Why Is It Necessary to Lie about Donald Trump?

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

 

Donald Trump routinely provides plenty of fodder for his critics, raising the question of why they still feel compelled to lie about him.

 

Take his now-famous rally in Ohio last weekend. He saluted the anthem of the J6 choir at the outset and then called the imprisoned J6 rioters “hostages” and promised to pardon them.

 

That, together with his frequent references to the 2020 election being stolen, would seem perfectly adequate material to catalyze several news cycles of outrage, and understandably so.

 

But no, sticking to what was unambiguously said and meant wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. As we all know, the press and hostile commentators had to insist that Trump had directly threatened political violence by referring to a “bloodbath” if he doesn’t win election in 2024.

 

It’s one thing to initially see a misleadingly edited clip of Trump’s speech and conclude that he was literally promising blood in the streets, and another to be aware of the context and blow right through it anyway.

 

To take just one prominent example: Joe Scarborough passionately declared the other day that “bloodbath” meant literal bloodbath, context notwithstanding. The key tell for him was that Trump said “that’s going to be the least of it.” That’s a fairly obvious reference to there being other economic and policy disasters in a Biden second term. But Scarborough believes that even if Trump meant a metaphorical bloodbath in reference to the auto industry, he meant a literal bloodbath in reference to everything else.

 

This is terrible exegesis, but his panel earnestly agreed. “There’s no need to parse this,” said Ed Luce of the Financial Times.

 

So why does this happen? Why can’t Trump’s enemies hew to truthful critiques of him?

 

Part of it is sheer partisanship. The Biden operation pushed out the idea that Trump was promising violence, and a lot of commentators were going to go along no matter what. Then, there’s the dopamine rush of new Trump outrages. He had called the J6 prisoners hostages before, so that didn’t rate anymore. It had to be something new, worse, and more exciting, something pleasingly apocalyptic, something that makes for grim-faced alarm on cable TV and self-righteous rants.

 

More fundamentally, there is a belief among Trump’s haters that he must be a Nazi, and everything that can be used to portray him as one is fair game — indeed, fully justified.

 

Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian who wrote a best-selling book on America becoming an autocracy under Trump, argues that we shouldn’t let the context distract from the fascist narrative about Trump.

 

“Focusing on the cars,” he writes on his Substack, “has the effect of casting away the fascist overture and rest of the speech, and all of the other contexts. Those who speciously insist that Trump had in mind an automotive bloodbath never mention that he had just celebrated criminals, repeated the big lie, dehumanized people, and followed fascist patterns.”

 

There you go, “bloodbath” is fake but accurate; technical accuracy is unhelpful to driving the larger message about Trump.

 

This is the kind of thing, when it doesn’t serve an approved narrative, that is condemned as “disinformation.”

 

Norm Eisen and Ruth Ben-Ghiat made much the same argument in a piece for MSNBC — the context is Trump’s authoritarianism, so please don’t bother us with the prattle about cars.

 

The ever-thoughtful Amanda Marcotte wrote a piece headlined, “Trump’s call for a ‘bloodbath’ was literal — let’s not waste time pretending it was ambiguous.”

 

She threw in Trump’s supposed dehumanization of immigrants as part of her fascist bill of particulars: “He also underscored the fascist ideology he was espousing by declaring that immigrants are ‘not people,’ and sneering, ‘But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.’ One doesn’t need a doctorate in history to recognize this blunt dehumanization is typically used to justify genocide and hate crimes. Frankly, most people who stoke racist violence tend to be more subtle than Trump with the dehumanizing rhetoric.”

 

Never mind that Trump was talking about hypothetical MS-13 gang members jailed in foreign countries, context that has been left out of every news report and piece of commentary, as far as I can tell. This may already be one that has been repeated so often that many people may simply be unaware of the context — not that it matters when there’s a narrative to serve.

 

If Trump is a Nazi, he must be portrayed as saying Nazi things. The truth, of course, is that sometimes overheated rhetoric about what will happen to the automotive industry is just overheated rhetoric about what will happen to the automotive industry.

 

As has been observed many times, “bloodbathgate” and similar episodes hurt rather than help the anti-Trump case. His enemies still seem not to know or to care that, by so plainly distorting Trump’s meaning, they discredit themselves and legitimate criticisms of him.

 

That’s the instrumental case against what they are doing. The more fundamental one is that the truth should matter, even when commenting on Donald Trump.