SKILLS: The professor got way out over his skis!

FRIDAY, MARCH 22, 2024

The candidate feeds on such meat: Briefly, let's recall the basic facts which were established in yesterday's report.

Last Saturday, Donald J. Trump made an array of familiar yet very strange claims during his campaign rally in Vidalia, Ohio:

At the start of his endless address, the candidate referred to prisoners who have been convicted of violent attacks against police officers as a group of "hostages." 

As he continued, he claimed, on nine occasions, that the 2020 presidential election was "crooked," "fake" or "rigged."

All praise goes to Timothy Snyder for recording these peculiar statements in this March 19 essay at Substack. Yesterday, the editorial board of the Washington Post listed other things the candidate said that day which they regard as beyond the pale.

Full disclosure:

As we noted yesterday, Trump has been saying that the 2020 election was rigged for well over three years now. He has never presented anything like a white paper offering evidence for this inflammatory claim.

One analysis after another has concluded that this remarkable claim is a fantasy—a dreamscape invented by Trump. And yet, our own blue tribe has never been able to convince the bulk of Trump supporters of this apparent fact.

What explains our blue tribe's inability to persuade so many voters? On this morning's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough aggressively said that he still can't understand the way "these people" think.

If we were being paid millions of dollars to go on TV as a political analyst, we would regard that as a confession that we were being overpaid. Such thoughts don't seem to enter the mind of major cable news stars as current journalistic arrangements create two warring Americas, Red and Blue, and never the twain shall meet.

At any rate, Candidate Trump had started his speech with those peculiar statements and claims.  Thirty-three minutes into his address, he did something new:

Fleetingly, the candidate uttered the word "bloodbath." In fact, he uttered the word two times.

He did so as part of a crowd-pleasing soliloquy—a soliloquy in which he discussed certain aspects of the auto industry for a bit less than four minutes. After that, it happened again:

Acyn Torabi posted a 20-word excerpt from that soliloquy. With that, our blue tribe pundit corps was off to the races again.

Let's return to one basic fact about the candidate's speech in Vidalia.  As you can see from the C-Span videotape, Trump's discussion of the auto industry lasted roughly three minutes and 35 seconds. 

It starts around the 33-minute mark of the tape. As you can see, he switches to a different topic (U.S. Steel) almost four minutes later.

It was in the midst of that discussion of the auto industry that the word "bloodbath" appears.

Trump spoke for three minutes and 35 seconds about the auto industry—unless you were watching Ali Velshi this past Tuesday night! If you were watching Velshi, you were told something different.

 Velshi was serving as guest host on MSNBC's 9 p.m. program, Alex Wagner Tonight. In his opening segment, he introduced Professor Snyder as his lone guest, and he was soon saying this:

VELSHI (3/19/24): Joining us now is the Yale historian, Professor Tim Snyder...Thank you for being here in person.

This is a remarkable conversation because people have spent the past couple of days saying he was just talking about the cars. 

I'm an economics reporter. We've not used that term, "bloodbath," about cars.

But what you wrote about is the context.  It's not just whether he said that sentence about cars. It's everything else he said in the speech, starting with the salute of the hostages.

Say what? "It's not just whether he said that sentence about cars?"

Had Donald J. Trump said just one sentence about cars? At this point, Velshi's meaning wasn't clear, but soon he was saying this:

VELSHI: You write [at Substack], "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." 

You lay out, in your article, the pattern of that speech. All of that was done before he brought up cars for one sentence and then went back to violence.

In fact, Trump had spoken about cars for almost four minutes. Unless you were watching Velshi, in which case you were now being told that he "brought up cars for one sentence," then went back to violence.

It seemed to us, as we watched that night, that Velshi's presentation was at best highly misleading. In fairness, Professor Snyder had said something similar in his Substack essay:

SNYDER (3/19/24): Yes, Trump spoke for a moment about cars.  He was saying that we should elect him so that he can put tariffs on Chinese cars.  At this point he is presumably still on script.  And then he starts to say that it will be bad for the auto industry if he is not elected.  He never quite gets to that, since in the middle of the sentence he has another idea. 

Trump "spoke for a moment about cars?" In fact, he "spoke about cars" for almost four minutes, with the "bloodbath" remark coming midway through. 

Meanwhile, were people simply being "specious" if they said that Trump had been speaking about an automotive bloodbath?  In the passage we just posted, Velshi quoted Snyder making that sweeping assessment.

Meanwhile, here's the fuller chunk from the part of Snyder's essay which we just posted:

SNYDER: [E]ven if we knew nothing about the history of political violence, or about Trump, or about the rest of his appearance in Vandalia, the meaning of "bloodbath for the country" would still be absolutely clear to anyone who listened to him.  Even if we play the bad-faith syntactical game that his defenders want us to play, there is really no doubt that he was talking about a bloodbath when he spoke of a bloodbath.

Yes, Trump spoke for a moment about cars.  He was saying that we should elect him so that he can put tariffs on Chinese cars...

According to Snyder, Trump's meaning would be "absolutely clear" to anyone who watched what he said. There was "really no doubt" about what Trump meant when he used the term "bloodbath."

According to the all-knowing professor, people who offered a different assessment were simply being specious. Such people had engaged in bad faith, or so the professor said.

Professor Snyder is worried about the possibility of a second term for Trump. In our view, there's no reason why he shouldn't be worried—and the professor is generally understood to be a leading expert about the way autocracies can take shape.

Professor Snyder is generally understood to be a leading expert about the history of such development. That doesn't mean that he has sound political judgment, or that he can keep his larger political views from infecting his transitory judgments. 

Consider:

In that editorial by the Washington Post, the editors say that Candidate Trump was in fact talking about an automotive bloodbath:

("He was talking—hyperbolically—about the potential impact on U.S. jobs of imported automobiles, not political violence.")

In this earlier post, Kevin Drum had reached a similar conclusion:

("Many news outlets reported that Trump had threatened a 'bloodbath' if he's not elected. But if you listen to his remarks, he's talking about a bloodbath in the US auto industry unless he's elected and places high tariffs on Chinese cars.")

Our own best guess was somewhat different. Still and all, riddle us this:

Were the editors merely being specious when they said what they said? Was Drum acting in bad faith when he voiced his assessment?

In our view, Professor Snyder was way out over his skis as he made his sweeping claims. Meanwhile, let's return to one other thing Velshi sweepingly said.

"I'm an economics reporter," Velshi told Snyder that night. "We've not used that term, 'bloodbath,' about cars."

So the blue tribe cable star said, apparently speaking for an entire guild. Earlier, though, we ourselves had been surprised when we checked standard dictionary treatments of the newly exciting term. 

Here. for example, is the way Merriam-Webster presents the term in question:

bloodbath noun

1: a great slaughter

2 a: a notably fierce, violent, or destructive contest or struggle

the campaign has become a bloodbath

b: a major economic disaster

a market bloodbath

We were surprised to see that many dictionaries list "bloodbath" as a term which is routinely used in the context of market meltdowns. Velshi seemed to be assuring us of something different, and it looks like Velshi was wrong.

Why has our own blue tribe had so much trouble persuading Trump voters? In part, it's because of presentations like these, in which blue tribe stars offer accounts of Trump's behavior which are plainly misleading, highly subjective, or sometimes just flat-out wrong.

There are many examples of blue tribe reinventions. This very morning, red tribe viewers were reminded of an example from 2021 on Fox & Friends—a debunked example which has popped up in the discourse again.

In the case now under review, a highly regarded Yale professor was telling the world that anyone who disagreed with his assessment was being specious—was acting in bad faith. Meanwhile, he and Velshi seemed to be fudging certain facts in line with preferred assessments. 

A blue tribe host was telling us that Trump "brought up cars for one sentence and then went back to violence."

On its face, that statement was simply inaccurate. In our view, Snyder's statements were often spectacularly unintelligent. He's a highly respected historian, but his judgment in matters like this may not be especially strong. 

That said, our tribe has followed these people down the primrose path over the course of a great many years. Back in December, we saw how skilled these people may turn out to be when three elite college professors got left for dead, in embarrassing fashion, by an undisguised demagogue named Elise Stefanik, with Professor Tribe rushing out to say that Stefanik had been right.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Our tribe is very self-impressed, but we're nowhere near as impressive as we're inclined to say and believe.

Last Saturday, Acyn played his standard game. When he did, our blue tribe was off to the races again.

By Tuesday night, our tribe was already taking a bit of beating about the way we'd jumped to an instant analysis about Trump's "bloodbath" remark.

Quite possibly, this latest Acyn-inspired stampede had become a loser for our side by that point. And then, up jumped the guest host and the highly regarded professor with a highly slanted account of what Trump had said and what he had plainly meant.

We've offered our own best guess about Trump's "bloodbath" remark. We'll guess that he likes to drop such terms into the stew to provoke these outbursts from our tribe—outbursts which work in his favor. 

By now, we've seen three different people on Fox who have voiced a similar view. Is that what Trump was doing when he dropped "bloodbath" into the soliloquy about car lats in Mexico?

There's no way to know such things for sure, Professor Snyder's astounding degree of certainty notwithstanding.

Snyder is a highly erudite historian. Like everyone else, he's also just a person.

In his essay and then on the air, some of his claims were unintelligent in the extreme. The stars at Fox feed on such meat.

So does Candidate Trump!

Full disclosure: We often think of what Hector said: "Sacred Troy must die."

(Hector's sister was Cassandra. She'd been given the gift of prophecy, along with a famous curse.)