‘Bloodbath’ speech was only hyperbole
Turns out that many took former President Donald Trump’s warning during a rally in Ohio on Saturday, to the effect that there’s “going to be a bloodbath for the country” if he loses in November, out of context. He was talking — hyperbolically — about the potential impact on U.S. jobs of imported automobiles, not political violence. To be sure, it was understandable that some might leap to conclusions given Trump’s record. Still, the furor had an unfortunate unintended consequence: distracting from many other false, bizarre, vulgar and threatening remarks in Trump’s Saturday speech at an airfield outside Dayton.
If we devoted an editorial to every such outburst by the former president, we would write about little else. Never taking note of them, however, would contribute to the normalization of his words, as through repetition at rally after rally they lose the power to shock. Here, then, is the rest of what Trump told his audience.
The “bloodbath” line came 32 minutes into a 1½-hour speech, which Trump began by praising people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as “unbelievable patriots.” He saluted as a video played on big screens of Jan. 6 prisoners singing the national anthem. “You see the spirit from the hostages,” he said. These are some of the most violent rioters from that day.
This was Trump’s first rally after clinching enough delegates to win the 2024 GOP nomination. He told the crowd a “highly paid adviser” had urged him to stop attacking other Republicans now that the primary is effectively over. “I don’t give a s***,” Trump said. He reminisced about crushing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who endorsed him two months ago: “I hit him just like we did to ISIS.”
Facing multiple criminal indictments, Trump said he’s “being persecuted” worse than presidents Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. “Nobody comes close to Trump,” he said. He attacked the prosecutors in every criminal case against him. Referring to Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani T. Willis, he said: “It’s spelled Fani, like your a**.”
He called President Joe Biden “a Manchurian candidate” under Chinese control, adding baselessly: “They know things about him that you’ll never know unless they want to reveal it.” Trump fat-shamed Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, accusing him of eating five hamburgers in a sitting. By contrast, he gushed about the supposed toughness of Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orban.
Trump claimed that “very brilliant Wall Street analysts” agree that stocks are up because investors expect him to win in November and that, if the markets start to think he’ll lose, “you would end up with a crash, the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1929.” He insisted Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine and Hamas wouldn’t have attacked Israel if he had been president. He claimed crime in Venezuela is down 66% — he didn’t say over what period — because that government sent its gang members, drug dealers and murderers to the United States. “In some cases, they’re not people,” he said. “These are animals.”
Almost offhandedly, Trump fanned the flames of racial animus and tried to pit racial groups against one another. “Biden has repeatedly stabbed African American voters in the back, including by granting millions and millions of work permits [to migrants], taking their jobs,” he said. Later, he called it “a very terrible thing” that the United States has renamed military bases that formerly honored Confederate officers, and he attacked the Cleveland Major League Baseball franchise for changing its name. “They’re Indians,” he said.
Trump generated much appropriately negative coverage on Monday for saying in a radio interview that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion” and “should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.” But attention also needs to be paid to Trump’s claim Saturday that “Catholics are under siege” by Biden, who is the second Catholic president in U.S. history. “Any Catholic that votes for this numbskull is crazy because you are being persecuted,” he said. (The day after his Ohio rally, he posted on Truth Social that former Wyoming Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney and the other members of the select committee that investigated Jan. 6 “should go to Jail.”)
Political rhetoric is heated and hyperbolic by nature. Trump’s fans say he’s just counter-punching against over-the-top Democratic attacks. As the above examples illustrate, though, Trump’s stump speeches fall into a completely different category of demagoguery. And, we repeat, these are excerpts from just one. It can be psychologically costly to keep track of his constant verbal outrages. But it can be politically costly not to do so.