No one knows how Election Day will turn out.
But if the press’s panicked behavior this week is any sign, including its false claim that former President Donald Trump called for Republican critic Liz Cheney to be executed by firing squad, things won’t go well for Vice President Kamala Harris.
A confident team doesn’t resort to these types of desperate measures.
During a conversation Thursday with right-wing provocateur Tucker Carlson, Trump criticized Cheney for her foreign policy positions, many of which call for U.S. engagement in overseas conflicts. In criticizing Cheney, Trump trotted out warmed-over anti-war rhetoric.
Liz Cheney is “a deranged person,” the GOP nominee said, “but the reason she couldn’t stand me is that she always wanted to go to war with people. I don’t want to go to war. She wanted to go – she wanted to stay in Iraq. I took them out. I mean, if [it] were up to her, we’d, we’d be in 50 different countries. She’s a radical war hawk.”
He then said, “Let’s put her with a rifle, standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Okay? 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, well, let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.”
Much of the press feigned horror, scrambling to report that the former president had called for Cheney’s execution.
“Trump suggests Liz Cheney should face firing squad,’” Reuters reported.
“Trump embraces violent rhetoric, suggests Liz Cheney should have guns ‘trained on her face,’” reported the Washington Post.
“Donald Trump suggests [Liz Cheney] should be fired upon,” reported CNN’s Kasie Hunt. “It's an escalation of his violent rhetoric.”
Politico senior political columnist Jonathan Martin remarked, “Once again, Trump shows he’s built in a lab to humiliate his apologists … Trump gonna call for Liz Cheney to face a firing squad And thereby rub ya nose in it, and demand more rationalization.”
“Trump Attacks Liz Cheney Using Violent War Imagery,” declared the New York Times.
What?
Re-read what Trump said, and then re-read those headlines and news blurbs. What sort of a firing squad hands a rifle to the condemned?
The “firing squad” claim isn’t even a little bit true. It doesn’t lack context. He simply didn’t say what they said he said. Worse than merely mischaracterizing his remarks, these reporters and their editors almost certainly understood exactly what Trump meant. They’re simply pretending otherwise.
Trump said nothing new. He simply dusted off the well-worn argument, the “chickenhawk” criticism, that says direct involvement may cool one’s support for military conflict. Or, as the show “Letterkenny” put it, it’s the notion that says, “Maybe, if you'd ever been in a real fight, you might not be so keen for another.”
This sardonic observation has been a fixture in political discourse worldwide for as long as the wealthy and powerful have sent the poor to war. America is no exception. It was a near-constant refrain during the Vietnam War and the so-called war on terror.
The rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” captured this sentiment with the lines: “Some folks inherit star-spangled eyes/Hoo, they send you down to war, Lord/And when you ask 'em, ‘How much should we give?’/Hoo, they only answer, ‘More, more, more, more.’”
And I’m sure you remember that nearly every Republican lawmaker in the years following the September 11 attacks was required at some point to answer the question, “Will you send your own son to war?”
Yet, despite the ordinariness of it all, journalists act as if Trump has crossed yet another red line.
Zoomers and first-timers can be forgiven for having no context for Trump's words and mistaking the ordinary for the extraordinary. But what excuse is there for seasoned journalists to gin up such panic?
Even if Trump were unclear – and he wasn’t – longtime journalists know exactly what he meant from context and precedent. There is no daylight between what Trump said and the sort of stuff anti-Bush Democrats and commentators said for the entirety of George W. Bush’s presidency. Former Sen. John Kerry’s entire 2004 presidential campaign was built around the idea that the reins of power should be handed over to a real war hero, one who understands the sacrifices and horrors of armed conflict, and not some nepo-warmonger.
CNN, the New York Times and others remember this.
Yet, in the closing days of the 2024 election, as media try to convince voters there was an invisible apostrophe in President Joe Biden’s off-hand remarks about Trump’s “garbage” supporters, the same newsrooms that gave outsized and positive coverage to the Bush-era anti-war activists would have you believe Trump called for a critic’s execution by using similar rhetoric.
And journalists wonder why Americans trust them less than Congress.
Becket Adams is program director of the National Journalism Center.
