Trump defends his warning of a ‘carnage for the country’

Former President Donald J. Trump on Monday tried to defend his weekend statement that the country would face a “bloodbath” if he were to lose in November, saying — as his campaign had previously done — that he would only rely on automotive industry was aiming for. .

“The Fake News Media and their Democratic partners in the destruction of our nation pretended to be shocked by my use of the word BLOCKS, even though they fully understood that I was simply referring to imports allowed by Crooked Joe Biden, who was killing the automotive industry,” he wrote on his social media platform.

He made the comments Saturday in a speech in Ohio delivered on behalf of Bernie Moreno, whom he endorsed during Tuesday’s Republican Senate primaries. After promising to impose tariffs on cars produced outside the United States, he then said: “If I’m not elected, it will be a bloodbath for the whole – to say the least. It will be a bloodbath for the country.”

President Biden’s re-election campaign responded in a statement that Mr. Trump was “a loser who is defeated by more than seven million votes and then, instead of appealing to a broader mainstream audience, doubles down on his threats of political violence.”

In the same speech, Trump called migrants “animals” and “not people, in my opinion”; described people convicted in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as “hostages”; and suggested that American democracy would end if he lost. “I don’t think there will be another election, and certainly not one that is meaningful,” he said.

The next morning, Fox News aired an interview with Mr. Trump in which he repeated his previous claims that migrants were “poisoning the blood of the country.”

Trump followed up his social media post on Monday defending his comments with an all-caps message: “Our once great country is going down. We are a nation in decline! Vote for Trump, what the hell have you got to lose?”