The liberal media’s distortion of Trump’s Liz Cheney comments exposes how panicked they are
So now Donald Trump wants to kill Liz Cheney? Worse, he wants to drag her before a firing squad. Is there no end to this man’s wickedness?
The Lefty web and progressive media are awash with anguished commentary on Trump’s latest dream of violence. “Trump fantasises about guns pointed at Liz Cheney’s face”, pants an irate Rolling Stone. Trump has “told a crowd” that “Liz Cheney should have guns ‘trained on her face’”, yelps Vanity Fair. He wants “nine barrels shooting” at her, cries Politico.
There’s only one problem with this vision of Trump as such a lunatic liability that he fancies hauling poor Liz Cheney off for execution – it is completely untrue. It is undiluted poppycock.
What Trump actually did was criticise Cheney’s pro-militarist streak. In a sit-down chat with Tucker Carlson in Arizona, he laid into her “war hawk” tendencies. And he wondered out loud – in his usual, unfiltered language – how she would feel about war if she was in the thick of one herself.
It kicked off when Carlson asked him what he thought about the Cheneys campaigning against him. Both Liz, a former congresswoman for Wyoming, and her dad Dick, who was vice president to George W Bush, have thrown their weight behind Kamala Harris, despite being lifelong Republicans.
Trump, in typically abrasive style, responded that Liz is a “deranged person” and “very dumb”. She’s a “radical war hawk”, he said. She “always wanted to go to war with people”.
Then came the “guns trained on her face” thing. These people are all war hawks “when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh gee, well let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy’,” he said.
But how would they feel if they had to go and fight in one of those wars they send Our Boys to? How would Liz feel in a war zone with guns “trained on her face”?
That’s it. It was not a threat of execution, it was a moral thought experiment. Trump wasn’t calling for violence – he was challenging the violence that he thinks springs from the war-hawking of the likes of Liz.
Even by the standards of the Trump-hating media, the distortion of his Cheney comments has been extraordinary. They have turned his dislike for foreign interventions into a love of violence. They have misrepresented his agitation against American militarism, making it look like he wants people to die, when the opposite is the case.
The cant is off the scale. Down the years I heard many Leftists rage against Dubya and Dick Cheney himself by saying: “Why don’t you put your own lives on the line?” That’s been a standard dig at the war-making elites for years. Yet when Trump does it, it’s psychotic, it’s a “threat of death”.
What’s with this pathological misrepresentation of Trump’s beliefs? We saw it with his recent comments on women, too.
If you were to believe Kamala and her noisy fanbase, you would think Trump had promised to pursue certain policies “whether women like it or not”. What a sexist oaf!
Actually, what Trump said is that his administration would protect women. “I’m going to protect them from migrants coming in. I’m going to protect them from foreign countries that want to hit us with missiles”, he said.
And his sting: he will protect women whether they “like it or not”. It was clearly a swipe at feminist types who might baulk at Trump’s male saviour complex.
Now, you can like or dislike Trump’s promise of chivalrous protection. But the idea that his comments were anti-women is bunkum. They were pro-women.
These are Orwellian levels of truth distortion. The Kafkaesque overlords of the progressive media have mangled Trump’s anti-war statement into a cry for violence, and his concern for women into a hatred for women. Stalin would envy such a shameless twisting of reality to the end of landing blows on a political foe.
Trump often doesn’t put things well. He can be uncouth. Right now, though, the moral duplicity of his media critics scares me far more than his own unpolished blather.
There’s an ironically authoritarian streak in their manipulation of reality to try to hoodwink the masses into believing Trump is evil. It has the whiff of desperation, too. Nothing better captures the panic in the Harris camp than their placing of words in Trump’s mouth. They know we can read what he actually said, right?