Do aspiring rightwing dictators mean "bloodbath" when they say "bloodbath"?

Josh Marshall offers some good advice to people on the left who have been hemming-and-hawing about whether Donald Trump’s “bloodbath” threat was a threat of a bloodbath:

If you’ve followed the uproar over ex-President Trump’s promise of a “bloodbath” if he’s not elected you’ll see it’s partly been diverted into a kind of textualist grudge match over whether he meant apocalyptic and blood-drenched civil violence or simply stiff competition for the US auto industry. If you look at the actual words it seems clear he initially riffs on his claims about the auto industry but then doubles down on the promise of a bloodbath, suggesting that problems with the economy will be the least of the country’s problems. You can interpret it either way in large part because Trump always expresses himself in the kind of disjointed word salad which always require the words to be reconstructed after the fact, thus giving a fair amount of leeway to whoever wants to do the interpreting and reconstructing.

But that’s a feature, not a bug.

If you’re taking that discussion seriously you’re missing the point. Trump’s consistent schtick, accelerating through a mix of aggression and cognitive degeneration since his 2020 defeat, is to constantly throw out a mix of hyperbole, incitement, threats of violence and retribution and more. He then sits back and let’s his targets interpret what his comments mean, express outrage, demand apologies and do whatever else. If this or that threat of violence turns out to be a touch too hot his acolytes will claim on his behalf that he was joking or speaking figuratively. As that memorable line from most-times-Trump acolyte Salena Zito had it, we’re supposed to take the man seriously but not literally. (1) [my emphasis]

It’s a good thing when serious commentators and analysts on the left pay close attention to context. In looking at something like official diplomatic statements, that’s exactly the right thing to do.

But parsing Trump’s Klan talk as though it’s a carefully prepared magazine essay is silly. As Josh puts it:

If a mob boss says someone is going to go sleep with the fishes I’m not going to get into an argument about whether that person has a big aquarium in his bedroom. Because he’s a mob boss and I’m not a chump and murdering people is what he does.

The whole world could see Donald Trump on television on January 6, 2021, directly inciting his mob to attack the US Capitol, which they did. All as part of an elaborate coup effort to maintain himself in power after losing the Presidential election.

Rightwingers love to comma-dance over things like this, e.g., “he wouldn’t have used this pronoun if he had meant that.”

There’s no need for anyone else to play that silly game.