Eddie Scarry of the Federalist assesses multiple legacy media outlets’ over-the-top reactions to the former president’s colorful choice of words.
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.
