on the media’s distortions and embellishments of a recent Trump speech:
I first read about the speech in The New York Times and learned the following: that Trump had predicted a “blood bath” if he lost; that he said “some migrants” were “not people” and were “animals.” And it was also strongly implied that Trump had lost his grip, that he was “discursive” and that the speech was utterly self-absorbed, with Trump “only sparingly” talking about the purported subject of the speech, the Senate candidate Bernie Moreno.
All that seemed clear-cut enough and fit a certain picture of what The New York Times calls “the doomsday vision” of Trump’s third presidential run. And that coverage was echoed in other bastions of the mainstream media. The Hill’s headline “Trump warns US will see ‘bloodbath’ if not reelected.” CBS: ‘Trump says there will be a bloodbath if he loses November election.”
So I was a bit surprised to actually watch the speech and see something different from what had formed in my mind. Don’t get me wrong. The speech terrified me. But it wasn’t because it was an unhinged septuagenarian ranting about a bloodbath.
What bothered me most was that the speech was composed, that Trump was reading his audience, that he clearly was campaigning effectively—and will be a dangerous, wily opponent for the Democrats. He did praise Moreno several times and tied Moreno closely to his own candidacy—which was all that Moreno needed out of him. In saying “I don’t know if you call them people in some cases,” he was talking, at least at that moment, about “MS-13” and gang members, as opposed to all “migrants.” The “animals” line referred to violent criminals. And, in context, it was clear that, in the most controversial line of the speech, he was talking about an economic “bloodbath.” The moment in question came during an extended section on auto workers and the car industry and Trump went into a riff saying, “Now if I don’t get elected it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole country.” Anybody watching the entire speech would have known that the skipped-over word in there was “economy.”
