cheney with execution by firing squad,” blared a headline from New York Daily News. The New York Times was only slightly more subtle in its headline, “Trump Assails Liz Cheney and Imagines Guns ‘Shooting at Her.’” Not to be outdone, The Washington Post went with “Trump embraces violent rhetoric, suggests Liz Cheney should have guns ‘trained on her face,’” while CNN declared, “Trump says ‘war hawk’ Liz Cheney should be fired upon in escalation of violent rhetoric against his opponents.”

None of that is true. Anyone who watched the full clip of Trump’s comments could see for himself that Trump was talking about how Cheney is a neocon war hawk who doesn’t have the guts to face the consequences of her own policies. He 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. You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Gee, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’”

That’s clearly a rhetorical point about politicians pushing for wars without bearing the burden of fighting them. So the media were obviously lying about something that was very easy to verify. Why? Because almost as soon as those headlines appeared, Vice President Kamala Harris got in front of a camera and kicked off a fresh round of headlines by saying this: “He has increased his violent rhetoric, Donald Trump has, about political opponents. And in great detail, in great detail, suggested rifles should be trained on former Rep. Liz Cheney. This must be disqualifying. 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.”

Note the shift from “unfit,” which is what Harris usually says about Trump, to “disqualified.” The purpose of that language shift should be obvious. Democrats and the corporate press know Harris is poised to lose the election, so here in the final stretch, they are grasping for a pretext to prevent a victorious Trump from taking office on Jan. 20. They will repeat the claim that he’s “disqualified” ad nauseam between now and then to prepare the rhetorical ground for what comes next.

Indeed, we can already discern the broad outlines of what’s coming next. No sooner had Kamala made her statement than Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes told a local news outlet she was “investigating whether what Donald Trump said about Liz Cheney constituted a death threat under Arizona law.” “I’m not prepared now to say whether it was or it wasn’t,” said Mayes, “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.”

That news triggered yet a third round of headlines. By now, hundreds and hundreds of stories had been published and television segments aired in a matter of hours, all of them based on the demonstrably false premise that Trump had threatened to execute Liz Cheney by firing squad. (For a partial list of prominent journalists and pundits who repeated the lie on Friday, see this piece by my colleagues Kylee Griswold and Beth Brelje.) 

There is no other way to describe this other than mass election interference by the combined efforts of the corporate press, the Harris campaign, and elected Democrats in the closing days of the presidential election. It is actual “disinformation,” and it comes amid further election interference by the White House itself.

In the wake of President Joe Biden’s smear of Trump supporters as “garbage,” the White House was caught falsifying federal documents by fraudulently altering the transcript of his remarks to make it appear that he didn’t call Trump supporters garbage. This was first reported Thursday night by the Associated Press, which said the changes raised ethical concerns by official government stenographers. 

In an email the AP obtained, a White House supervisor wrote that “if there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently.” The supervisor then added, “Our Stenography Office transcript — released to our distro, which includes the National Archives — is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff.”

Again, Democrats are flooding the zone with lies, distortions, and falsifications in the closing days of the campaign because they know they’re about to lose at the ballot box. Most Americans will not see the corrections or the pushback from conservative media. They will just get the headlines, by the thousands before it’s all over, asserting that Trump threatened Cheney and might have committed a crime. That in turn will be used to build a narrative, already well underway, that he is “disqualified” from the presidency — no matter how the election turns out.

It is hard to say what mechanisms Democrats might deploy in the coming weeks and months to deny Trump’s likely election victory. The situation is fluid. The Harris campaign and its allied corporate media are reacting to events as much as they are manipulating the messaging around them. But don’t kid yourself, they have no intention of letting go of power, and they will lie, cheat, and steal — whatever they have to do — to hold onto it.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.