Status Report: That “Bloodbath” comment

We need to stop trying to parse the unparsable.

Photo: Jeff Dean / AP

When I emerged from the Chobe National Park in Botswana after a 36 hour safari, my head was still filled with the power of the animal world—its balance, its cycles, its beauty and even its violence. I had been commenting to my sister Mimi that, among all of the animals we saw, the most disruptive ones were the baboons. They appeared to lack the serenity and grace exhibited by every other animal.

So it seemed almost fitting when I got internet service again and was able to log in to read the headlines that they were all about Trump. Specifically, they were about his “bloodbath” comment, delivered in a fiery speech outside Dayton, Ohio. Here’s the sentence, standing on its own:

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.

For a change, the media made this a headline. A “bloodbath” warning from a man who already incited a deadly insurrection is in fact quite newsworthy, even for someone like Trump, who descends every day into darker, more dangerous rhetoric.

But wait! As right-wing propagandists like Fox’s Maria Bartiromo noted, Trump was talking at that moment about the auto industry, and the need for a 100% tariff on every single car coming in that was made in Mexico. So the “bloodbath” comment about what would happen if he isn’t re-elected? It referred to an economic bloodbath for the whole country.

Scolded Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH):

Donald Trump said that a bloodbath would happen to the American auto industry if Biden kept on promoting Chinese made EVs.

He of course is 100 percent correct.

All other reporting about his "bloodbath" comment is complete propaganda. The media should be ashamed.

So, a few things. Reasonable people consider the importance of context. If, for example, Joe Biden had said that 100% tariffs would result in a “bloodbath” if Trump were elected, this wouldn’t be much of a story. Financial bloodbaths happen, and we talk about them without fear of stoking violence.

But because context matters, we need to put Trump’s words in context, too. We are far past the point where we can ascribe any nuance to his speeches or his social media posts. To understand the true context, we need to widen the lens.

In today’s piece, I’ll look at his rhetorical practices, particularly at how he is priming his audience for political violence and catastrophizing in order to justify it. Then I’ll look at the speech as a whole to see how the “bloodbath” comment fit in. Finally, I’ll offer a reminder of who Trump really is and how his base responds to his calls to violence.

Psychological priming

It’s important to understand what Trump is really doing here. For this, we need to look at his rhetoric more generally. Over the past nine years, Trump has used the language of political violence in his speeches and social media posts. This is known as “psychological priming.”

Author and activist Grant Stern correctly placed Trump’s “bloodbath” statement within this bucket. Psychological priming is defined, as Stern noted, as “the idea that exposure to one stimulus may influence a response to a subsequent stimulus without conscious guidance or intention.”

Such priming is the tool of authoritarians and fascists, and Trump wields it masterfully. When he rails against Mexican immigrants as “rapists and murderers” and calls his political enemies “vermin,” he evokes a deep, instinctual response from his supporters, triggering their disgust responses and priming them for worse.

Think of it this way: Does anyone think the MAGA crowd gathered in Dayton will actually remember that Trump was talking about the auto industry when he said there would be a bloodbath if he isn’t reelected? That presumes a level of nuanced thinking that an extremist crowd, listening to a hate-filled speech, simply does not possess.

As Mehdi Hasan, formerly of MSNBC, put it,

When you give a long rambling speech in which you make violent threats and allusions constantly, salute domestic terrorists, and demonize foreigners, you don’t then get to say “bloodbath” and hide behind “but the context was cars!”

Catastrophizing America

Former Republican official turned anti-Trump crusader George Conway made another keen observation. He noted that Trump “catastrophizes *everything* to rile up his cultish supporters, and to bind them to him, and to make them do his bidding.” Conway writes,

That’s dangerous all around because he’s encouraging them to believe that conditions are so bad or will become so bad, and that the political opposition is so awful, that anything is justified—including law-breaking and violence—to prevent those conditions and to destroy the opposition.

And so it doesn’t matter what he’s specifically referring to at the moment. He could be talking about trans people in public bathrooms or the state of the auto industry or the border—it doesn’t matter.

This is why efforts by the likes of J.D. Vance to compartmentalize and explain Trump’s evocation of dangerous language fall flat. Sen. Vance fails to take into account that immediate context simply does not matter to Trump when he is giving one of his rambling, non-sensical speeches. His point is to evoke the imagery of violence and warn of total collapse if he is not chosen to lead America as an autocrat.

As expert on fascism and modern authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat observed, Trump’s speech was designed

To get people to embrace violence, fill them with existential dread—the fear that it's the Leader or the abyss. This is an incitement to violence speech.

Just consider what Trump said during the 2020 campaign. He warned his MAGA voters that, should Biden be elected, there would be “no school, no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgiving, no Easters, no Christmas, no Fourth of July, no future for the youth.” None of that, of course, came true. But it was all to scare his base into following him no matter what because the alternative was an end to America.

The “context” was far broader that that moment

On her program, former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki also took issue with the idea that the bloodbath comment lay solely within the context of that moment, where Trump was addressing the auto industry.

She observed that Trump began his speech by physically saluting and thanking the “patriots” who violently attacked the Capitol and were now incarcerated felons. January 6 was the deadly insurrection that Trump wanted and in fact helped instigate precisely because he wasn’t reelected in November of 2020.

Elsewhere in the Dayton speech, Trump said that if he didn’t win, “I’m not sure you’ll ever have another election in this country.” And he said that some of the migrants crossing the border are “animals” and “not people”—the very kind of psychological priming that he is well aware leads to atrocities and genocide.

Trump previously has made statements about political violence and mayhem if he is not re-elected—ones that had nothing to do with the auto industry—and his followers are well aware of them. It is part of the MAGA liturgy.

For example, as Psaki noted, in warning about how his criminal prosecutions were hurting his reelection campaign, Trump said,

I think they feel this is the way they’re going to try and win, and that’s not the way it goes. It’ll be bedlam in the country.

In 2023, when he was facing possible criminal charges in Manhattan, Trump threatened more violence, posting that it was “known” that “potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country.”

Trump is a mob boss, and his speech should be viewed in that context

I’ve written extensively about Trump’s use of stochastic terrorism to cause angry but anonymous people to take action for him, even without his having to order it directly. It is why he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” and why he tweeted to his followers that January 6 “will be wild.” It’s why he told the crowd at the Ellipse, many of whom he knew were armed, that they would never take back their country with “weakness” before instructing them to march on the Capitol.

It’s why he re-posted an image of himself holding a baseball bat behind District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s head, and why he calls Jack Smith a “thug” and the prosecutors “animals.” It’s why he doxxed Judge Engoron’s clerk and insinuated she was Sen. Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend, bringing the wrath of the mob down upon her—just as he had with election worker Ruby Freeman and Judge Tanya Chutkan, who also received racist death threats. And during the Dayton speech, Trump belittled District Attorney Fani Willis for her name, vulgarly comparing it to a body part.

Trump is adept at skirting up to the line and allowing others to cross it for him. That is what a mob boss does, and why they had to come up with laws like RICO to sweep in the heads of criminal enterprises and hold them responsible for the actions of others within the organization.

The stages of denial

Finally, it’s important to remember how anything outrageous that Trump does gets processed then accepted among his supporters. Trump puts crazy things out there in order to keep shifting what is normal and acceptable, even if at first the statements sound outrageous and unacceptable.

As Rep. Steven Woodrow noted,

Remember the stages folks:

1. Trump never said it!

2. If he said it, he didn’t mean it!

3. OK, he meant it but not like that!

4. He meant it exactly like that and I agree!

By this inevitable progression, we can expect that Trump will soon begin to repeat his “bloodbath” comment outside of the context of the “auto industry” and to watch his ever more extreme followers begin to absorb and accept the idea.

A “bloodbath” over a failed presidential bid is a very dangerous idea, and we need to call it out now—not permit politicians and media personalities to make excuses for it.