The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: hoax
George Conway

Conway: When Trump Threatens America With A Bloodbath, It's No 'Hoax'

Donald Trump and his allies devoted the bulk of their energy Monday to cleaning up his promise during a weekend rally that if he doesn't win the presidency in November, "it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country."

Trump made the remark—which has attracted a gusher of scrutiny—while stumping for Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno on Saturday in Dayton, Ohio. Trump had been discussing the auto industry, but when he got to the gory “bloodbath” line, he hammered it repeatedly as the notion that the auto industry would flounder if he lost in November receded into the background.

“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," Trump said, adding, "But they're not going to sell those cars."

In other words, it was a classic Trump conflation of themes, obscuring his true intent.

The media, which usually misses the big picture on all things Trump, took his comments both literally and seriously.

One New York Times headline said Trump "Predicts a 'Blood Bath' if He Loses."

Trump allies, no doubt realizing the damage done by the viral comments, began referring to mainstream coverage as the "bloodbath hoax." Trump also took to Truth Social, his social media platform, with a series of posts and reposts claiming he was merely talking about cars and that the "Fake News Media" was taking him out of context.

But the most pertinent context came via George Conway, a noted anti-Trumper and soon-to-be ex-husband of Trump ally Kellyanne Conway. He tweeted out a thread that included this observation: "I’m willing to assume for the sake of argument that he was referring to cars. And it makes no difference to his malicious intent or to the danger he and his rhetoric poses.

"What matters," Conway continued, "is that he consistently uses apocalyptic and violent language in an indiscriminate fashion as a result of his psychopathy and correlative authoritarian tendencies, and because he’s just plain evil."

Trump famously kicked off his presidency in 2017 with an inaugural address decrying "American carnage." And during his 2024 bid, he has already leaned heavily into envisioning the catastrophic aftermath for the country if he loses, promising an economic crash "like you wouldn't believe" and bedlam in the country if his criminal indictments kneecap his electoral chances.

Trump is willing chaos and violence into existence if he loses precisely because he needs that apocalyptic threat to assert that he alone can fix it.

Indeed, later in Trump's weekend rally, he forewarned, “If this election isn’t won, I’m not sure that you’ll ever have another election in this country.”

When Trump says “bloodbath,” it's because he's out for blood, plain and simple. The apocalyptic promise of violence and carnage is essential to his pitch, a self-fulfilling prophecy spoken into action.

As MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said Monday, "We are not stupid. Americans aren't stupid. [Trump] was talking about a bloodbath. Sometimes a bloodbath means a bloodbath. And when he finishes by saying, 'That's just going to be the least of it.' Seriously … we're not stupid."

The Biden campaign got the contextualization right, dropping a new ad Monday afternoon reprising Trump's entire body of work.

The spot opened on Trump's weekend remarks, then took viewers through a tour of Trump's greatest end-of-times hits, including his 2017 reference to the Charlottesville neo-Nazi marchers as "very fine people," his 2020 order to the white nationalist Proud Boys to "stand by," and his unabashed glorification of the Jan. 6 rioters.

That's the context, folks. When Trump promises a bloodbath for the country, he means it.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

The Huckster Populist

The Huckster Populist

The tectonic plates of American politics are no longer moving along the old fault lines of “left vs. right” or even Democrat versus Republican.

As we’ve seen this bizarre political year, the biggest force welling up is rage against insider elites in both parties and against the American establishment as a whole — including the denizens of Wall Street, large corporations and the mainstream media.

Now, with Bernie Sanders essentially out of the race, Donald Trump wants Americans to believe he’s the remaining anti-establishment candidate.

It’s smart politics, but it’s a hoax.

Trump is even more of an establishment figure than Hillary Clinton — inheriting a fortune from his father, spending years bribing politicians to subsidize his hotels and casinos, and repeatedly using bankruptcy to shield his money while leaving creditors and workers holding the bag.

But Trump is also a brilliant huckster who knows his mark.

“There is one thing that Bernie Sanders and I are in complete accord with and that’s trade,” Trump said last week. “[Sanders] said we’re being ripped off, and I say with being ripped off. I’ve been saying it for years, he’s been saying it for years. I think I am saying it even louder. … Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very wealthy. But it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.”

By putting opposition to trade at the center of his economic agenda, Trump gets a twofer — landing blows against big American corporations and Wall Street, and also against the Clintons. (He traces America’s economic problems to the North American Free Trade Agreement that Bill Clinton signed in 1993 and to the entry of China into the World Trade Organization, which Bill Clinton supported, and says Hillary Clinton “voted for virtually every trade agreement.”)

It’s pure demagoguery. Trade isn’t to blame for the declining wages and job security of most Americans.

The real problem has been the unwillingness of the biggest beneficiaries of trade (and also of job-displacing technologies) to share the gains with the rest of America through larger wage subsidies, stronger safety nets, better schools and easier access to higher education. Trump’s Republican Party has been the main culprit.

Trump has vowed to withdraw from the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership — “another disaster done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country,” he said recently — which Hillary Clinton praised in 2012 as “set[ting] the gold standard in trade agreements” before later reversing herself after Sanders came out strongly against it.

Too bad Clinton delegates on the Democratic Party’s platform committee muddied the waters last week by voting down a proposal by Sanders delegates to put the party on record as opposing the TPP, noting instead that “there are a diversity of views in the party” on this matter.

The central problem with the TPP is it would penalize member nations for raising health, safety, environmental and labor standards. But this aspect of the TPP doesn’t trouble Trump, who calls America “overregulated.”

Trump’s faux populism extends to “powerful corporations, media elites and powerful dynasties,” who, he said last week in Pennsylvania, again echoing Sanders, have “rigged the system for their benefit [and] will do anything and say anything to keep things exactly as they are.”

Unwittingly, the GOP establishment seems intent on proving Trump’s point. Mitt Romney condemns him, conservative media pundit George Will is deserting the Republican Party because of him, big business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers blast him, Republican mega-donors like Paul Singer rebuke him, and Wall Street Republicans such as former Goldman Sachs CEO and George W. Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (who initiated the Wall Street bailout) announce they’re voting for Hillary Clinton.

“It’s almost, in some ways, like I’m running against two parties,” Trump crowed recently. He has also said, “The people who rigged the system are supporting Hillary Clinton.”

It’s all an act. The real Donald Trump thinks U.S. wages are too high and has fought against the unionization of his hotel employees.

His businesses outsource abroad like mad. Most of the suits, ties and cufflinks he peddles are made in China. His luxury line of furniture comes from Turkey. The crystal for his Trump Home line is produced in Slovenia.

And the real Trump is on the side of the super-wealthy. He proposes to cut taxes on the rich from 39.6 percent to 25 percent, and to reduce taxes on all business income to 15 percent (thereby slashing the top tax rate of hedge fund and private-equity managers from the current 23.8 percent).

The real Trump isn’t a populist. He’s a plutocrat. Above all, he’s a con man. And the people being conned are average working Americans who are buying Trump’s ruse of being a man of the people.

Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. His new book, “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few,” is now in bookstores. His film “Inequality for All” is now available on iTunes and Amazon streaming.

(c) 2016 By Robert Reich; Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, Colorado, U.S., July 1, 2016. REUTERS/Rick Wilking