Former President Donald Trump on Monday fumed over what he says were comments taken out of context at a rally in Ohio on Saturday where he predicted a “bloodbath” if he loses November’s presidential election, contending that he was referring to the U.S. auto industry.
Trump’s comment came during a portion of his speech where he pledged to levy a tariff on cars being imported into the United States.
“We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars if I get elected,” Trump said on Saturday. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country, that’ll be the least of it.”
The comment from the ex-president and presumptive Republican nominee in November’s election drew alarm from Democrats, including President Joe Biden and his reelection campaign.
“It’s clear this guy wants another January 6,” Biden wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol when a mob of Trump’s supporters stormed the building as Congress counted the electoral votes from the 2020 election. “But the American people are going to give him another resounding electoral defeat this November.”
Biden’s campaign responded to Trump’s comment by calling the ex-president “a loser who gets beat by over seven million votes and then, instead of appealing to a wider mainstream audience, doubles down on his threats 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 affection for violence, and his thirst for revenge,” said Biden campaign spokesman James Singer.
But in a social media post on Monday, Trump railed against “[t]he Fake News Media, and their Democrat Partners” for taking his comments out of context, writing that they “pretended to be shocked at my use of the word BLOODBATH, even though they fully understood that I was simply referring to imports allowed by Crooked Joe Biden, which are killing the automobile industry.”
Trump’s comments echo a similar sentiment from campaign spokesman Steven Cheung, who charged in a statement Saturday that Biden and his campaign “are engaging in deceptively, out-of-context editing that puts Roman Polanski to shame.”
At other points in Trump’s speech, he said that some undocumented immigrants are “not people, in my opinion,” reiterated his position that those arrested for storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 are “hostages” and charged that if he doesn’t win in November, “I don’t think you’re going to have another election … or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.”
Republicans largely accepted Trump’s explanation of his “bloodbath” comment, while Democrats were not convinced. On Monday, President Biden's reelection campaign released a new video ad highlighting Trump's comments and juxtaposing them with his comments about the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and his "stand back and stand by" comments from a 2020 presidential debate when asked about the far-right Proud Boys. It ends with Trump vowing to pardon Jan. 6 defendants and dodging a question in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack about him discouraging his supporters from further violence.
When asked about Trump’s remark on CNN, U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., replied: “With regard to the autoworkers that he was talking to, he is showing them or he's telling them what has been an economic downturn for them.”
When pressed further, Rounds said, “I talk in a different format than what the former president does. It's different than the way that he says it. But, right now, if it's a choice between moving forward with the economy the way that it is today or the way that we could make it … I will take a conservative approach that actually cools the rest of the world down and builds our economy, and I think that’s really the choice that we have got before us.
Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, another Republican, offered that “general tone of the speech is why many Americans continue to wonder, ‘Should President Trump be president?’”
“That kind of rhetoric, it's always on the edge, maybe doesn't cross, maybe does depending upon your perspective,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press" on Sunday, adding: “I also think that the mainstream media contributes to it.”
“If you take the one about the bloodbath, which arguably could be about an economic bloodbath not about kind of street violence related to the election, then it gives his defenders something to focus on, something – which was distorted,” Cassidy continued. “So, yes, he always walks up to the edge on that rhetoric. And again, that's why people are concerned. But sometimes the mainstream media, whether they want to or not, can't resist and they go just a little bit too far, which distracts from what could be the impact.”
“Maya Angelou said, ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,’” said U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., on MSNBC on Sunday. “Donald Trump has shown us who he is time and time and time again. And we ought to take him seriously.”
“We just have to win this election, because he's even predicting a bloodbath,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “What does that mean? He's going to exact a bloodbath? There's something wrong here.”