At a rally near Dayton, Ohio on Saturday, Donald Trump told an audience full of rabid Republicans: “If I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath. That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”
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His disturbing words were in support of Bernie Moreno, whom he endorsed in the Republican Senate primary.
Following the imminent backlash, Trump did his best to walk back what he said on his social media platform. “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,” he wrote, “Even though they fully understood that I was simply referring to imports allowed by Crooked Joe Biden, which are killing the automobile industry.”
During that same Ohio rally, Trump also called immigrants “animals” and “not people, in my opinion.” He claimed that those who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were “hostages” and that democracy is over if he doesn’t win.
“I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful,” he exclaimed.
Fear-mongering has been a strategy for Trump since he started his run for president, but he was literally out for blood when he bought newspaper ads back in 1989 that called for New York State to adopt the death penalty following the arrests of the Central Park 5.
The five black and Latino teens were wrongly convicted of rape and ultimately exonerated, though Trump never apologized for his crusade against them. In 2017, deadly violence occurred at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. A woman died after a driver rammed his vehicle into counter-protesters. “There was blame on both sides,” Trump remarked in regards to the woman’s death. He also said that there were “very fine people on both sides” regarding the same rally.
During his first presidential run, Trump said he would pay the legal fees of supporters who attacked protesters at his rallies. He incited the violence that occurred on Jan. 6 and still refers those perpetrators as victims who were merely upholding American values.
Trump has also stated that shoplifters should be shot, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves execution and that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. But the walls may finally be closing in on Trump, as his former adviser Peter Navarro surrendered Tuesday at a federal Bureau of Prisons after being convicted of contempt of Congress.
Trump’s property may be seized if he can’t cough up the $454 million he owes in civil fraud debt and is still facing 91 criminal charges. Somehow, he remains the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination while using violent rhetoric to keep his opposition at bay.
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