Trump’s closing message: Attack, divide and veer off script

Donald Trump finished his final full week on the campaign trail the way he started it — with a set of grievance-fueled attacks that set off a firestorm among his critics, thrilled his supporters and drew a wary shrug from the Republican Party he dominates.

The former president started Sunday with a rally in which one of his opening acts described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” sparking outrage among Hispanic voters he will need in the swing state of Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

Then, he declared Wednesday that he would protect women whether they “like it or not,” further fueling a gender gap that could haunt him on Election Day.

And on Thursday, Trump said Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney should “face nine barrels shooting at her,” an apparent attack on her hawkish views that may alienate a small segment of the electorate he could need if the race against Vice President Kamala Harris is indeed as close as polls reflect.

It was vintage Trump — and evidence, yet again, of how little his campaign style has changed since he descended the escalator in Trump Tower more than eight years ago.

“This is what he always does,” said Doug Heye, a former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee. “We focus on the crazy and that’s understandable, of course. But the consistency of how he does this — this is the disciplined message. He is saying precisely what he wants to say.”

Of Trump’s intent, Heye said, “He fires up the base, and focuses the attention on himself.”

The latest controversy roiling Trump’s campaign erupted after the former president, in a conversation with Tucker Carlson in Arizona late Thursday, took aim at Cheney in violent terms.

“She’s a radical war hawk — let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?” Trump said. “And let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Arizona’s top prosecutor, a Democrat, is now investigating whether Trump violated state law by making a death threat against Cheney. Democrats seized on the remark as the latest example of Trump being unfit to serve as president, with Harris arguing that his attack on Cheney “must be disqualifying.” And Cheney, once the No. 3 House Republican, equated the remarks to a death threat and called Trump a “vindictive, cruel” man vying to be a tyrant.

Trump has long hurled insults at Cheney, who voted to impeach him and helped lead the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. As Harris campaigns with Cheney, who endorsed her, in a bid to expand her appeal among independents and moderate Republicans, Trump has taken to yoking Cheney to her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and his role in the Bush-era Iraq War as he looks to wrest away Arab American and Muslim votes from the Democrat. He did so again on Friday in a rally outside Detroit.

But the violent image he conjured on Thursday of the younger Cheney marked a notable escalation in his attacks.

Democrats and Harris surrogates seized on Trump’s rhetoric against Cheney. Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, called it “sickening” and “un-American” but “not surprising.” Former President Barack Obama’s former attorney general, Eric Holder, denounced the comments as “reprehensible” and “irresponsible” when asked by a POLITICO reporter at a Harris campaign canvass launch in north Philadelphia, adding that it’s “an indication of who [Trump] is and why he should never, ever, ever again be president.”

Trump’s campaign aides and close allies on Friday dismissed criticisms of his remarks. The Trump campaign’s spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, said Trump was “100% correct that warmongers like Liz Cheney are very quick to start wars and send other Americans to fight them, rather than go into combat themselves.” Leavitt said discussion of the matter was “the latest fake media outrage days before the election in a blatant attempt to interfere on behalf of Kamala Harris.”

Republicans on Capitol Hill and operatives working on key down-ballot races were also eager to downplay any electoral fallout, arguing Trump was only trying to paint Cheney as a so-called “chicken hawk” who is eager to get the U.S. involved in wars abroad but avoids military service.

But privately, they’re acknowledging Trump using such language in the final days of the campaign threatens to further erode his support among female voters. That’s especially true of the highly sought-after Republican and moderate suburban women who Harris is aggressively targeting in the close of this incredibly tight campaign.

No matter the context of what he meant, Trump deploying such attacks in the final days of a race where he’s trying to stem bleeding among moderate female voters only risks pushing them “closer to Harris,” said one GOP lawmaker, granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Former Rep. Reid Ribble (R-Wis.) agreed, saying that Trump’s remarks don’t play well with women.

“This dialing up the rhetoric is not going to help him win over the very voters that he needs to win over here,” Ribble said.

Both Trump and Harris are holding rallies in Milwaukee on Friday as the two campaigns compete for traditionally Republican and moderate voters in the key, suburban-heavy WOW counties — Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington — outside the city. Trump has been shedding support in that long-running GOP stronghold since 2016, where suburban women are poised to determine the outcome of the presidential race in the state with notoriously slim margins.

“It doesn’t have an effect on anyone’s closing message,” said David Urban, a former 2016 Trump campaign adviser. “When Kamala Harris is out giving her closing message, Biden was fucking sawing her legs off from behind her in the building — literally in the building behind her — saying stupid shit.”

This late in the campaign, “everyone’s looking for advantages at the last moment — some real, some not real,” Urban said. And when it comes to Trump’s remarks about Cheney: “There are lots of times and I’m like, ‘shouldn’t have said that one,’” Urban said. “This isn’t one of those.”

Trump has employed the same derogatory language since he descended the golden escalator at his eponymous tower in New York City nine years ago, calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and disparaging former Sen. John McCain’s military service. And ever since the “Access Hollywood” tape, voters have frequently given him a pass. Meanwhile, Trump has turned nearly every slight against him — real or perceived — into a rallying cry for his base.

Trump routinely dabbles in revisionist history and hyperbole, reframing the deadly Jan. 6 riot as a “love fest.” He did much the same after his marquee event at Madison Square Garden turned into a showcase of the MAGA movement’s racism and vulgarity, later describing the event as “the greatest evening anyone’s seen, politically.”

And in the same event Thursday in which he invoked the image of Cheney facing down nine guns, Trump hurled insults at several of his other nemeses, maligning their intelligence and, in at least one case, their physical appearance. Many of the comments were met with laughter from the friendly crowd.

“It’s totally in character to say everyone who’s not with me is against me, and everybody who is on the other side is somehow mentally or competently deficient,” said Chuck Coughlin, a political consultant in Arizona who left the Republican Party after Trump’s election. “It’s what he does. That’s the MO.”

“That’s part of the unicorn that Trump is,” Coughlin continued. “He’s this celebrity that everybody follows who can trash anybody, and everybody — at least everybody in his base — accepts it.”

Myah Ward, Adam Wren and Megan Messerly contributed to this report.