Member Newsletter
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.
If you’re taking that discussion seriously you’re missing the point. Trump’s consistent schtick, accelerating through a mix of aggression and cognitive degeneration since his 2020 defeat, is to constantly throw out a mix of hyperbole, incitement, threats of violence and retribution and more. He then sits back and let’s his targets interpret what his comments mean, express outrage, demand apologies and do whatever else. If this or that threat of violence turns out to be a touch too hot his acolytes will claim on his behalf that he was joking or speaking figuratively. As that memorable line from most-times-Trump-acolyte Salena Zito had it, we’re supposed to take the man seriously but not literally.
Except when it turns out we are supposed to take him literally. That’s when he says that yes that’s exactly what I threatened and in fact as President or ex-President or candidate or whatever else I am perfectly entitled to do so.
The throughline is always that Donald Trump acts and his targets react, which in itself becomes a kind of spectacle of authority and power. Too often his opponents react in a way which makes Trump himself the arbiter of his intent or meaning. So he may not only claim he can murder political opponents or imprison them on false charges but that he may be perfectly entitled to do so.
Now they demand that he admit that he is by no means entitled to do what everyone knows no one is entitled to do. If you know the man you know that telltale body language — arms folded tight under his torso, face tight — which says you have to come to me. I decide.
This of course makes him difficult to deal with because people have a hard time getting out of the mindset that there are some basic rules to civic life or some basic fixity to what words mean or don’t. In wars, in sports, in virtually every competitive domain in life it is a given that the side maintaining the initiative, forcing the other side to react rather than dictate the course of events has an overwhelming advantage. That’s 90% of Trump’s game.
The first step out of that game is not to get gummed up interpreting, reacting. If there may have been some confusion about this one statement that’s because Trump routinely threatens violence, threatens the most brazen abuses of public trust all to frighten and keep his political adversaries off balance and scared. And he does that not only for that reason but because he actually will use violence to hold on to power. It’s no threat. He’s already done it. Trump is a lawless bully who will toss out the Constitution, refuse to accept the results of an election and work with enemy foreign powers all for his own personal power.
I mean, we literally know all of this. It’s not speculation. He’s done all of that.
If a mob boss says someone is going to go sleep with the fishes I’m not going to get into an argument about whether that person has a big aquarium in his bedroom. Because he’s a mob boss and I’m not a chump and murdering people is what he does.
It can be difficult because civic minded people find it a challenge to grapple with lawless degenerates. But it can be done.