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#LizCheney responded on Friday morning in a post: “This is how #dictators destroy free nations.”

#Trump’s #violent hypothetical came as he has recently intensified the dark & #threatening language he uses toward his political opponents. Trump, whose #lies that he won the 2020 election spurred some of his supporters to storm the Capitol on #Jan6, 2021, once again on Thurs referred to a pernicious “#EnemyWithin” that needed to be addressed.

#Trump has previously described his #enemies as “#vermin” that needed to be rooted out. (#Cheney was the top Republican on the House cmte that investigated Trump’s role in the #insurrection.)

…#Democrats & some #Republicans have increasingly warned that Trump exhibits #authoritarian tendencies, w/ #KamalaHarris [& Trump’s fmr top advisers] recently calling him a “#fascist.”

#Trump & his allies…[have tried to blame Democrats for]…an overheated political climate that…has led to #PoliticalViolence, ignoring that Trump has long used…[far worse]…language to describe Democrats.

Throughout Thurs night’s interview, Trump…gave a series of #rambling answers in which he flung personal #insults at his critics, at one point relived his 2016 presidential campaign & used dark language to make exaggerated claims about #immigration.

#TuckerCarlson did little to curb #Trump’s *freewheeling* impulses, rebut his exaggerated claims or to interrupt his digressive answers. With no teleprompter in front of him, Trump seemed to use Carlson’s short questions as jumping off points for whatever topic came to mind.

#Trump alluded to unfounded, debunked claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. He repeated a baseless theory that Democrats were encouraging undocumented immigrants to vote illegally, misrepresented gender-affirming surgeries for transgender people & revived old grievances about the investigation of the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III & his 2 #impeachments that he had not been asked about.

And he again revived his fixation on crowd sizes. At one point, #Trump falsely insisted that people did not leave his rallies early. Then, he compared his audiences to Ronald Reagan’s.

“If Ronald Reagan came back from the dead — at the height of Ronald Reagan, if he went to California to have a rally, he would have 250, 300 people in a ballroom some place,” Trump told the crowd. “We have fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred thousand people.”