Bloodbath

Once again, Donald Trump’s purposeful ambiguity is wasting our time. Did he mean a literal bloodbath? Was it just his belief that electric cars won’t sell? Or his usual condemnation of another presidential term for Joe Biden.

Trump is talented at the double entendre. He may have developed this talent from his approaches to the opposite sex. He may have developed it from his role as a Mob boss – plausible deniability. Or he may just enjoy throwing ambiguous words out there and watching people try to parse them.

“Bloodbath,” of course, leans toward the ugly side of things, like, say, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”

At this point, why give him the benefit of the doubt? Why let him ramble into a murderous side to the ambiguity? Clyde Haberman, Maggie’s dad and former Timesman, isn’t having it.

The answer to my question is that to take the harsher interpretation every time, without explanation, erodes one’s credibility. But we might ask, every time, whether this latest outrage fits with Trump’s earlier crimes.

The words Trump produces are actually quite complex and layered. For example, does he say things to feed raw meat to his base or to outrage the libs? Or is outraging the libs part of what he’s giving to his base? A relatively simple answer is that it’s all those things. Fintan O’Toole nicely parses out some of it.

I would like to see our side spending less time trying to parse these ambiguous comments and recognize that Trump has declared that he would be a dictator from the first day, would put immigrants and others in camps and deport them and set up the Supreme Court to remove the right to appropriate health care from half the population.

He’s bad. Take the worst interpretation.