'She's a warhawk': Trump says Liz Cheney 'wants to go kill people unnecessarily'

Donald Trump was asked about former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney on Friday afternoon after he made widely misinterpreted comments about her interest in pursuing war and sending American troops to fight overseas.

"She kills people. She wanted to—even in my administration—she was pushing that we go to war with everybody and I said, ‘If you ever gave her a rifle and let her do the fighting, if you ever do that, she wouldn't be doing too well,’ I will tell [you] right now,” Trump said while he was in a stop in Dearborn, Michigan. “She's a war hawk, she wants to go kill people unnecessarily," he added.

The comments he made on stage with Tucker Carlson on Thursday night resulted in left-wing pundits as well as Vice President Kamala Harris falsley claiming that the GOP nominee was calling for Cheney to be executed. His argument was that if she had to face battle, guns pointed at her, she would not be so quick to engage the military in conflicts. 

"If she had to do it herself, if she she had to face the consequences of battle, she wouldn’t be doing it. So it's easy for her to talk, but she wouldn't be doing it. She is actually a disgrace," Trump added.

When he was speaking with Carlson, he 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," Trump said. "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.' But she's a stupid person. And I used to have, I'd have meetings with a lot of people, and she always wanted to go to war with people."

After Trump made the comments, pundits and the Democrat nominee for president pounced on them, saying falsely that he was calling for her execution. Others claimed it was a "death threat." Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said that she had her "criminal division chief to start looking at that statement, analyzing it for whether it qualifies as a death threat under Arizona's laws."

However, some pundits such as Jonah Goldberg at CNN have had to recant their comments, saying that he was "wrong to say [Trump] was calling for a firing squad execution."