Former President Donald Trump went a step further this Saturday in his violent rhetoric by predicting during a rally in Ohio that there will be a “bloodbath” in the United States if he is not elected in next November's elections. He also escalated his xenophobic discourse: he stated that undocumented immigrants “cannot be called people.”
Trump is, since last Tuesday and after mathematically securing the necessary delegates for his party's nomination, the Republican candidate for the White House, a race in which he faces President Joe Biden in a repeat of the duel between the two in 2020. Then, the tycoon refused to admit his defeat and was building the “big lie” that the elections were going to be stolen from him during the months prior to the appointment with the polls that led to the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Saturday's was one of his classic angry, disjointed and apocalyptic interventions, but not exactly a rally. He was in Ohio to support Bernie Moreno's Senate candidacy for that Midwestern State. Trump took the microphone and launched into a litany in which he criticized the electric car industry that he manufactures outside the country. He also wanted to turn around one of his opponent's favorite arguments, who usually warns that a Trump victory would be a “threat to democracy,” by stating that if he loses at the polls in November, it will disappear forever in the United States. . “If we don't win, I don't think you're going to have another election in this country,” he told attendees.
Although the headlines were taken by something he had not said until now: “If I am not elected, it will be a bloodbath for everyone… that (losing the elections) will be the least of it, because there will be a bloodbath,” he insisted. . He did not give any further explanation for that threat, but soon his campaign began trying to deny that his candidate was invoking violence. He was actually referring, a spokesman said, to the auto industry. Elsewhere in his speech on Saturday, Trump promised to impose “a 100% tariff” on foreign-made electric cars.
The former president is accused of having tried to reverse the electoral results from four years ago and having instigated the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. During his speech in Ohio, the Republican described those arrested and detained as “hostages,” as is his custom. imprisoned for attacking Congress after his rally in Washington, in which he urged the masses to do so. He promised again, it's classic rallies of his, that he will pardon them if he returns to the White House.
As in the campaign that made him president in 2016, one of the favorite targets of his bitter rhetoric this time is undocumented immigrants trying to enter the United States through the border with Mexico. Lately he does not hesitate to call them “criminals”, and says, without evidence, that they come straight from “prisons, asylums and mental asylums”.
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Among other controversial statements, the Republican has promised to be a “dictator” on the first day of his term and suggested that he would encourage Russia to attack NATO countries that do not meet defense spending quotas.
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