Trump drops bombs on Liz Cheney

Former president Donald Trump slammed former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who has been campaigning on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris, for her war-hawk tendencies and quickly found himself in a media feeding frenzy. Trump said during a town hall with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, “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.”

He added, “Look, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh gee, let’s send 10,000 troops right in the mouth of the enemy.’” 

The intent was obviously to point out how those who advocate meddling in foreign conflicts often don’t have any skin in the game; that is, Cheney is perfectly happy to send young, mostly working-class, Americans off to toil in her conquests because their deaths don’t directly impact her. It is an argument that was embraced by leftists in the not so distant past, but has been oddly abandoned as Harris cozies up to the Cheney family in the pursuit of winning over disaffected Republicans. 

News outlets still breathlessly reported that Trump was threatening to “execute” Cheney, leaving out his quip that she is a “war hawk” and the context about foreign policy. Cheney herself responded, claiming, “This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who who speak against them with death.”

The Trump campaign defended the former president against the barrage, including highlighting words of support from some unlikely sources. 

“Folks, Trump didn’t threaten to execute Liz Cheney. He actually was calling her a chickenhawk, something liberals said about her for ages. Look at the context — Trump is talking about giving her a weapon. Typically, people put in front of firing squads aren’t armed,” Zack Beauchamp, a writer for Vox, tweeted.

“Trump did NOT call for Liz Cheney to be executed. This is what’s so wrong with our politics today… This short clip is so deceptive,” added NeverTrumper Joe Walsh. 

-Amber Duke

On our radar

YOU’RE SUED Former president Donald Trump is suing CBS News for $10 billion over the network’s 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump has argued CBS deceptively edited an answer Harris gave to a question about the White House’s relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu. 

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS The US’s October jobs report showed just 12,000 new jobs created last month, which Trump’s team is calling a “catastrophe” and which Democrats are largely blaming on the two major hurricanes that hit the southeastern part of the country. 

AD-VANCED Vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in the days leading up to the election. The conversation lasted over three hours and covered topics like abortion, LGBT issues, the economy, and even the nominee’s favorite Netflix shows. 

Jeff Bezos’s plea falls on deaf ears

“Americans don’t trust the news media,” Jeff Bezos wrote in the pages of the Washington Post, the newspaper he owns. Today, Hugh Hewitt, who had contributed for years to the Post, publicly quit the newspaper after an on-air altercation with his colleagues on the editorial board.

Bezos’s article came shortly after his newspaper’s editorial board passed on endorsing in the presidential election, but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Several editorial board staffers quit in outrage almost immediately.

Hewitt’s exit is a bit different, however. While on a livestream with his colleagues, Jonathan Capehart and Ruth Marcus, Hewitt interrupted a discussion the other two were having about how former president Donald Trump was “laying the groundwork for contesting the election by complaining that cheating was taking place in Pennsylvania,” Capehart said. “Uh, yeah,” Marcus replied.

“I’ve just got to say, we’re news people, even though we’re with the opinion section,” Hewitt said. “It’s got to be reported. Bucks County was reversed by the court…because they violated the law and told people to go home.”

Capehart replied that he did not “appreciate being lectured about reporting, when Hugh, many times, you come here saying lots of things that—” Hugh chirped in, and responded by tearing out his earpiece and walking off camera. “I won’t come back, Jonathan,” he said. “This is the most unfair election ad I have ever been a part of.” Hewitt subsequently confirmed that he resigned from the Post.

When Capehart turned to Marcus as a potential lifeline, her screen froze, all but ending that installation of Washington Post Live. “It is what it is,” he said.

With yet another vacancy on the Post’s staff, perhaps they can inquire with Ryan Girdusky of CNN lore if he’d be interested in joining.

–Matthew Foldi

Revenge of the stenographers

Efforts to clean up President Biden’s slip-ups are causing controversy in government departments. On a Voto Latino Zoom call on Tuesday, Biden chose to respond to Tony Hinchcliffe’s Trump rally joke that Puerto Rico is “a literal island of garbage.” “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” Biden said. 

According to a Thursday AP scoop, “White House press officials altered the official transcript of a call in which President Joe Biden appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity.” After conferring with Biden and his press team, an apostrophe was added to make it “supporter’s.” 

“The change was made after the press office ‘conferred with the president,’ according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by the AP… The supervisor, in the email, called the press office’s handling of ‘a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.’” 

Cockburn is a stickler for grammar — how could he not be? — but the biggest surprise for him about this minor scandal is that there is an official Stenography Office?! Doesn’t that seem a little redundant given how most of the press here chooses to operate…?

–Cockburn