US election campaign
Donald Trump incites against migrants and announces “the largest deportation operation in US history.”
“These are not people, but animals”; says Donald Trump about migrants
© Jeff Dean / AP / DPA
With his “bloodbath” rhetoric, Donald Trump is now inciting even more violence than usual against migrants and his challenger Joe Biden. His most recent speech showed what would happen if he became US president.
At a campaign appearance in Grand Rapids, Michigan Donald Trump accused Democratic President Joe Biden on Tuesday (local time) of causing a “bloodbath” with his border policy. Trump claimed that Biden’s lax migration policy meant America was facing an “invasion” of criminals from other countries coming out of prisons and “madhouses” and attacking and killing innocent people in the United States. “These are not people, they are animals,” said Trump.
Under Biden, every US state is a border state and every US city is a border city, said the incumbent’s likely challenger in the presidential election at the beginning of November. “Because Joe Biden has brought the carnage, the chaos and the killing to us from around the world and dumped it right in our backyards.”
Trump continued: “We will stop the looting, the rape, the slaughter and the destruction of our American suburbs, cities and towns.” If re-elected, he would seal the border on his first day in office. “And we will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” said the Republican. At the same time, he warned that the country would “cease to exist” if he was not re-elected president.
Donald Trump’s “bloodbath rhetoric”
Trump regularly uses radical rhetoric, uses hateful and dehumanizing language, makes racist statements and incites against minorities. He recently caused a stir in another context with, of all things, the term “bloodbath,” which he placed at the center of his speech in Michigan and displayed in large letters on his standing desk.
At a campaign event in the state of Ohio in mid-March, the ex-president spoke about how he wanted to make it more difficult to sell Chinese cars on the US market. He added: “If I’m not elected, there will be a bloodbath. (…) It will be a bloodbath for the country.” That made big waves.
Trump’s campaign team weighed it down and tried to argue that the 77-year-old had only spoken about the US auto industry and that the “bloodbath” quote had been taken out of context. In Grand Rapids, Trump addressed the controversy, saying people were trying to misattribute the term to him. What Biden is causing is actually a “bloodbath”.