Observers attuned to the patterns of the Trump era knew instantly — beyond the shadow of a doubt — that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had not called for Liz Cheney’s execution on Thursday night in spite of the press’s collective effort to convince the world that he had.

At an event hosted by Tucker Carlson on Thursday evening, Trump attacked Cheney by noting that “She wanted to stay in Syria. I took them out. She wanted to stay in Iraq. I took them out,” and declaring that if it were “up to her, we’d be in 50 different countries.”

“She’s a radical warhawk,” he submitted before continuing:

Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, ok? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face. You know, they’re all warhawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh, gee, 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. So whether it’s her, whether it’s-, I was surprised a little bit with Dick Cheney. I didn’t know him at all. I only had essentially the one or two phone calls, and it was only a call saying, ‘Thank you very much for doing that for Scooter Libby, that was nice.’