When
Donald Trump became president, he quickly developed a favorite morning hobby. “I wake up early,” he revealed to me a few months into his tenure. “And if I don’t like what I see about myself on the TV screens in my bedroom, I pull out my phone in bed and tweet something that makes them all change to
BREAKING NEWS and a completely different story based on my tweet.” Then he burst out laughing. I did, too. There was something genuinely hilarious about the most powerful man on earth being able to manipulate the media so easily with just a casual flick of his fingers. But as a journalist, I also found it very dispiriting that the media was so willing to be manipulated in this way. Of course, we know why: ratings. The formula was very simple, for both TV networks and newspapers: Take a Trump tweet, massively exaggerate whatever he was saying, and BOOM — watch those ratings fly. This went on for four years and became an increasingly ludicrous game that suited both parties. Trump got his message out, and the liberal-partisan media got to gorge on how terrible he was for both the message and the way he conveyed it. Meanwhile, Trump’s supporters lapped up his media-bashing, as did liberal viewers addicted to consuming 24/7 Trump-bashing cable news. But none of this self-serving nonsense served the national interests of the
United States of America, or most Americans. And I genuinely hoped liberal media and politicians had learned their lesson from the Trump presidency years and would deal with him differently this time around now he’s won the GOP presidential nomination again. As comedian Chris Rock told me, the day after Trump’s win in 2016, when I asked him why he thought the real estate tycoon had triumphed: “If someone’s murdered eight people, don’t go around saying they’ve murdered nine.” In other words, judge Trump accurately and fairly, or deploy absurdly disingenuous exaggeration and surrender the high moral ground. Regretfully, they haven’t. Speaking in Ohio on Saturday , Trump said if he’s re-elected president, he intends to slap a 100% tariff on Chinese cars being manufactured in
Mexico and then imported to the US. And he warned: “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole, that’s gonna be the least of it, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the country, that’ll be the least of it.” I watched the whole extended clip back several times so I could assess what Trump meant, and there’s absolutely no doubt that he was referring to a bloodbath in America’s auto industry. That was the context of his comment, not anyone being killed. And the media, and his political opponents, knew it. But that didn’t stop them instantly pretending he’d meant there would be an actual violent bloodbath of people if he wasn’t re-elected. The Biden-Harris campaign issued a statement, branding Trump a “loser who gets beat by over 7 million votes and then instead of appealing to a wider mainstream audience, doubles down on his threats 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 affection for violence, and his thirst for revenge.”
Nancy Pelosi then told CNN: “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 much more do [American voters] have to see?… you wouldn’t even allow him in your house.” But Trump hadn’t threatened actual violence at all, and they all knew it. Incredibly, virulent anti-Trumpers like George Conway even tried to argue that it didn’t matter if he was referring to the auto industry. No, what mattered apparently was his use of “apocalyptic and violent language in an indiscriminate
fashion as a result of his psychopathy and correlative authoritarian tendencies.” This from a man, Conway, whose own relentlessly apocalyptic language about Trump is borderline psychopathic. All of this is wearily familiar. After Trump won in 2016, I lost count of how many times he was branded the “new Hitler!” by people on the left, despite the fact he self-evidently hasn’t murdered 12 million people. And they’re at it again now. Depressingly, we’re back into the same old cycle; Trump says something provocative or inflammatory, and the liberal media promptly goes nuts and wildly – and deliberately – misconstrues what he says. The only difference now is that X, formerly
Twitter, is owned by someone who won’t let them get away with it. MSNBC star Joe Scarborough posted a tweet saying, “Donald Trump’s America. And he’s proud of it. Promised another ‘bloodbath’ if he loses again.” But he deleted it after
Elon Musk replied: “Trump was referring to
Job losses in the auto industry when he used that word. Your post is extremely misleading.” Musk then posted the whole bloodbath clip, showing the context, and so far, it’s been viewed 60 million times! Trump, naturally, capitalized on the fall-out by saying: ‘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.’ He’s right — they did. And moreover, X users quickly reminded the world of all the times liberal anchors feigning outrage have used the word “bloodbath” on air, also without meaning human blood. As political scientist Ian Bremmer explained: ‘Exaggeration and misdirection from the media is self-damaging and counterproductive.’ Yes, it is, and the only bloodbath I can see happening in America right now is the left-wing media and political class once again having the entrails of their integrity and hypocrisy splattered all over
Social Media.