“Young Turks” host Cenk Uygur was one of several hosts/journalists on the Left who debunked Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign lie that former President Donald Trump called for her surrogate former Rep. Liz Cheney to be executed.
During an interview on Thursday, the former president labeled Cheney a “radical war hawk” and suggested if she was armed on the battlefield with “nine barrels shooting at her,” where the “guns are trained on her face,” she wouldn’t be so fast to send tens of thousands of our troops “right in the mouth of the enemy.”
Cheney released a statement on Friday labeling Trump a “petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant” and said “this is how dictators destroy free nations.”
The legacy media followed suit with people like Kasie Hunt on CNN (formerly of MSNBC) claiming that Trump said Cheney “should be fired upon.” Over on “Morning Joe,” co-host Joe Scarborough said that Trump “called for Liz Cheney to be shot in the face…”
Donald Trump did not call for the execution of Liz Cheney. That is a bald-faced lie. He was making a point about how she is a chickenhawk. But also, Trump shouldn’t talk about guns being “trained on her face,” especially in a time where we’re worried about political violence.
— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) November 1, 2024
The “Young Turks” host took to X and said that the media’s response is a “bald-faced lie.”
“Donald Trump did not call for the execution of Liz Cheney,” Uygur wrote. “He was making a point about how she is a chickenhawk…This is a classic case of Trump saying something outrageous and the press bailing him out by being purposely misleading. You didn’t have to lie about it for the comment to be totally irresponsible. And when you do, you lose all credibility and no one believes anything you say.”
The Free Press writer Kat Rosenfield said that she was not a Trump supporter, but she also doesn’t “support journalists lying to their audiences, and when he says (paraphrased) ‘these pro-war people wouldn’t be talking such a big game if they were on the front lines’ it is actually not the same thing as saying they should be shot.”
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“Love to spend my days on Twitter begging members of my profession to please join me in just saying things that are true, and not saying things that are not true,” she added.
Vox’s Zack Beauchamp wrote, “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.”
When liberal political consultant Neera Tanden called Beauchamp out for pointing out the truth, he hit back and wrote, “It is not ‘defending’ Trump to describe what he said accurately — it is basic intellectual honesty. Telling the truth is how we in the media retain our credibility, especially when we frequently (and rightfully!) criticize Trump.”
On Friday, Trump also hit back at the lies and wrote on his Truth Social that Cheney is a “War Hawk, and a dumb one at that, but she wouldn’t have ‘the guts’ to fight herself. It’s easy for her to talk, sitting far from where the death scenes take place, but put a gun in her hand, and let her go fight, and she’ll say, ‘No thanks…'”
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