Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. But if it involves Donald Trump, the news media for various reasons insist it’s definitely a penis.
We’re in the middle of another round of gravely serious media analysis about what Trump meant when he said something in public, this time that there would be a “bloodbath” if he didn’t win the election. Anyone who saw the remarks at a campaign rally Saturday in Ohio knew Trump was talking about the economic fallout of a second Biden term. But Washington journalists and commentators, equal parts lazy and dishonest, have spent the days since attributing every other hysterical meaning they can dream up.
The unintentionally funniest was NBC News’s “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss, who with great originality drew a direct link between Trump and the Holocaust.
“When he uses the word ‘bloodbath,’ yes, it was in the context of an automobile industry speech,” he said Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning. Joe.” “But he knew exactly what he was saying.”
Beschloss went on to say that what Trump meant was the opposite of what he actually said: “A major-party candidate is saying, ‘You elect me, there’s going to be dictatorship, bloodbath, violence, retribution against my political enemies’ that equals what we saw in Germany and Italy and other places.”
So, by Trump saying, “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath,” what he really meant was that if he does get elected, there will be violence. Fascinating. (By “fascinating,” I do mean Beschloss is a deceitful dope.)
This is a plot corporate media have been pushing for nearly a decade: that everything Trump says comes with innuendo and it’s always, always, always nefarious.
The New York Times in December 2015 ran an article headlined, “95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump’s Tongue.” Reporters Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman, with no discernible sense of embarrassment, declared they had “analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump” over one week and found “several powerful patterns, demonstrating how Mr. Trump has built one of the most surprising political movements in decades and, historians say, echoing the appeals of some demagogues of the past century.”
To fully grasp the severity and magnitude of the matter at hand, the Times noted that among Trump’s “most frequently used words is ‘guy.’”
In 2019, CNN’s bespectacled geek Daniel Dale similarly bragged that he had “fact-checked every word Trump has uttered since his inauguration.” (Ladies, calm down. There’s enough of Daniel to go around.) His stunning conclusion: “I can tell you that if this president relays an anecdote in which he has someone referring to him as ‘sir,’” he wrote, “then some major component of the anecdote is very likely to be wrong.”
Democracy, saved.
Yes, we’re still doing this. Just on Sunday, Politico ran an exhausting article about people who find Trump funny. Naturally, it wasn’t to acknowledge the former president as an engaging speaker, but, again, to describe him as an existential threat. “Trump is not Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini,” wrote Michael Kruse. “But they share a rhetorical style, experts say.”
Well, if there’s one thing we know about “experts,” it’s that if they say it, who are we to say otherwise? Now close your eyes and do your part to flatten the curve. It’s just 15 days. This will only hurt for a second…
The media have been pseudo-analyzing Trump to impart dark meaning to his every word forever. But sometimes, a bloodbath is, sadly, just a tired metaphor.
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