Much Worse Than Bloodbaths

 Something from the Republicans on ci-devant Twitter:

Folks, I think President Biden is merely trying to take the Ex-Guy seriously but not literally, as the very serious journalist Salena Zito advised us back in the day, and the very serious billionaire investor Peter Thiel, cheerfully plagiarizing her (he has nothing to fear from Christopher Rufo) in a talk at the National Press Club:

I think one thing that should be distinguished here is that the media is always taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. ... I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally, so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment, their question is not, ‘Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?’ or, you know, ‘How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?’ What they hear is we’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.

So Trump never told people to inject themselves with bleach as a COVID cure, not literally; he merely said he thought it might be a good idea, injecting it or using it for "almost a cleaning", that or light, or UV, that was the bit that got me, the idea of injecting people with light, or sticking it in you "some other way", which he believed William Bryan, head of science and technology at the DHS, had just told the press conference about, while Trump complacently "clasped his hands in front of his stomach", as Politico later wrote, before offering his own remarks:

“A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world,” Trump began, clearly thinking the question himself, “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that, too. It sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”

Which is not, as you might imagine, what Mr. Bryan had told them; he was only talking about research into the lifespan of the coronavirus on non-porous surfaces like stainless steel in a "five-gallon bucket from Home Depot", leading to the conclusion that we were safer from infection if we held social gatherings outdoors, and that we should keep our doorhandles disinfected:

as the temperature increases, as the humidity increases... you can see how drastically the half-life goes down on the virus, so it's dying at a much more rapid pace. Just exposure to higher temperatures and humidity. In the fourth line, you inject sunlight into that, you inject UV rays into that... it goes from six hours to two minutes. That is the effect that UV rays have on the virus. In the last two lines, are aerosols, that is a dew in the air: I was discussing this with the president, he wanted me to convey to you how we do this... if you can imagine at Home Depot, a five-gallon Home Depot bucket, we were able to take a particle of the virus and suspend it in the air inside it and hit it with various temperatures, humidity levels, multiple different kinds of environmental conditions... This is how we do that aerosol testing...

Trump made up the part about injecting it in the body himself, with the very big brain he ascribes to genes inherited from his uncle, the distinguished physicist John G. Trump (who really had, believe it or not, had some success in the 1940s inactivating hepatitis virus in human blood plasma by bombarding it with electrons, but the treatment required freezing the plasma, so it wasn't safe to put it back in the body). He wished they would stop talking about the subject of the day anyway, protective measures like masking—he thought such things discouraged people and probably hurt stock prices—and decided to change it to this fabulous new scientific idea for a treatment he had come up with, which would not only cheer them up but also give them a vivid sense of how extraordinarily smart he is.

So, I have to admit it, Biden is literally wrong and "RNC Research" is literally right: Trump didn't tell us to inject ourselves with bleach—he told the scientists to do it.

Seriously, though, on the other hand, Biden was absolutely correct: Trump didn't tell us to inject ourselves with bleach, and he didn't tell us not to, either. He just slipped the idea into our minds, with a spoonful of plausible deniability, to change the subject from protective measures to Trump.

He also didn't tell us, a couple of weeks later, to inject ourselves with hydroxychloroquine, though he claimed to be taking a two-week course of it himself, who knows whether he was or not, and didn't tell us not to take it either; and possibly associated with an 11% increase in mortality from COVID-19 in randomized trials of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment with hospitalized patients, for maybe 17,000 deaths in six countries altogether; and probably associated with a campaign from the conservative "dark money" group Job Creators Network, founded by Home Depot founder Bernard Marcus. 

What is taking Trump seriously but not literally? What does it entail? It means not getting hung up on the specific meanings of the specific words he chooses, in which he's generally lying anyway, but rather focusing on the particular effect he's trying to achieve. 

The same kind of thing goes for Trump's "bloodbath" remarks in Ohio last weekend, whose meaning seems to have been undergoing a change as he was speaking, starting out like a prophecy about the US auto industry under the Biden presidency:

“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 guys if I get elected,” Trump said during a rally in Vandalia, Ohio. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole – that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it.”

It began as pretty much the same message he was pushing as a young self-publicizer 36 years ago on Oprah and Letterman, about the menace of Japanese cars:

“If you ever go to Japan right now, and try and sell something, forget about it, Oprah. Just forget about it,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs, they knock the hell out of our companies.”

And no surprise: I think it's arguably the only economic idea he's ever seriously had, that the US government needs to put a protective tariff on automobiles to save the industry here, which of course gets wronger every year, as foreign car companies increase their manufacturing in the US, a fact Trump seems entirely unable to assimilate to his brain, and the industry goes from strength to strength from the bailouts of 2008-09 to the domestic manufacturing provisions for EV building under the "Inflation Reduction Act" and 100% tariffs are really stupid, and as Michael Tomasky noted at The New Republic,

outside of the sugar high that comes from that, they pave the way for retaliatory tariffs that hurt U.S. consumers. The U.S.-China Business Council, that well-known outpost of Marxist vermin, estimated in a 2021 study that Trump’s trade policies cost nearly 250,000 American jobs.

But Tomasky also noted that the meaning seemed to be changing as Trump was speaking, to some other subject altogether:

It does seem that, in that half-finished sentence, he was briefly heading in the direction of saying, “It’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole auto industry.” If he’d said that and stopped there, I’d agree that his words were being taken badly out of context.

Notably, he didn’t stop there. What made him say “that’s gonna be the least of it”? Where was he going, in that mildewed brain of his? He stopped himself mid-sentence. Why? Based on what he went on to say, it’s a reasonable guess that he stopped himself because the words that were about to come out of his mouth, “auto industry,” just weren’t big enough—weren’t aggressive enough. So he had to amplify it and make it more threatening. The auto-industry bloodbath, he said twice, will be the least of it. It will be a bloodbath “for the country.” ....

Did Trump stop himself mid-sentence to broaden his indictment and deliberately use a phrase—not once but two times, for emphasis—that is ambiguous, open to dark interpretation? He most certainly did.

I've been able to find just one other case of Trump using the word "bloodbath", in a 2017 warning to congressional Republicans about the 2018 election: that it would be a "bloodbath" if they failed to repeal and replace Obamacare:

President Donald Trump warned House Republicans Tuesday if they can’t pass health care legislation after seven years of promises it could be a “bloodbath” in the 2018 midterm election, according to one member present in the meeting.

Which might seem prescient, given that they did fail to repeal and replace Obamacare and did indeed lose the House majority in 2018. Then again, they failed to do anything at all except for an enormous windfall for the very rich from the tax system, so maybe it's not the health care system specifically (a lucky thing for the country, in my opinion, that the House had a Democratic majority under the speakership of Nancy Pelosi when the pandemic arrived—how much worse things would have been if an inexperienced and impotent Kevin McCarthy had had to replace Paul Ryan).

I did see an interesting passage about civil war, in an interview Trump gave Tucker Carlson in August 2023:

“You know, Jan. 6 was a very interesting day because they don’t report it properly. I believe it was the largest crowd I've ever spoken before,” Trump said. “A very small group of people went down there. And then there are a lot of scenarios that we can talk about. But people in that crowd said it was the most beautiful day they've ever experienced. There was love and that there was love and unity. I have never seen such spirit and such passion and such love.”

“And I've also never seen simultaneously, and from the same people, such hatred of what they've done to our country,” he added.

Is open conflict possible, Carlson asked at the interview’s end.

“I don't know, because I don't know what, you know — I can say this: There's a level of passion that I've never seen. There's a level of hatred that I've never seen,” the 2024 GOP frontrunner said. “That's probably a bad combination.”

Another thing that can't be taken literally, because it hardly has a fixable meaning.

I can tell you, by the way, that the number of people who showed up in Washington to watch the speech or demonstrate on January 6 was indeed pretty big, and a lot bigger than the authorities were expecting: something like 120,000 souls, but not the largest crowd he'd ever addressed (that was the something upwards of 250,000 in the Mall at his inauguration, vs. 1.8 million who came to watch Obama in January 2009) as against 1,200 involved in the breach on the Capitol.

Which is funny, when you think about it. Does he realize he gave a speech urging the crowd to march "peacefully and patriotically" (Miller's alliteration) to protest the certification of the elections and 99% of the audience wasn't listening to him? More than 99%, probably, given that the Proud Boys were assembling the rioters at the Capitol before Trump even started speaking.

Assistant US Attorney Jason McCullough said the group did not intend to listen to the president’s speech; they had always planned to lead a crowd to the Capitol to forcibly stop the transfer of presidential power.

“They hoped the ‘normies’ – that is, the civilians – would burn the city to ash,” he told jurors on 12 January.

Jurors were shown video of defendant Ethan Nordean from 11.41am on January 6, 2021, according to prosecutors. Someone can be heard saying “Ethan, let’s f****** do it”. Moments later, at 11.47am, that person tells the crowd “take the f****** Capitol”.

Mr Trump began his speech to a rally crowd at 11.57am.

Way to start an insurrection, loser!

But the message here, the thing to take seriously rather than literally, is that he didn't start it. That's just "a lot of scenarios" that we don't need to talk about.  It's the love, stupid, and the unity, and the passion, and the hatred, all greater than he's ever seen, even when you're comparing them to each other. That's love for Donald, passion for Donald's needs, and hatred for those who dare to oppose him, cosmic forces warring around the Donald, the dispassionate object of all this passion, at the center of the universe. 

And that's what hit him in the Ohio speech, triggered by the thought "if I don't get elected". I don't think he was even calculating in the way Tomasky was suggesting: I think the collision between "if I don't get elected" and "bloodbath" appalled him too much—it's the end of everything, the Trumpendämmerung. Not just problems in the auto industry, but the collapse of the whole universe in a world of darkness and chaos. And not just bloodbaths—bloodbaths would be "the least of it"! Much worse than bloodbaths!

Cross-posted at the Substack.