Former President Donald Trump went one step further this Saturday in his apocalyptic vision by predicting, while speaking about the automobile industry during a rally in Ohio, that there will be a “bloodbath” in the United States if he is not elected in the US elections. next November. He also escalated his xenophobic discourse: he stated that undocumented immigrants “cannot be called people.”
Trump is, since last Tuesday and after mathematically securing the necessary delegates for his party’s nomination, the Republican candidate for the White House, a race in which he faces President Joe Biden in a repeat of the duel between the two in 2020. Then, the tycoon refused to admit his defeat and built the big lie that the elections were going to be stolen from him during the months prior to the polls. This hoax led to the insurrection of the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Saturday’s was one of his classic angry, disjointed and apocalyptic interventions, and was marked by failures in the teleprompterwhich gave wings for improvisation to the candidate, who at one point was confused when saying that Biden had arrived at the White House after defeating Barack Obama.
Trump was on the outskirts of Dayton (Ohio) to support Bernie Moreno’s Senate candidacy for that Midwestern State. Trump took the stand and launched into one of those litanies full of insults, inaccuracies and lies for 90 minutes, in which one thing unpredictably leads to another, and in which he criticized the electric car industry that manufactures outside the country. . He also wanted to turn around one of the favorite arguments of his opponent, who usually warns that a Trump victory would be a “threat to democracy.” He stated that if he loses at the polls in November, it will disappear forever in the United States. “If we don’t win, I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country,” he warned his supporters. “November 5 [jornada de la votación presidencial] “It’s going to be the most important day in our history.”
Although the headlines were taken by something he had not said until now: “If I am not elected, it will be a bloodbath for everyone… It will be the least of it, because there will be a bloodbath,” he insisted. He did not give any further explanation for that omen, but soon his campaign launched into denying that his candidate was invoking violence. He was actually referring, a spokesperson said, to the automotive industry, which he had actually been talking about when he said the phrase. It was one of his classic and chaotic discursive turns, and it also unleashed a shower of interpretations.
The full intervention is this: “If you are listening to me, President Xi [Jinping], you and I are friends… he understands the way I act. Those huge monster car manufacturing plants you’re building in Mexico right now… you’re not going to hire Americans and then you’re not going to sell those cars. “We are going to put a 100% tariff on every car that crosses the border, and you will not be able to sell those cars if I am elected.” Immediately afterwards, he added: “Now, if I am not elected, it will be a bloodbath for the whole world; That will be the least of it. “It will be a bloodbath for the country.”
“Thirst for revenge”
The Biden campaign did not buy that argument, and defined the intervention as a “threat of political violence.” “He wants another January 6, but the American people are going to give him another electoral defeat this November because they continue to reject his extremism, his penchant for violence and his thirst for revenge,” campaign spokesman James Singer said in a statement.
In the following hours, the main conservative commentators accused the major American media of taking Trump’s words out of context. Electric car mogul Elon Musk accused NBC of fabricating a “misleading headline.” Another spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said on behalf of Trump on that same television network: “Biden’s policies will create an economic bloodbath for the auto industry and auto workers.” Republican Senator Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) added: “If you look at [en el diccionario] The definition of ‘bloodbath’, there is a meaning that refers to an economic disaster. “If you’re talking about the auto industry, and especially in Ohio, I think the quote requires a little context.”
The former president faces 91 criminal offenses in four separate cases. Two of them are built around his attempts to overturn the election results from four years ago and his instigating the assault on the Capitol. One is in Atlanta, and refers to his attempted electoral coup in Georgia. The other is scheduled to be held in Washington once the Supreme Court decides whether during those months at the end of his term he was granted “total immunity” in his position as president, as his lawyers claim.
During his speech in Ohio, the Republican described the detainees and prisoners as “hostages”, as is his custom, for attacking Congress after his rally in Washington, in which he harangued the masses to do so. He promised again that he will pardon them if he returns to the White House. There are more than 1,200 people accused of those events.
As in the campaign that made him president in 2016, one of the favorite targets of his bitter rhetoric is again this time the undocumented immigrants who try to enter the United States through the southern border, which is experiencing one of its recurring crises due to the impotence of the Biden Administration and the inaction of Congress. If then he repeatedly called Mexicans “rapists” and recently said that they were “poisoning the blood of the country,” in a reference with echoes of My struggle, the book in which Hitler summarized his ideology, Trump recently defines them as “criminals,” and says, without evidence, that they come straight from “prisons, asylums, and mental asylums.”
“I don’t know if you can call them people,” he said Saturday. “In my opinion, in some cases they are not. But I can’t say that because the radical left considers it a terrible statement.” The dehumanization of the other is one of the classic arguments in the xenophobia instruction manual.
Also notable in the candidate’s list of controversial statements is his recent promise to be a “dictator for a day” – specifically, the first of his long-awaited return to the Oval Office, during which he would reverse some of Biden’s policies. Also the suggestion that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell it wants” with NATO countries that do not comply with the multilateral organization’s defense budget, another of his favorite targets. That last threat also came on a Saturday night, one of his favorite days of fury, at a rally somewhere in the United States.
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