Women fire back at Trump after he shoots his mouth saying 'war hawk' Liz Cheney should be fired on

TOI correspondent from Washington: Characterizing his Republican critic Liz Cheney as a dumb and radical "war hawk," MAGA supremo Donald Trump on Thursday suggested she should be subjected to gunfire to "see how she feels about it," in remarks that underscored his crude, sexist outlook and penchant for violent methods.

With polls showing him trailing among women voters, particularly college-educated women, Trump seemed to have aggravated his position after an appearance with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in Arizona where he attacked Liz Cheney and her father, former vice-president Dick Cheney, for being war hawks.

"She's a radical war hawk. 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 in remarks some overwrought critics saw as a threat to put her before a firing squad.

Trump has dialed up his diatribe against the Cheneys after Liz Cheney, once a rising star in the GOP before she was sidelined and ousted from Congress by Trump for opposing his effort to steal the 2020 election, backed Kamala Harris, with support from her father. "I don't blame him for sticking with his daughter. But she's a very dumb individual, very dumb," Trump said in typically sexist comments disparaging women who challenge him.

Liz Cheney fired back, saying, "This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant."

Trump's disparagement of Cheney came on the heels of his efforts to win over the female vote by promising to protect women whether they "like it or not." By his own account, his campaign advisors advised him it was inappropriate to say he would be a "protector," but he disdained their counsel.

The Harris campaign jumped on the remarks to remind voters of his lurid record with women and his efforts to dictate their reproductive rights. “He does not believe women should have the agency and authority to make decisions about their own bodies. He simply does not respect the freedom of women or the intelligence of women to know what is in their own best interest and make decisions accordingly,” Harris said.

The growing gender polarization is causing a meltdown among some paternalistic MAGA talking heads who are flipping out at the thought of women lying to their pro-Trump spouses and voting for Kamala Harris -- mainly on account of patronizing Republican efforts to dictate women's reproductive rights. A pro-Harris ad by Julia Roberts is urging women to vote according to their conscience and not at the direction of their spouses.

One agitated Fox News anchor, Jesse Watters, raged that if his wife secretly voted for Harris, "that's the same thing as having an affair... that would be D(ivorce) Day."

The gender spat has also reopened Trump's lurid record with women, including allegations of groping, sexual assault, and rape for which he has been found liable. More than a dozen women have accused him at various times of groping them in a pattern his critics say fits in with his claim in an Access Hollywood tape where he brags about it saying, “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”

Nevertheless Trump is claiming that women are "poorer, less healthy and less safe" than they were before Joe Biden took office and is pledging to fix all that. The assertion has incensed many women, one of whom, a US military veteran, cut an ad for the pro-Harris group VoteVets, saying, "the only protection I need is against rapists like him."