The media’s misrepresentation of Donald Trump’s “bloodbath” remarks is an example of the profession slipping into tribalism in evaluating and covering the presumptive GOP nominee’s presidential campaign, National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke said on Tuesday’s episode of The Editors.
During an Ohio speech last weekend, Trump had used the term to describe what would happen if he loses in November — but while he was talking about U.S. auto-manufacturing jobs and the impact of Chinese auto imports, the term was portrayed as a call for violence.
“The effect Trump has had on conservatism and the Republican Party is well documented,” Cooke said. “Trump has said a lot of bad things. I’ve written about those bad things. But . . . he didn’t say without any context that there’d be a bloodbath if he lost. This was not one of the bad things that Trump said.
“Too many people in our political world and our journalistic world are terrified that if they evaluate the truth about Donald Trump fairly, they will be accused of being on the wrong team,” Cooke said. “This is tribalism. This is what we are supposed to avoid in the West. It’s extremely dangerous.”
Cooke said that both sides need to seriously consider “whether they want to lose all of their good tendencies, traits, habits because Donald Trump is around.”
He also pointed out that this type of “martial language” isn’t new. “Loads of the words that we use in politics are aggressive when you take them out of context: ‘Attack,’ ‘campaign,’ ‘rout,’ even ‘landslide’ is slightly different. It’s not martial, but it’s not pleasant. We do it in sports as well.” Cooke continued: “It is ridiculous to look at anyone — Republican, Democrat, Trump, Biden — and say because they are using language that is usually reserved to war, they are therefore crossing a line.
“The reason we use those words is because our political system, our peaceful democratic system is the stand-in for what historically would have been resolved by war.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.