Donald Trump’s best friends are in the legacy media.
I don’t mean that Donald Trump is friends with people in the legacy media, I mean they are helping him.
Members of the legacy media have been playing this incredibly stupid game since 2015, and the reason they play this game with Trump is because they play it all the time with other Republican politicians.
The game goes like this: Donald Trump says something that uses a bit of inflammatory language in a completely non-inflammatory context, the media then proceed to cut out the inflammatory language from the non-inflammatory context and then blow it up.
They’ve been doing this with Republicans for as long as I’ve been alive.
The weird thing about doing it with Trump is that Trump frequently says wild things. They don’t even have to do it with Trump. What they end up doing, however, is essentially showing the American public they are willing to say anything about Trump.
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The latest example comes courtesy of the entire legacy media who decided to jump on a clip of Donald Trump at a political rally over the weekend — while the media is in a sheer state of panic about the 2024 race. They should be.
According to the Real Clear Politics polling average, Donald Trump is currently almost two points up in the national average. He’s currently leading in every single battleground state. Joe Biden is in deep trouble and so the media are looking for some sort of headline that is going to gin up the Democratic base.
Thus, they have to find something that says Donald Trump is a severe danger and he is going to overthrow the Republic; that there will be blood in the streets, the case that Joe Biden has been making since 2020. They say that Donald Trump isn’t just a problem — he’s a threat to the very nature of the Republic.
Joe Biden gave the worst speech I can remember, standing in front of a blood-red Independence Hall and suggesting his political opponents were going to overthrow our democracy.
That is the line the entire media have been told to repeat over and over and over for the duration of this election cycle.
And so they decided over the weekend they found the golden ticket. They found the clip of Donald Trump promising violence in the streets.
Here’s what actually Trump said:
Mexico has taken over a period of 30 years 34% of the automobile manufacturing business in our country. Think of it, went to Mexico. China now is building a couple of massive plants where they are going to build the cars in Mexico and think, they think, that they’re going to sell those cars into the United States with no tax at the border?
Let me tell you something to China. If you’re listening, President Xi — you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal — those big monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now, and you think you’re going to get that you’re going to not hire Americans and you’re going to sell the cars to us now, 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.
If I get elected 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 country. That’ll be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars.
He’s literally talking about his plan to place a tariff on Chinese imports. That’s his plan, right? Tariffing Chinese cars imported via Mexico into the United States. And he says that if he gets elected, it’ll be good for the economy; and if he doesn’t, then there will be an economic bloodbath.
Now, that’s the sort of language that occurs constantly in American politics. Democrats often use the word “bloodbath” in a variety of contexts, talking about political bloodbaths and economic bloodbaths.
No one assumes what they mean is that there will be actual murder in the streets with the blood flowing freely into the gutters.
The word “bloodbath” happens a lot in American politics because it means a slaughter. We use violent language a lot because it’s evocative, but it doesn’t mean that somebody’s about to get killed or there’s going to be a civil war.
Obviously Trump was talking about an economic bloodbath, but — what did the media do? When Donald Trump said, “If I’m not elected, there will be a bloodbath,” they took that out of context and then proceeded to claim that what Trump was saying is that if he was not elected, that there would be a full-scale insurrectionist civil war in the United States with bodies in the streets.
Nancy Pelosi said,
We just have to win this election because he’s even predicting a bloodbath. What does that mean? He’s going to exact a bloodbath. There’s something wrong here. How respectful I am of the American people and their goodness. But how much more do they have to see from him to understand that this isn’t what our country is about?
Jen Psaki, former press secretary for Joe Biden, said:
The full context is that this is much bigger than one single speech. This embrace of political violence, this dehumanizing language. This is what Donald Trump has been preaching for years. In January, he warned that there will be, “Bedlam in this country if his criminal prosecution derailed his campaign.” In 2020 he reportedly asked his defense secretary about shooting people who were protesting the death of George Floyd, saying, “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something.” And of course, his very words inspired violence on January 6, 2021, when he told a crowd of his supporters to walk down the Capitol and fight like hell because, “You’ll never take back our country with weakness.”
Trust me, I could go on and on and on. We all know by now that Trump’s allusions to political violence are not merely rhetorical. His supporters take them literally. That’s part of the big problem here. And he knows that, too. So, no, we did not miss the full context. This was not some meandering yesterday comment. This is his message.
This is always the game with Trump: Take a comment and then spin it up to its greatest possible allusion while ignoring all possible context.
But you know why it helps Donald Trump?
Because everyone starts ignoring the media: they’re the boy who cried wolf.
And if Trump does say something that really is egregious, there’s no place to go because the media already turned the dial up to 11.