During a Saturday rally in Ohio, Donald Trump said, “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s going to be the least of it—It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” But before and after that statement, he spoke of slapping huge tariffs on imported cars built in Mexico by Chinese companies.
Acyn Torabi, the senior digital editor of the liberal MeidasTouch.com, posted a video clip of the “bloodbath” quote, shorn of most of the surrounding verbiage, garnering 22 million views on X.com. As reported by Semafor, Joe Biden’s campaign posted a similar clip soon after Torabi did, implying Trump was fomenting violence. By Sunday morning, Republicans on the news-making talk shows were asked about Trump’s comment. They responded by arguing Trump was just talking about the economy and Democrats were taking the word “bloodbath” out of context.
Ever since we have been subjected to a semantic debate over “what did Trump really mean.” Such chin-stroking works to Trump’s advantage, dulling the potential for mass outrage when he makes outrageous statements.
How can we avoid this semantic trap?
Some argue Democrats can’t be so quick to pounce. One of CNN’s in-house Republican talking heads, former George W. Bush administration official Scott Jennings, said, “When [Trump’s] political opponents take these kinds of matters out of context, it then dilutes it when he actually does say something that’s worthy of criticism, which is not uncommon. He does it all the time. But when you cry ‘wolf’ on one like this, it hurts your ability to get people to take you seriously on the next one.”
Sound advice in theory but, in our social media-driven times, difficult in practice.
The video clip artists that track Trump’s every utterance have a strong incentive to post each instance of seemingly incendiary rhetoric because each can potentially go viral. Trump’s critics are primed to assume the worst and can’t be trained en masse to take a breath before sharing and opining. What gets traction online often bleeds into mainstream media, as 24/7 TV news outlets can’t resist a segment over a controversial remark. A video clip followed by a panel of dueling “strategists” debating its meaning is easy, low-cost content.
This predictable path is a dead end for the Biden campaign. Instead, it can guide the visceral online reactions into something more useful than a linguistic seminar about what Trump meant. What’s needed is a narrative frame about the Trump presidency, crystalizing the choice facing voters, on which all of Trump’s disturbing remarks can be hung—regardless of their intended meaning.
Remember, this is 2024, not 2015. Nine years ago, when Trump rode the escalator at his eponymous tower to announce his candidacy, we could only speculate about what Trump’s hateful rhetoric actually meant or what it would do to the fabric of our country. After four years of President Trump, we knew.
Biden needs to remind voters that Trump was less a president than an arsonist. May 2020 was marked by violence in several cities after video captured a police officer murdering George Floyd during an arrest, with more than 120 people convicted of arson, rioting, or conspiracy. In August 2020, as unrest consumed Kenosha, Wisconsin, following a non-fatal police shooting of an African-American man, a 17-year-old boy shot and killed two protestors. In January 2021, hordes of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to steal the presidential election.
The flames in Trump’s final year in office can and should be directly tied to the president who spent every day gathering kindling and pouring gasoline. As I wrote last month, I would like to see a TV ad in which Biden says, “After four years of a president spewing hatred…our country was falling apart. We were turning on each other, and democracy itself hung by a thread.”
Are we better off than we were four years ago? Yes. Our cities aren’t burning, and our Capitol isn’t under siege. Having a president who isn’t a hatemonger makes a difference.
This narrative frame connects Trump’s rhetoric to his presidency without burdening Trump’s critics to prove a remark was intended to provoke violence. It doesn’t matter what he meant by any particular riff. What matters is what he did.
And what he did, he is still doing. Only now, it’s worse because he is deeming convicted January 6 insurrectionists “hostages” and vowing to pardon them if he returns to the Oval Office, including those like Daniel Rodriguez, serving 12 years for, among other things, driving a stun gun into the neck of a police officer and beating him.
If the Biden team deploys this narrative—in presidential speeches, campaign surrogate interviews, TV advertising, and social media memes—then future instances of Trump’s explosive asides tossed in convoluted word salads can be easily prosecuted without a linguistics seminar on what he meant.
There he goes again, critics can say, turning Americans against each other with irresponsible rhetoric. We know how this ends.
