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The left did it again! Blatant lies (yet again? maybe still lying)
President Joe Biden’s campaign quickly accused Trump of fomenting “political violence.” The Trump campaign said Trump was clearly using the term in the context of an economic bloodbath.
“If you actually watch and listen to the section, he was talking about the auto industry and tariffs,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, told the Washington Post, adding that “Biden’s policies will create an economic bloodbath for the auto industry and autoworkers.”
That explanation seems the most plausible, given the context of Trump’s comments.
Speaking at a rally on the grounds of the Dayton International Airport in Ohio, Trump said that over the last three decades, Mexico has siphoned off U.S. auto manufacturing jobs, and he accused China of building car manufacturing plants in Mexico that will cost U.S. autoworkers their jobs.
Trump, March 16: China now is building a couple of massive plants where they’re 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, and 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? No. 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. 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.
“The Fake News Media, and their Democrat Partners in the destruction of our Nation, 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 wrote, promising that if elected U.S. auto manufacturing “WILL THRIVE LIKE NEVER BEFORE.”
(An aside: When Trump was president, auto manufacturing jobs rose about 5.8% to 1,012,500 in his first two years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but dipped in his third year, and then again sharply during the pandemic. There were 949,300 auto manufacturing jobs in the U.S. when Trump left office. Under Biden, the number of auto manufacturing jobs has increased about 12.2% to 1,065,100 in February, the most recent data available.)
The Trump campaign also noted — rightly — that one of the definitions of “bloodbath,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “a major economic disaster.” We did a Nexis search of TV news transcripts and found numerous instances of bloodbath being used in that way.
