American Carnage, American Bloodbath

If Trump wins, the United States will descend into dictatorship. But what happens if he loses?

At an airfield in Vandalia, Ohio, over the weekend, former president and adjudicated rapist Donald Trump delivered what the Associated Press described as “a profanity-filled version of his usual rally speech” that was dark to the point of being “apocalyptic”; the New York Times reported that Trump “doubled down on a doomsday vision of the United States.” Here is what the presumptive GOP nominee said: “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 country.”

A bloodbath for the country.

Was this a figure of speech? A prediction? A Freudian slip? A threat?

A vow?

His campaign staffers, a team of professional gaslighters cashing checks from a dementia-addled would-be dictator, tried to walk this back, indignantly explaining that Trump was merely talking about the auto industry, and that the “bloodbath” had to do with tariffs. You know, as bloodbaths so often do.

House Speaker and Putin apologist Mike Johnson, Trump’s lickspittle, complained that “the media” took the “bloodbath” line “wildly out of context.” Which, while perhaps not completely untrue, ignores the “least of it” phrase and misses the larger point: FPOTUS delights in bloody violence, and always has.

The Ohio speech echoes the ominous remarks Trump made during his inaugural address—a speech characterized by George W. Bush as “some weird shit”:

Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge, and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

There is a thruline from that speech, delivered on January 20, 2017 in front of a sparse D.C. crowd, to the comments made in Ohio this past Saturday in front of grinning nincompoops Kristi Noem and J.D. Vance. The not-so-subtle subtext is that the alleged ubiquitous violence in the United States—the American carnage—will only stop if Trump is restored to the White House. And, conversely, that if FPOTUS is denied a second term, there will be blood.

On the subject of stochastic terrorism, Trump doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. It’s not like Donald is Mahatma Gandhi with the visions of peace. How many death threats have been made in his wake by his deranged followers? There is precedent for mayhem with his guy—huge, historical, impeachment-causing precedent: In January 2021, Trump summoned his worshipful foot soldiers to Washington, whipped them into a frenzy, commanded them to march on the Capitol, and sat idly by as they did so, refusing to call in the National Guard, as both members of Congress and members of his family urged him to do. Those MAGA besiegers wanted to hang Mike Pence—Trump’s own vice president. They broke through the entrance to Nancy Pelosi’s office, where her staffers hid under a table. They brought zip-ties. They took selfies and smeared their own shit on the Capitol walls. And Donald sat for hours in a White House dining room, watching the insurrection play out on TV. People died that day, and Trump did nothing but feed his sadism, his narcissism, and his dumb face.

Donald Trump enjoys violence. He gets off on it: rape is a violent crime, and as the civil court has made clear, he is an adjudicated rapist. Not only that, but there are dozens of sexual assault accusations against him besides E. Jean Carroll’s.

Saturday’s speech was also eerily reminiscent of Trump’s shout-out to the Proud Boys during his debate with Joe Biden in September of 2020. As AP reported at the time:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday didn’t condemn white supremacist groups and their role in violence in some American cities this summer, branding it solely a “left-wing” problem and telling one far-right extremist group to “stand back and stand by.”

“Almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing,” said Trump, whose exchange with Democrat Joe Biden left the extremist group Proud Boys celebrating what some of its members saw as tacit approval. . . .

FBI Director Christopher Wray told a congressional panel last week that white supremacists and anti-government extremists have been responsible for most of the recent deadly attacks by extremist groups within the U.S. . . .

“What we saw was a dog whistle through a bullhorn,” California Sen. Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, said on MSNBC after the debate. “Donald Trump is not pretending to be anything other than what he is: Someone who will not condemn white supremacists.”

The Proud Boys took Trump’s “stand by” order as the call to arms it was intended to be. The dogs heard the whistle, and they were ready to fight. The hate group participated in several ugly rallies in November and December of 2020, before being key players in January 6’s violent coup attempt. Its leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy and given long prison sentences: Zachary Rehl, 15 years; Joseph R. Biggs, 17 years; and for the national chairman, Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, 22 years.

Seditious conspiracy, to spell it out, is when two or more people “conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof.” It is tantamount to treason. The Proud Boys are in prison because they led a violent coup attempt intended to overthrow the government. And they led a violent coup attempt intended to overthrow the government because that’s what they thought Donald Trump ordered them to do.

After Trump’s speech on Saturday, the Biden-Harris campaign put out this statement:

Tonight, Donald Trump said there would be a “bloodbath” if he wasn’t elected and that if he lost there would be no more elections.

After opening the general election by meeting with authoritarian leaders and rallying alongside conspiracy theorists, Donald Trump continues to praise dictators, promise to pardon political violence, and launch racist attacks against Black and brown Americans.

It’s why last night, Trump’s own former Vice President Mike Pence, who Trump supporters called to hang for not overturning the election, came out against Trump.

This is who Donald Trump is: a loser who gets beat by over 7 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.

It came and went in a single news cycle; Trump has so successfully co-opted the Republican Party and the national news media that we have become numb to these sort of awful utterances. But let’s pause for a moment, and read the two statements again—Trump’s and the Biden-Harris campaign’s—and think on what they might portend. In the United States, two years shy of the 250th anniversary of our independence, the presumptive nominee for one of the two major political parties and its unquestioned capo dei capi essentially called for a “bloodbath” if he loses the election. And this threat was taken so seriously by the sitting president and vice president that their campaign felt the need to denounce Trump’s “affection for violence, and his thirst for revenge,” and also to mention the attempt on the life of Mike Pence on January 6.

This is not normal. This is extraordinary—truly extraordinary. It’s not something that is supposed to ever happen in this country. Threats of political violence should be unacceptable, always. And yet a third of the country has not only accepted Trump’s abusive behavior, but fervently endorses it.

May peace prevail.

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Photo credit: Mark Stebnicki.