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How Not To Fall For Yet More Trumper Textualism About His Latest Threat of Violence

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March 18, 2024 7:11 p.m.
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - JANUARY 27: Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump stands on stage during a campaign event at Big League Dreams Las Vegas on January 27, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada... LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - JANUARY 27: Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump stands on stage during a campaign event at Big League Dreams Las Vegas on January 27, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Trump is campaigning in Nevada ahead of the state’s Republican presidential caucuses on February 8. (Photo by David Becker/Getty Images) MORE LESS

If you’ve followed the uproar over ex-President Trump’s promise of a “bloodbath” if he’s not elected you’ll see it’s partly been diverted into a kind of textualist grudge match over whether he meant apocalyptic and blood-drenched civil violence or simply stiff competition for the U.S. auto industry. If you look at the actual words it seems clear he initially riffs on his claims about the auto industry but then doubles down on the promise of a bloodbath, suggesting that problems with the economy will be the least of the country’s problems. You can interpret it either way in large part because Trump always expresses himself in the kind of disjointed word salad which always require the words to be reconstructed after the fact, thus giving a fair amount of leeway to whoever wants to do the interpreting and reconstructing.

But that’s a feature, not a bug.

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