Donald Trump — the former and possibly future president of the United States — is notoriously sloppy with words and reckless in his mob-boss allusions. So what are we to make of his blood-curdling, throwaway lines Wednesday night in a speech in Clinton Township?
After telling his audience what a successful businessman he was before his political career, Trump said: “I’ve risked it all to defend the working class from the corrupt political class that has spent decades sucking the life, wealth, and blood out of this country.”
Amid a United Auto Workers strike growing in intensity, Trump said he was in town at a non-union parts manufacturing warehouse in Macomb County called Drake Enterprises to bring “a revival of economic nationalism and our automobile factories, a lifeblood which they are sucking out of the country.”
Referring to former President Barack Obama and to current President Joe Biden and to their foreign economic treaties, Trump said “‘Crooked Joe’ backed every single, bloodsucking globalist attack on U.S. auto workers.”
And, after the speech, Trump shifted his underlying motif for the night to a question about immigration in an interview with the right-wing television network Newsmax.
“It’s killing our country,” Trump said. “They’re destroying the blood of our country.”
Needless to say, the word “blood” — and especially the phrase “blood-sucking” — creates powerful images in the mind. Phrases that come to mind include “blood and soil” and “blood libel.”
Would a respectable presidential candidate accidentally throw around a phrase like “blood-sucking globalist?” Look it up, kids, in the Google box, and type alongside it the word “trope.”
Trump’s visit came one day after a short stop by Biden to a picket line in Belleville in western Wayne County. His trip also occurred on the same night of the Republican presidential debate in California, the second one Trump has avoided because he is leading by far in the polls.
Trump also avoided picket lines Wednesday. After telling UAW leaders to endorse him, he expressed surprise in his post-speech interview to learn that UAW President Shawn Fain — who met at length with Biden on Tuesday — did not care to talk to Trump on Wednesday.
“I didn’t know that,” Trump said. “If he didn’t want to meet with me, then I don’t like him very much. That’s foolish not to meet. What is he going to do, meet with Biden? The man doesn’t know he’s alive.”
Trump’s ridicule of Biden’s age and health was a major theme of his speech, which lasted about one hour. He called Biden a “wretched old vulture.” But, also important to the speech was what Trump left out.
Now that he has been indicted for multiple felonies in four venues and warned in several legal hearings, Trump appeared to be biting his forked tongue when it came to his legal cases.
In a change of his usual style, he didn’t attack by name any prosecutors or judges or witnesses, even by implication. Strange how he can measure his words when he wants to. One prison allusion was brief.
“I’m fighting for my freedom,” he said, late in the speech, “against the forces of evil.” Later, he joked off-the-cuff: “Now, I get indicted, like, every three days.”
In a vague way, he alluded to how prosecution of a political candidate like himself “sets off a chain of events that could be dangerous in future years.”
This seemed to imply he would “weaponize” his Justice Department against Democrats the way he insists that Democrats have done so to him.
He also went light with his usual whining allegations that the 2020 election was stolen from him, when he lost Michigan and the Electoral College to Biden.
But Trump did his best to divide and scare people with word-bombs like “horrible, ridiculous . . . radical left Marxists, fascists, crazy people . . . environmental lunatics . . . left wing crazies . . .”
He said the people who own auto companies are “either stupid or they’re gutless” because they allow the federal government to push the transition from gasoline to electric power in cars. He repeatedly said that electric vehicles would eliminate jobs for American auto workers.
He kept going back to violent imagery.
“The auto industry is being assassinated,” Trump said. “It’s a hit job on Michigan and on Detroit.”
He threw scraps of red meat on non-auto issues by speaking against public schools and transgender people.
That made him for “school choice,” Trump said, and against “sexual mutilation of children.”
All this from the same large, loud, orange-faced, yellow-haired demagogue who fancied buying a gun this week but thought better of it because he is under felony indictment and that would be a crime.
On Wednesday, outside Drake Enterprises on Gratiot Avenue, Trump fans waved “Take America Back” flags and yellow Gadsden flags and flags that showed Trump’s face over an assault rifle.
Just before he took the stage, Trump sent out an email blast that was almost poetic in its dark rhythm.
It said:
“Our country is dying
Our people are suffering
Our border is collapsing
Our world is in chaos.”
Inside the auto parts place, they chanted their own menacing tempo.
“Trump! Trump! Trump!” they said. “Trump! Trump! Trump!”
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