We’re Falling Into Trump’s Trap… Again

The media messed up with the “bloodbath” remark. He's too dangerous for us to repeat the mistakes of 2016.

Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Ohio, on March 16, 2024. (Photo by Kamil Krzaczynski / AFP via Getty Images.)

Well, it’s another Trump election cycle, which means separate sets of alternative realities. There’s Trump reality, which is very much its own realm. And then there’s the media depiction of Trump, which has a tendency to veer off into its own projections. 

As tempting as it is for the media and for Trump-haters (myself included) to assume one or another of our nightmare visions of a Trump presidency, it’s a self-defeating impulse. And we have seen this play out before. In 2016, the press forgot about established principles of reporting to portray Trump as having no chance and his campaign as constantly on the verge of collapse. That did lasting damage to the integrity of journalism and, ironically, it weakened the media’s ability to help stem Trump—he was able to run against the media and the “establishment” as much as he was against the Democratic Party. In an election cycle, there is bound to be spin and exaggeration, but it is vital that those who purport to be in positions of detached observation (like journalists and headline editors) keep it together and critique Trump for what he actually says he’ll do or intends to do as opposed to our embellishments of it. 

Take Trump’s Ohio speech, the most recent outrage and the branching-off point for the divergent realities. 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 was: “Trump warns US will see ‘bloodbath’ if not reelected.” CBS’ was: “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.” 

None of this is to detract from the very real dangers that Trump poses. He was a terrible president. He degraded the dignity of the office in unprecedented ways. He often made only gestures at governance. His reaction to a pandemic was to abdicate responsibility—mocking the governors scrambling to secure PPE, attempting to reap political benefit from Democratic governors shutting down their states in the hopes that he could eventually take credit for reopening. And, as a parting shot, he turned a mob loose not only on Congress but on his own vice president. 

As a direct result of his cynical, narcissistic politicking the country is more divided than it has been in living memory. He has encouraged the idea that a sitting U.S. president is illegitimate, which will almost certainly lead to a contested election result in 2024 and which threatens to tear apart the fabric of democracy altogether. 

This will be an awful few months no matter what. But it is incumbent upon the media—the “establishment media” above all—to exercise some real responsibility and not fall once again into the trap that was set for them in 2016. Trump didn’t, in the Ohio speech, actually predict a violent bloodbath, as the editors of The New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, etc. very strongly implied he did in their choice of headline. (You would have to read far down in each of those articles to get the context.) And it is fanciful to believe that he is somehow falling apart on the campaign trail. 

He really is very skilled at running for president. He speaks like an actual person, where the leading Democrats have a great deal of trouble tearing themselves away from their teleprompters and talking points. He can be amusing (some of his more famous incendiary comments are clearly jokes if you listen to them in context). He plays the martyr card effectively. He makes a certain amount of sense—until you stop to think about what he’s actually saying, that is. He didn’t actually “fix the border” or “save the steel industry” when he was president. Crime isn’t actually “way, way down all over the world” because cunning governments are dispatching their criminals to the United States. Entire stories, as delivered in the speech, are fabricated. And there is no question that his rhetoric is dehumanizing: At one point he told a parable during which he compared migrants to a snake—something which was bizarrely missing from the coverage. The fact check turns up enormous whoppers, but, as Trump well understands, nobody stops to fact check a live speech. 

If Trump is to be defeated and Trumpism overcome, the mainstream will have to maintain its realism and its dignity, and the adults in the room will need to avoid being sucked into loose play with the facts. What Trump actually is, and what he stands for, is bad enough. 

Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.

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