I planned to leave the “bloodbath” topic alone, thinking it was over. Donald Trump gives speech, mentions “bloodbath”; Democratic PAC-funded oppo outfit circulates video out of context; lots of media dopes from Joe Scarborough to the Washington Post fall for it; critics catch up to the scam. Embarrassment ensues. Fin du Media Cycle. Haven’t these people watched The Three Stooges? If you somehow throw a pie in your own face, don’t do it again.
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But, they do. Post-debunk, Substack’s own Robert Reich denounced the “bloodbath” speech as straight out “Hitler’s playbook.” Former Hillary Clinton lawyer Marc Elias roared about Trump’s plan to foment “another insurrection, maybe a bloodbath, to use a phrase that he recently used.” This episode is already on its third or fourth life, and will have more.
To recap: Trump gave a speech last Sunday in Dayton, Ohio. The “bloodbath” portion concerned a promise to slap a 100% tariff on foreign cars, and the quote was, “If I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath.” Acyn, a media chop shop funded by blue-party PAC Meidas Touch, put out a 17-second tweet, which the Biden-Harris campaign shortened to nine seconds:
Trump: Now, If I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. pic.twitter.com/qDEPTtl4Bu
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 16, 2024
This triggered the usual outrage battery. Biden spokesperson James Singer said it was clear Trump “wants another January 6th.” David Corn said Trump “endorsed political violence.” Even Hillary Clinton slid her crypt open to contribute:
“Bloodbath” was clearly economic metaphor, and the worst thing you could say about it is that it underscored a general Trump tendency to preach doom and disaster in a way some consider irresponsible. I don’t. This rhetoric works for Trump for a reason, the same one that makes the media miss on “bloodbath” a double-insult.
This apocalyptic speech resonates in places like Dayton, a region that produced six million vehicles between 1981 and an infamous GM plant closure in 2008. There’s now a Chinese auto-glass factory on the site. Many people in that part of the world watched $30-an-hour factory jobs turned into $1-an-hour gigs for Mexican counterparts after NAFTA, which explains why crowds tend to respond to heated rhetoric about the border. You don’t have to agree with Trump’s stances on these issues, but not understanding why they work is rhetorical malpractice.
The “bloodbath” episode is exposing how even a nationwide digital blackout of Trump can’t and won’t work, ever. It’s not Trump’s own statements or online “misinformation” or Russian bots or Decepticons or Marilyn Manson or the Reverse Flash or any other diabolical villain animating Trump’s campaign. It’s people who hate him the most, in media, who’ve become nearly the whole of his PR operation.
It was amazing this week, watching how close the press came to realizing the mistake they’ve made by combining constant mischaracterizations with censorship. The Nation has a piece out about it, “The True Threat of Donald Trump’s ‘Bloodbath’ Speech.” Watch as Jeet Heer works out every element of the story except the conclusion:
After the aborted coup of January 6, 2021, there was a concerted and largely successful effort to deplatform Trump. His Twitter account was deactivated, and Facebook stopped amplifying his message… Trump’s words are now a markedly smaller part of public discourse than they were in his first presidential run… Trump is talked about as much as ever but rarely heard from in his own voice…
But like all attempts to thwart Trump through nonpolitical means, deplatforming has failed as a strategy… Paradoxically, deplatforming might be helping Trump, since it allows Republican-leaning voters to conjure up a party standard-bearer who shares their politics rather than having to pay attention to the actual Trump, whose posts and speeches are animated by nastiness and recrimination.
On Thursday in Dayton, Ohio, Trump delivered a speech that, going against recent trends, actually gained traction…
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There’s seemingly nowhere to go but forward to realization. Heer almost gets there, dismissing as “ridiculous” the idea that such a “crude” speaker needs to be treated “with exegetical care.” Beyond that, he says, “hermeneutical precision wouldn’t exonerate Trump” (I’ll take scriptural vocabulary for $800, Alex!). In fact, a more accurate depiction of Trump’s words would just make clear that “he is more depraved than ever.”
After working through the insight that not letting Trump campaign “in his own voice” hasn’t helped, and arguing more “precision” in reporting might even hurt him, Jeet retreats to the same the old saw of stressing “the necessity of making Trump’s threat clear to voters”:
There’s no need to focus on just a few sentences of Trump’s speech. The entire performance is disgustingly authoritarian. The key takeaway is not the debatable meaning of any of Trump’s words but the necessity of making Trump’s threat clear to voters. Deplatforming hasn’t worked, and the best way to defeat Trump might be to encourage voters to spend more time listening to him.
Isn’t the problem supposedly that they are listening to him, already? That despite the “successful effort to deplatform,” despite the piles of criminal charges and hundreds of millions in fines and (soon, apparently) property seizures, people are still turning out in throngs to speeches like this one in Dayton? Isn’t that what’s got all these media folk so spun up?
But of course listening to Trump is not what Heer means. He means voters should hear more contextualizing of Trump’s speeches by people like him, when he says Trump’s address was the “classic language of fascist bigotry,” or Axios saying it was full of “insults, obscenities, and dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants.”
