Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump gestures to the crowd following a campaign rally Saturday, March 16, 2024, in Vandalia, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jeff Dean)

Bloodbath. That’s the word that caught everyone’s attention and was soon headlining most of the Trump news stories of the past few days. It wasn’t even the worst thing Trump said at his Saturday afternoon MAGA carnival show in Ohio, but it was enough to create a rare media firestorm swirling around Trump’s incendiary and dehumanizing language.

These are some of the weekend headlines:

This clip from ABC’s Sunday evening newscast, for example, is incredibly serious, almost ominous. It reminds me of the news coverage on the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. It is also a salubrious departure from the usual mainstream coverage of Mr. Trump. As I’ve shown elsewhere, the media has had a lot of trouble holding Mr. Trump accountable or even treating him with the same skepticism they bring to other candidates.

Instead of seeing this improved coverage as the start of a trend, I think it is more likely that Trump’s use of the word “bloodbath” was simply irresistible. It’s so jarring, even coming from Donald Trump, that journalists and headline writers had no choice but to give it the front-page coverage it deserved.

Still, it’s interesting to see what happens when he is treated like other politicians. To start, Republicans and their media propaganda partners were so surprised to have Trump’s hate speech taken seriously for a change that they shifted immediately into damage control. Politico ran a story titled “When is ‘a bloodbath’ not a bloodbath?“ quoting nervous Republicans who were certain Trump wasn’t really calling for violence in the streets. “Fox and Friends” was so visibly worried that it began warning its viewers to avoid reading headlines and to count on only them for honest reporting on the topic. Good grief.

While MAGA world played defense, the Biden campaign quickly produced a “bloodbath” campaign ad reminding voters of Trump’s long history of violent threats & attacks on Democracy. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted that any debate about context was seriously misguided because, “He’s repeatedly and more explicitly invoked righteous violence by his supporters. And tellingly, he’s continued to do so long after the cautionary tale that was Jan. 6.”

Blake also put together this handy reminder:

Trump tried to deflect, claiming he was misunderstood. He argued in all caps on social media that he was really, truly only talking about cars, not armed revolt. But he’s already threatened political violence and retribution at least five other times just in this current campaign season, so does he deserve the benefit of the doubt? Longtime Trump critic George Conway says no.

“What matters is that he consistently uses apocalyptic and violent language in an indiscriminate fashion as a result of his psychopathy and correlative authoritarian tendencies, and because he’s just plain evil. And so it doesn’t matter what he’s specifically referring to at the moment. He could be talking about trans people in public bathrooms or the state of the auto industry or the border — it doesn’t matter. He’s a dangerous psychopath, and after more than eight years of watching his sick behavior, we must not give him the benefit of the doubt.”

Trump’s toxic Saturday Night Fever-swamp speech began with a regular feature at Trump rallies: a disgusting “tribute” to the hundreds of people who were convicted or plead guilty to Jan. 6 crimes including a new MAGA anthem by the so-called J6 choir. Then, in a diatribe about electric cars, he said this:

“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.”

The rest of the speech was a litany of frequent Trump attacks, slurs and obscenities. He calls migrants less than people. He also claimed, “I don’t think we’re going to have another election in this country if we don’t win this election.”

Trump has held numerous Saturday rallies over the past year. They’ve been mostly ignored by the news media or gotten scant coverage that sugar coats the venom spewing from the candidate as he promises more violence and vengeance. His very first rally of the 2024 campaign was last March in Waco, Texas. Yes, Waco. The site of the deadly government standoff with the Branch Davidian sect in 1993. That’s where he had the gall to include the J6 choir and it’s disgusting song.

Another Saturday rally in New Hampshire last November also got little press attention, even though that’s when Trump echoed Hitler and Mussolini’s dehumanizing rhetoric by calling his opponents vermin. Even though Trump was literally talking like a Nazi, The New York Times wrote this stunningly inaccurate headline: “Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech in a Very Different Direction.”  No reflection of Trump’s hard-right turn towards authoritarianism.

This past weekend in Ohio, Trump didn’t get away with it. Not only did Trump’s Saturday rally get substantially more press attention, but it also got better, more detailed news coverage.  Although The New York Times initially described the speech as “freewheeling,” most of the headlines and stories mostly reflected what you saw if you had the misfortune of being there.  Maybe some journalists were inspired by Susan Glasser’s powerful New Yorker piece encouraging everyone to actually watch the entirety of a Trump rally. Here, she talks with Greg Sargent of The New Republic about what it’s like to witness “two hours of hate speech flow over you.”

The media have a lot of ground to make up before we can trust that they will consistently hold Mr. Trump to anything like the same standards they apply to other politicians. As Jon Allsop wrote for Columbia Journalism Review, the track record is pretty uneven after all these years.  But I’m hoping the extensive news coverage highlighting his “bloodbath” remarks isn’t a blip, but rather a sign of more serious media attention to this very dangerous candidate who reminds us of exactly how dangerous he is nearly every Saturday afternoon.

Jennifer Schulze is a former Chicago journalist who talks media every month on WCPT 820AM on “Live, Local & Progressive with Joan Esposito” with former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob. You can follow her on Threads @jenniferschulzechi or Twitter/X @NewsJennifer.