The joke is in Trump’s accordion hands when he changes diapers. He normalizes cruelty and violence among his other hateful messages. Mirth masks the menace, because American humor still relies on Shtick.
Trump’s critics along with experts in rhetoric and nationalist and populist movements and leaders say it helps him turn his opponents into not just enemies but jokes. They say it helps him recast his own liabilities as laughing matters and desensitizes his supporters to his most outrageous comments and proposals — the undermining of institutions, the abandonment of allies, mass deportations and all but outright invitations for Russian invasions and so on. They say the mirth masks the menace.
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“A dollop of humor makes the anti-establishment rage go down,” as the writer Noah Berlatsky wrote in 2020 for Foreign Policy in a piece headlined “Fascists Know How to Turn Mockery Into Power. ” “Horseplay is necessary,” believed Joseph Goebbels, one of Adolf Hitler’s closest, most loyal advisers and the Nazis’ top propagandist. “Mussolini,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen, told me, referring to 20th-century Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, “had the same twisted sense of humor” as Trump. And stenograms of Communist Party and Politburo meetings in the era of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union show no shortage of notations of laughter — from jokes made at the expense of somebody about to be on the outs to a sort of forced or sycophantic fun. “There’s a lot,” Maya Vinokour, a scholar of Stalinism, told me, “and that even ends up being true as the purges start.”
Trump was also careful to repeat the term "Bloodbath" regarding the auto industry but again that's not his goal. Much like "fight like hell" MAGA knows what he is saying "Law and Order" Nixon used the "bloodbath" term to support the war in Vietnam.
About Trump's reference to "bloodbath" if he loses election, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) tells CNN: "There's something wrong here... How much more do they have to see from him to understand that this isn't what our country is about?"
Reagan on violent protesters, April 7, 1970: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”
context: Trump warned that if he were to lose the 2024 election, it would be a “bloodbath” for the auto industry and the country. This came as Trump promised a “100% tariff” on cars made outside the US, arguing that auto manufacturing would be protected only if he is elected.
In 2016, Trump campaign consultant Roger Stone said Trump should warn of “widespread civil disobedience,” a “bloodbath,” and that “the government will be shut down” if Trump lost the election.