Former President Donald Trump told a crowd in Dayton, Ohio, on Saturday that, if he does not get elected, “it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it.”
Trump’s campaign and his supporters insist that he was simply talking about an “economic bloodbath” for the automotive industry, which was his topic immediately before and after this interjection. We agree with those who think that he was not just talking about cars. Trump was implicitly threatening the nation with violence. That follows from his words and demeanor in the rest of the speech, his overall positioning as Americans’ savior from existential threats, and the broader context of his attacks on democracy (as analyzed by one of the authors of this piece analyzes in the American Autocracy Threat Tracker).
Trump can be artful in how he couches incitement.
Though the arc of Trump’s thoughts is famously hard to follow, his campaign rhetoric repeats his basic narratives with small variations — a tactic of successful propaganda — to shape the way his audiences think and feel. In his telling, he is both the omnipotent defender of America, whose defeat would bring the abyss, and the victim, persecuted by his enemies for trying to save the nation. Those who assist him in saving the country, as his armed followers did Jan. 6, are patriots. Trump presents dangerous speech and incitements to violence within these narratives as digressions that defy logic or in vague terms that preserve his plausible deniability.
His speech in Ohio is a good example. Here is the complete passage of his remarks:
We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and [China is] 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 gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country; that will be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell…
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