He Said It

Kinda funny how the gang who loves Trump because he "speaks his mind - he says what he means" is frequently going to great lengths to explain that he didn't mean it that way.

Trump says things the way he says things on purpose. He wants his army of devotees to cover his ass, but he knows there are some who'll pick up on it as a signal to start some shit. And the bonus is that it can scare some of the normies just enough to alter their behavior - to keep them on the sideline out of his way.

That's how Stochastic Terrorism works - kinda disappointing that Snopes doesn't address that.

Did Trump Say It Will Be a 'Bloodbath for the Country' If He Doesn't Get Elected?

Claim:

At a campaign rally in Dayton, Ohio, on March 16, 2024, former U.S. President Donald Trump said: "Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country."

Rating:

Correct Attribution

Context:

The context of the remark suggests Trump was predicting an "economic bloodbath" for the country, not a literal one, if he loses the 2024 presidential election.

On March 16, 2024, the hashtag "#bloodbath" trended sharply on social media in the wake of a Dayton, Ohio, campaign speech earlier that day by former U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump stirred up controversy by claiming that if he didn't get elected for another presidential term, "It's going to be a bloodbath for the country."

A video recording of the speech from C-SPAN provides proof that he said exactly those words, which many partisan observers, such as the author of the X (formerly Twitter) post below, interpreted as a threat of post-election violence:

The post above linked to an article on Occupy Democrats, a left-wing website, which pushed the "violent bloodbath" interpretation of Trump's words even as it acknowledged that, as the author put it, the context left "wiggle room" for interpretation. What was that context? Broadly speaking, it was economic. Trump was in the middle of talking about the U.S. automobile industry and the country's trade imbalance with China (emphasis added):

China now is building a couple of massive plants where they're going to build the cars in Mexico and think, they think, that they're going to sell those cars into the United States with no tax at the border.

Let me tell you something, to China, if you're listening, President Xi — and you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal — those big, monster car-manufacturing plants that you're building in Mexico right now, and you think you're going to get that, you're going to not hire Americans, and you're going to sell the cars to us?

No, we're going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you're not going to be able to sell those cars if I get elected. Now, if I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that's going to be the least of it, it's going to be a bloodbath for the country, that'll be the least of it. But they're not going to sell those cars, they're building massive factories.

As some social media users pointed out in lengthy threads debating what Trump really meant, popular dictionaries like Merriam-Webster include "major economic disaster" as a secondary meaning of "bloodbath."

Ultimately, however, "bloodbath for the country" is an ambiguous figure of speech, and Trump has a controversial history of using violence-tinged language in reference to political opponents, which, even if the intent was metaphorical, sarcastic or just to get media attention, makes it unsurprising that his use of the phrase "bloodbath for the country" drew instant public criticism.

Trump spoke about trade tariffs with China at a campaign rally in Dayton, Ohio, on March 16, 2024.

Today's Tweet

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

- Winston Churchill pic.twitter.com/ECoR8YeiMm

— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) January 21, 2024

That wasn't Churchill, Ron. That was a copy writer for Budweiser.

SOTU Fact Check

There's whole big bunches of nit-picky shit in this breakdown at WaPo by Glenn Kessler - some, admittedly, a bit more than that - but the main takeaway is that Biden was mostly on the nose.

Fact-checking President Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address

“I stand here tonight after we’ve created — with the help of many people in this room — 12 million new jobs, more jobs created in two years than any president has ever created in four years.”

“We’ve already created 800,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs, the fastest growth in 40 years.”

“For too many decades, we imported products and exported jobs. Now, thanks to all we’ve done, we’re exporting American products and creating American jobs.”

“America used to make nearly 40 percent of the world’s chips. But in the last few decades, we lost our edge and we’re down to producing only 10 percent.”

“We used to be number one in the world in infrastructure. We’ve sunk to 13th in the world.

“It’s not fair the idea that in 2020, 55 of the biggest companies in America, the Fortune 500, made $40 billion in profits and paid zero in federal income taxes? Zero.”

“Because of the law I signed, billion-dollar companies have to pay a minimum of 15 percent.”

“Pass my proposal for a billionaire minimum tax. … Because no billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a schoolteacher or a firefighter.”

“In the last two years, my administration cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion — the largest deficit reduction in American history.”

“Under the previous administration, America’s deficit went up four years in a row. Because of those record deficits, no president added more to the national debt in any four years than my predecessor. Nearly 25 percent of the entire national debt, a debt that took 200 years to accumulate, was added by that administration alone.”

“Some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s a majority. … Anybody who doubts it, contact my office. I’ll give you a copy.”

“While the virus is not gone, thanks to the resilience of the American people and the ingenuity of medicine, we have broken covid’s grip on us. Covid deaths are down nearly 90 percent.”

“Ban assault weapons once and for all. We did it before. I led the fight to ban them in 1994. In the 10 years the ban was law, mass shootings went down. After we let it expire in a Republican administration, mass shootings tripled.”

Fact Check

Knowing what we know about the GOP's War On Smarts, there will be a lot more weird shit that we have to either ignore (at our obvious peril) or spend scarce resources in terms of time and energy chasing down and debunking.

Here's one - WaPo: (paywall)

No, the Taliban did not seize $83 billion of U.S. weapons

“ALL EQUIPMENT should be demanded to be immediately returned to the United States, and that includes every penny of the $85 billion dollars in cost.”

— Former president Donald Trump, in a statement, Aug 30

We don’t normally pay much attention to claims made by the former president, as he mostly just riffs golden oldies. But this is a new claim. A version of this claim also circulates widely on right-leaning social media — that somehow the Taliban has ended up with $83 billion in U.S. weaponry. (Trump, as usual, rounds the number up.)

The $83 billion number is not invented out of whole cloth. But it reflects all the money spent to train, equip and house the Afghan military and police — so weapons are just a part of that. At this point, no one really knows the value of the equipment that was seized by the Taliban.

The Facts

The $83 billion figure — technically, $82.9 billion — comes from an estimate in the July 30 quarterly report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) for all spending on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since the U.S. invasion in 2001.

In recent years, the spending has decreased. For fiscal 2021, about $3 billion was spent on security forces, which was similar to 2020.

Separately, the U.S. government spent about $36 billion on shoring up the Afghan government. The total bill for the Afghan project added up to more than $144 billion.

In any case, the $83 billion spent on the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) goes back two decades, including almost $19 billion spent between 2002 and 2009.

A 2017 Government Accountability Office report estimated that about 29 percent of the funds spent on the Afghan security forces between 2005 and 2016 went to equipment and transportation. (The transportation costs related to transporting equipment and for contracted pilots and airplanes for transporting officials to meetings. There appears to be no way to segregate transposition spending.)

Using that same percentage, that would mean the equipment provided to Afghan forces amounted to $24 billion over 20 years. The GAO said approximately 70 percent of the equipment went to the Afghan military and the rest went to the national police (part of the Interior Ministry).

That’s certainly a lot of money. Between 2005 and 2016, U.S. taxpayers paid for 76,000 vehicles (such as 43,000 Ford Ranger pickup trucks, 22,000 Humvees and 900 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles known as MRAPs), 600,000 weapons and more than 200 aircraft, according to GAO.

Of course, some of this equipment may be obsolete or destroyed — or soon may not be usable.

The SIGAR report shows that 167 aircraft out of an inventory of 211 were usable — but the Afghan Air Force (AAF) still lacked enough qualified pilots. One issue was that the Taliban targeted pilots for assassination.

Even more problematic, there were not enough maintenance crews to maintain the aircraft. “Without continued contractor support, none of the AAF’s airframes can be sustained as combat effective for more than a few months, depending on the stock of equipment parts in-country, the maintenance capability on each airframe, and the timing of contractor support withdrawal,” the report said.

With great fanfare, the Taliban has seized a number of Black Hawk helicopters, including ones that the United States had just shipped this year at the request of former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani. But only the first crew of Black Hawk mechanics had been trained, so the military “can field no more than one UH-60 per night for helicopter missions,” SIGAR said.

Meanwhile, as the U.S. military wound down its mission, it turned over facilities and equipment to the Afghan security forces — which may have added to the total seized by the Taliban. But Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., head of U.S. Central Command, said that before leaving Kabul airport on Aug. 30, the military “demilitarized” 70 MRAPs, 27 Humvees and 73 aircraft. “Those aircraft will never fly again,” he said. “They’ll never be able to be operated by anyone.” (Demilitarized is a term that means damaging in place, sometimes with explosives.)

“No one has any accounting of exactly what survived the last weeks of the collapse and fell into Taliban hands, and even before the collapse, SIGAR had publicly reported no accounting was possible in many districts,” said Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “In rough terms, however, if the ANDSF could not sustain it without foreign contractors, the Taliban will have very serious problems in operating it. That covers most aircraft and many electronics and heavier weapons.”

“One also has to be careful here,” Cordesman added. “The fact that Taliban fighters or cells of fighters get U.S. equipment does not mean it is pooled or shared. Factionalism and hoarding are the rule in Afghanistan, not the exception.”

The Pinocchio Test

U.S. military equipment was given to Afghan security forces over two decades. Tanks, vehicles, helicopters and other gear fell into the hands of the Taliban when the U.S.-trained force quickly collapsed. The value of these assets is unclear, but if the Taliban is unable to obtain spare parts, it may not be able to maintain them.

But the value of the equipment is not more than $80 billion. That’s the figure for all of the money spent on training and sustaining the Afghan military over 20 years. The equipment portion of that total is about $24 billion — certainly not small change — but the actual value of the equipment in the Taliban’s hands is probably much less than even that amount.