Trump’s Alleged Bloodbath “Threat”

Background

One pattern which repeats itself in legacy media’s reporting and commentary on Donald Trump is something I call “Trump Hopscotch”. In Trump Hopscotch, the word “Trump” is written in the bottom square, and at the top, is written some bad thing or other as the occasion requires: Hitler, Stalin, Russia, Dictator. The rules of the game are you need to get from Trump to the Bad Thing, preferably in as few moves as possible. As soon as you get from Trump to the Bad Thing, you declare victory and the game ends.

Under these conditions, connecting Trump to the Bad Thing is all that counts. There’s never any requirement to consider whether the connection makes any sense. That is: is the Bad Thing actually plausible? But this kind of analysis is integral to the process of constructing meaning. We hear a friend say that they’re “about to leave for ma’s”. Did they mean their mom’s home, or Mars the planet?

Which of those two constructions is to be preferred? How could anyone say? If you answered, “I know, that’s easy”, it’s possible you sit on a pointy end of the bell curve. As any seven figure broadcast journalist will tell you reaching over the table at Eleven Madison for the bread as the waiter starts pouring the Acqua Panna, this is actually “one of those things that makes what it is we do so difficult”.

And so it was when Trump made the following comments at a campaign rally in Ohio on March 16:

Let me tell you something to China, if you’re listening President Xi, and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal. Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now, and you think you’re going to get that, you’re going to not hire Americans, and you’re going to sell the cars to us? No. We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars. If I get elected. Now, 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. That’ll be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars. [emphasis added]

There were two possibilities here. Trump was either talking about an economic bloodbath, or a violent uprising against the United States. For those reaching for the words “January 6th”—and plenty would—bear in mind, this was predicated on Trump losing the 2024 election. He would not have the command of the national guard or the military in the case things became kinetic. It would, presumably, be him and a bunch of his followers, waging a war against the full might of the United States.

So which one was it? For many in the legacy media, it was a coin toss. Or at least, occasion to saturate the airwaves with “analysis”, much of which simply became another game of Trump Hopscotch. Nowhere was there a discussion of just the degree of absurdity there was in the worst construction of the remarks that was being suggested.

Highlights: Michael Beschoss on MSNBC describing Trump’s comments as threatening a bloodbath if he won the election. Credit I suppose for at least remaining on script, knowing that however confused he was about what is was that Trump had said, he knew he didn’t like it.

Lowlights: Joe Scarborough, thinking he’d made the breakthrough that settled the whole “controversy”: the words “That’ll be the least of it”. A little proof of work is required here (†), but it is not difficult stuff to realize how preposterous Scarborough’s “breakthrough” was. There were two possibilities: Trump’s words amounted either to (i) an economic bloodbath in the auto industry and an economic bloodbath in the larger economy as well, or (ii) an economic bloodbath confined solely to the auto industry, with no effects in the broader economy, plus: a civil war. To Scarborough, who never stumbled into the first possibility, only the second even presented itself. In truth, for him and so much of the rest of the legacy media, it was Trump Hopscotch all the way down.

[†] The mistake is not realizing that if the “That” in “That’ll be the least of it” referred—as it naturally did—to the economic impacts in the auto industry, then that being the “least of it” still hinted at other consequences also being economic ones—ie: extending beyond the auto industry, to the country as a whole.