Former President Donald Trump went a step further this Saturday in his violent rhetoric by predicting during a rally in Ohio that there will be a “bloodbath” in the United States if he is not elected in next November's elections.
He also escalated his xenophobic discourse: he stated that undocumented immigrants “cannot be called people.”
Trump is, since last Tuesday and after mathematically securing the necessary delegates for his party's nomination, the Republican candidate for the White House, a race in which he faces President Joe Biden in a repeat of the duel between the two in 2020. Then, the magnate refused to admit his defeat and was building the “big lie” that the elections were going to be stolen from him during the months prior to the polls.
That hoax led to the insurrection that assaulted the Capitol on January 6, 2021, so this latest flirtation with violence is not exactly a surprise.
Saturday's was one of his classic angry, disjointed and apocalyptic interventions, but not exactly a rally.
He was on the outskirts of Dayton (Ohio) to support Bernie Moreno's Senate candidacy for that Midwestern State.
Trump took the microphone and launched into one of his litanies, in which one thing unpredictably leads to another, and in which he criticized the electric car industry that he manufactures outside the country.
He also wanted to turn around one of the favorite arguments of his opponent, who usually warns that a Trump victory would be a “threat to democracy.”
He stated that if he loses at the polls in November it will disappear forever in the United States.
“If we don't win, I don't think you're going to have another election in this country,” he warned his supporters.
Although the headlines were taken by something he had not said until now: “If I am not elected, it will be a bloodbath for everyone... that [losing the elections] will be the least of it, because there will be a bloodbath,” he insisted. .
He did not give any further explanation for that threat, but soon his campaign began trying to deny that his candidate was invoking violence.
He was actually referring, a spokesperson said, to the automotive industry, which he had actually been talking about when he said the phrase.
It was one of his classic and chaotic discursive turns.
Elsewhere in his speech on Saturday, Trump promised to impose “a 100% tariff” on foreign-made electric cars.
"Thirst for revenge"
The Biden campaign did not buy that argument, and defined it as a “threat 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 penchant for violence and his thirst for revenge,” campaign spokesman James Singer said in a statement.
The former president faces 91 criminal offenses in four separate cases.
Two of them are built around his attempts to overturn the election results from four years ago and his instigating the assault on the Capitol.
One is in Atlanta, and refers to his attempted electoral coup in Georgia.
The other is scheduled to be held in Washington once the Supreme Court decides whether during those months at the end of his term he was granted “total immunity” in his position as president as his lawyers claim.
During his speech in Ohio, the Republican described the detainees and prisoners as “hostages”, as is his custom, for attacking Congress after his rally in Washington, in which he harangued the masses to do so.
He promised again that he will pardon them if he returns to the White House.
There are more than 1,200 people accused of those events.
As in the campaign that made him president in 2016, one of the favorite targets of his bitter rhetoric is once again this time the undocumented immigrants who try to enter the United States through the Southern border, which is experiencing one of its recurring crises of impotence. of the Biden Administration and the inaction of Congress.
If then he repeatedly called Mexicans “rapists” and recently said that they were “poisoning the blood of the country,” in a reference with echoes of
My Struggle,
the book in which Hitler summarized his ideology, lately Trump defines them as “criminals,” and says, without evidence, that they come straight from “prisons, asylums and mental asylums.”
“I don't know if you can call them people,” he said Saturday.
“In my opinion, in some cases they are not.
But I can't say that because the radical left considers it a terrible statement.”
The candidate's list of controversial statements also highlights his recent promise to be a “dictator for a day”, specifically, the first of his return to the Oval Office, to reverse all of Biden's policies and the suggestion that he would encourage Russia. to “do whatever the hell it wants” with NATO countries that do not comply with the multilateral organization's defense budget, another of its favorite targets.
That last threat also came on a Saturday night, one of his favorite days of fury, at a rally somewhere in the United States.
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