Donald Trump has said that President Joe Biden and the media have deliberately taken "my words of context" as part of a "bloodbath hoax" in a new video posted online.
Posting on Truth Social on Friday, March 22, the former president presented a four-minute clip in which he accused his political opponents in the "Biden campaign" and the "fake news media" of a "bloodbath hoax" for comments he made at a campaign rally last weekend.
Speaking in Dayton, Ohio, Trump said: "If I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country." Those comments came ahead of the Biden administration this week finalizing new vehicle-emission standards designed to boost the sales of new electric and hybrid vehicles.
In the Truth Social video, Trump replied: "I said that, if we don't win, there will be a bloodbath for the U.S. auto manufacturing industry, which is right now turning very bad, and that's 100 percent true, that's going to happen, that's a fact." He said "crooked Joe Biden" is attempting to "destroy the U.S. auto industry" with his "extreme" electric-vehicle mandate.
Newsweek has contacted Trump via the contact form on his website outside of normal working hours.
Turmp said that the mandate means Biden is "doing the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party" and that the new electric-vehicle rules will "let China steal hundreds of thousands of American jobs." Newsweek has found nothing to support the claim about the president. Trump added that, if elected in upcoming November presidential election, he would "charge a 100 percent tariff on every car that China makes in Mexico."
"It will indeed be a bloodbath, but it will be on the opposite side," Trump continued. "We're not going to allow our auto workers to suffer the word 'bloodbath'."
In defense of Trump's Ohio rally comment, Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign's communications director, previously told Newsweek that "economically it will be a bloodbath because Crooked Joe Biden's policies have decimated working families."
Following Trump's comments in Ohio, he was directly criticized by Biden in a post on X, formerly Twitter, which read: "It's clear this guy wants another January 6. But the American people are going to give him another resounding electoral defeat this November."
Trump made similar remarks in an interview with Nigel Farage earlier this week. The right-wing British politician and media personality said to Trump, according to British broadcaster GB News: "Clearly you were talking about an economic bloodbath in terms of the car-manufacturing industry, and what China was doing, setting up in Mexico.
"And yet, this is what's being pushed, picked up by left-wing media sources all over the world. It's quite interesting," Farage added.
Trump replied: "It's going to be a bloodbath, in the auto industry, because we're gonna lose our whole industry, because this guy's going to all electric cars, and they're made in China. That's where the material is, that's where the minerals are, that's where everything is. They're going to all be made in China. And they want to go all electric cars, one of the dumbest... They don't go far, and they cost too much."
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Aliss Higham is a Newsweek reporter based in Glasgow, Scotland. Her focus is reporting on issues across the U.S., including ... Read more
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