‘Bloodbathgate’ is self-defeating and offensive: January 6 was real enough, and false alarms diminish its importance.
Where were you when you heard that former president Donald Trump was reviving the specter of January 6, bluntly threatening mass bloodshed from his legions of MAGA minions should the election be stolen from him again? Were you asleep in your bed like some civilian, caught unawares by the sudden onslaught of outrage? Or were you prepared like a true warrior of the Republic, commando-scrolling your social-media account furiously, screaming about the story with comments like, “Oh my god this guy I can’t even”?
Ah, “bloodbathgate”: the scandal currently consuming America’s elite political shut-ins. (The names of political kerfuffles seem to be getting more and more lurid, as if the media is desperate to keep our straying attention.) For those still unaware of the clear and present danger that looms, Trump spoke at a rally in Ohio the other day and apparently threatened that there would be an economic “bloodbath” in America if he wasn’t elected in November. (In other words, he used the same nonsensical and colloquially phrased rhetoric that he has been spouting since roughly 1986.) This of course immediately turned — via Democratic partisans and the media — into the implied equivalent of “TRUMP CALLS FOR NATIONWIDE MASSACRES IN EVENT OF LOSS.” All the headlines emphasize it: “Bloodbath” this, “bloodbath” that (or, if you follow the New York Times style guide, the far more genteel “blood bath”).
Trump meant no such thing. What he was actually talking about, in his own uniquely inarticulate way, was the urgent need for (of all things) a tariff on foreign-automobile imports. He was prophesying economic doom should he not be elected to impement this remarkably stupid policy initiative. (“That’ll be the least of it.”) He was playing to his working-class audience, and — setting aside the fact that the policy would be insanely self-destructive and was seemingly formulated in a nearby portajohn at the last second by Tesla’s industry lobbyists — doing his typical by-the-numbers job of pandering. It wasn’t even a dramatic moment in the rally, just more of his standard loose-tongued bloviation. (The funny thing is that Trump said so many other, actually offensive things during his Ohio rally. You should’ve heard his riff on DeSantis, yikes.)
Since you are not a child, you know why online commentators are misrepresenting this event with such eagerness and why media outlets are carefully and suggestively framing their headlines. They very much hope that you will scan them quickly and think that Trump threatened a “new” January 6. (Hawaiian senator Brian Schatz helpfully read the stage directions aloud on Twitter last night: “Headline writers: Don’t outsmart yourself. Just do ‘Trump Promises Bloodbath if he Doesn’t Win Election.’”) The idea is that most people won’t check, and the impression that “Trump is always threatening violence” will settle into people’s brains as a subliminal background message. This is a Democratic (and media, but as the old joke goes . . .) attempt, however disingenuous and dishonest, to keep the memetic image of “Donald Trump as January 6 chaos agent” fresh in the minds of a public whose tolerance for four more years of Joe Biden is now lower than his actuarial chances of survival over the next five years.
Will this message reach those (largely middle-class and suburban) voters, as it did in 2022? The jury hasn’t even retired to deliberate on the matter; the case is still ongoing. But I can tell you who have already tuned out: minority and working-class voters, who are not inherently political animals like so much of the middle and upper classes, and simply don’t care about loose rhetoric at a campaign rally. These people vote on the basis of their pocketbooks and the safety of their communities, and to whatever extent they care about January 6 they have long since priced it in while living through the increasingly cramped prospects of Joe Biden’s era of “shrinkflation.” (Those who mocked the Biden campaign for mainstreaming the term should quietly thank it for publicly tying the president to a modern misery that people hold him — and not food manufacturers — responsible for.) Whatever case Biden hopes to make to these voters, whom he is hemorrhaging, it better be something rooted in day-to-day life rather than “Hey, remember that Viking-helmet guy? That was awful.”
Furthermore, to whatever extent that these voters (or the educated voters the Biden coalition is desperately clinging onto) care about “Trump as loose cannon,” they read stories such as this and react with contempt upon realizing that they have been deceived. They do not think, “Aha, now that Trump’s honor has been vindicated, I shall fiercely support him!” (unless they are bots from Macedonia), but they do begin to act like the villagers in the old Aesopian fable about the boy who cried wolf. “Eh, he’s bad, but he’s not bad like they say, and that makes me suspicious.” The media, after years of shrieking about the “normalization of Trump,” are continuing to do just that by setting him up as a defensible victim of their partisan slant. It isn’t just self-defeating, it’s offensive: January 6 was real enough, and enough of an enormity, that any attempt to raise a false alarm about Trump’s rhetoric only diminishes the impact and importance of what he has actually done.
But, whatever. The media will make their choices. They really just can’t help themselves on a fundamental level, can they? A school of like-minded fish smelled “bloodbath” in the water and the feeding frenzy began. It will be forgotten tomorrow. But the problem is that the media aren’t feeding on Trump, as they seem to believe; they’re feeding on themselves, eating away at their reputations and ability to persuade. Each such example makes whatever it is that they think they’re doing — advocating Biden’s reelection or, I don’t know, just reporting the truth without an obviously partisan slant — less possible. When journalists lament about the death of public trust in their profession, what they fail to understand is that it wasn’t a murder. It was a suicide — and a death by a thousand cuts, at that.