At a campaign event on Thursday night, Donald Trump told Tucker Carlson he thought former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney—an outspoken Trump critic—was a “radical war hawk.” He added “Let’s put her where the rifle’s standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about—you know when the guns are trained on her face.”
Friday morning, Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee was on CNN to stump for Trump, and host Jim Acosta asked about those comments. Burchett was initially dismissive of the comment as anti-war rhetoric.
“What he says, ‘nine barrels shooting at her.’ That obviously evokes images of a firing squad,” Acosta repeated. “It evokes images of an execution. Does it not? Why? Why would he say nine barrels?
“I don't know why he would say nine—I didn't know there were nine barrels … in a firing squad, quite honestly,” Burchett said. “So I'm a little at a little loss at that,” adding that the Cheney family has profited off of wars. And that war profiting is totally true, but not what Trump was saying.
“Isn't it a bit much, though, for Donald Trump?” Acosta continued. “If you want to use that generous interpretation, to criticize Liz Cheney and say, you know, she should be sent off into battle if she's going to start wars, when Donald Trump claimed he had bone spurs and didn't go to Vietnam?”
“Well, I don't know about all that, actually, Jim, I, he did apparently have that,” Burchett stumbled, probably realizing that “old cadet bone spurs” throwing rocks in glass houses wasn’t the best defense either. “And that's, that is a reason to not go. Obviously a lot of people didn't go.”
Burchett then retreated to saying his father and uncles went to Vietnam, adding “Those kind[s] of statements were made. It's close to the end of the election.”
Pathetic answers to serious questions about violence is sort of Burchett’s brand. In 2023, when asked on the steps of the Tennessee capitol what state legislators were going to do about the most recent mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Burchett responded, "We're not gonna fix it.”
I guess that’s not just Burchett’s brand, but the entire Republican Party at this point.
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