Timothy Snyder considers “The Bloodbath Candidate”
Consider:
- Ordinary people tortured and executed “heretics” in Spain by the thousands.
- Ordinary people burned tens of thousands of “witches” in Europe and tried and hung them in New England.
- Ordinary people slaughtered several hundred women, children, and elderly Native Americans at Sand Creek, Colo. and committed atrocities against the dead.
- Ordinary people deported, executed, and starved a million or so Armenians.
- Ordinary people starved millions of Ukrainians.
- Ordinary people incinerated prisoners in Third Reich camps we still make movies about.
- Ordinary people murdered between 1.5 and 3 million others in Cambodia.
- Ordinary people killed close to one million of their neighbors in Rwanda with machetes and rifles.
- Ordinary people systematically massacred about 8,000 of their neighbors and Bosnia.
- Ordinary people murdered and raped Israeli villagers on Oct. 7, 2023.
- Ordinary people responded by leveling cities and starving children.
- Ordinary people attend rallies where their leader “confers martyrdom upon criminals who try to overthrow a democracy they associated with subhumans.”
- Ordinary people live next door.
In “The Bloodbath Candidate,” Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” analyzes Donald “91 Counts” Trump promising in Ohio last Saturday there would be a “bloodbath for the country” if he’s not elected:
The Vandalia rally began with a brazen celebration of the convicted criminals who took part in Trump’s failed coup attempt. Those present were instructed to “please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages.” The reference was to convicts serving time for attempting to overturn the results of the last presidential election and thereby overthrow the American form of government.
The phrase “horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages,” booming over the loudspeaker, was substituted here for the call to rise to the flag or the national anthem. The people who tried to overthrow the Constitution were inserted where a pledge to American values would ordinarily be. Americans were being asked to honor violence in the service of overthrowing the American system.
This Gesamtkunstwerk was designed to bring people into a sense of unity with the perpetrators of the January 6th crimes. As a chorus of convicted criminals sang over video, people rose and then joined in song. They put their hands on their hearts. Along with the coup convicts, those who attended the rally performed a perforated version of the national anthem. In so doing, they joined a virtual community of violence.
The singing was interwoven with a recording of Trump reciting the pledge of allegiance, as though he were the only American who mattered. Baseball cap still on head, Trump saluted a recording of himself. Both of these details, too, are mockeries of patriotic performance. Trump has no right to salute at that moment. Not removing the cap means that he, and he alone, is above it all — the martyr in chief, the most “horribly and unfairly treated.”
Will Bunch in his Tuesday Philadelphia Inquirer newsletter wrote, “Trump’s literal salute” in song “to those willing to commit violence on behalf of his MAGA movement — both the arrestees he now calls ‘hostages’ and the slain rioter Ashli Babbitt, hailed by the ex-president as a martyr” echoes the “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” or “The Horst Wessel Song.” The tune celebrating a fallen brownshirt became a Nazi anthem. “It was even played in churches as Goebbels forged his own version of Christian nationalism.”
Keep an eye out for that happening soon, willya?
Trump apologists explain away Trump’s bloodbath remark as a metaphor. He was talking about the auto industry and was taken out of context. But, Snyder explains, the entire rally is context. “In this sense Trump’s defenders are the one who are taking Trump’s remarks out of context.” In full context, Trump is worse.
Calling convicted, imprisoned insurrectionists “unbelievable patriots” and “hostages” he pledges to pardon is context.
“That is perhaps the most essential element of context to Trump’s later reference to a bloodbath,” Snyder explains. “He has already made clear, in a the collective performance, that violent insurrection is the best form of politics. Well before he actually used the word, he had instructed his audience that bloodbaths are the right form of politics” when done in his name.
For which (like Wessel) they would be remembered, celebrated, and forgiven.
Trump’s speeches are suffused with grievance justifying law-breaking. The Big Lie takes center stage. He invoked it nine times by Snyder’s count.
The fascist-style martyrdom cult justifies violence, in two ways. It makes a hero of criminals, thereby making criminality exemplary. And it establishes prior innocence — we suffered first, and therefore anything we do to make others suffer will always be justified. The Nazis sang their Horst Wessel Song as they conquered countries and killed millions.
In another way, Trump’s Vandalia speech also summoned up the fascist historical context. For fascists, political opponents are enemies because they are animals or are associated with animals. The border theme in Trump’s campaign is meant to link the Biden administration to violent subhumans. In the Vandalia speech, Trump called migrants animals, snakes, and monsters.
“I don’t know if you call them people,” Trump said, speaking of jailed Mexican gang members. “These are animals.”
Trump told his Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Just a rhetorical flourish? What happened next?
Snyder insists:
Trump is calling for a bloodbath in front of people who stood to honor bloodshed. People who have just sung with coup criminals. People whom he implicitly promises he will pardon if they carry out another insurrection. And he is doing this in the fascist style of telling a big lie that confers martyrdom upon criminals who try to overthrow a democracy they associated with subhumans.
We should see Trump for what he is: an aspiring fascist who likes, wants, and needs violence. But we need not fear him or his plans. There were not that many people assembled in Vandalia, and their reactions to Trump’s rhetoric were muted. Some left before he was done. Although Trump himself has (absurdly) escaped punishment for his attempted coup, the foot soldiers of the last insurrection are in prison. Trump won’t actually be able to pardon anyone this fall.
In coaching his followers towards a November 2024 insurrection, Trump is telling them (and us) that he doesn’t really plan to win the election. As he did in 2016, as he did in 2020, he is telling us that the vote count does not decide the issue for him. He wants to get close enough in the tally to make some kind of a play. But the vote count will matter to the rest of us. If the election is not close, it will matter even to his followers.
On that last part, I’m not so sure.
MAGAstan is a place where facts don’t matter, where the only reality is one Trump specifies, in which white, Christian males (and oligarchs like Trump) rule atop the social ladder, and all others know their place. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, and by a wider margin in 2020. When he lost the 2020 election, his followers rioted and sacked the U.S. Capitol. The vote was rigged. The machines were rigged. Bamboo ballot paper came from China. Election officials double-counted votes and fabricated others. Ineligible “illegals” voted and handed the win to Joe Biden, etc. Trump is selling the Big Lie still. It’s part of the MAGA catechism.
Trump is hemorrhaging support and cracking under the financial and legal pressures he’s brought on himself. That’s the bloodbath he fears most and for which he swears the retribution of Real Americans™, the ordinary people in his cult. Though likely fewer by the time the election rolls around, they won’t go quietly into that good night. “He’s the bloodbath candidate,” says Snyder, and he’s advertising it.
Update: More “ordinary people.”
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