In a speech last Saturday in Ohio, Donald Trump used the word “bloodbath.” This was played up in the initial media coverage of the speech. The New York Times, for example, ran the story under the headline, “Trump Says Some Migrants are ‘Not People’ and Predicts a ‘Bloodbath’ If He Loses.” The Joe Biden/Kamala Harris campaign upped the ante, suggesting that Trump had not only “predicted” but “threatened” such violence.

Trump’s defenders pointed out that he’d been talking about the auto industry when he used the word and that in context it’s plausible that what he meant was that competition from Chinese companies building factories in Mexico would lead to a “bloodbath” for the industry. There was a feeding frenzy about this alleged misrepresentation, ranging from YouTube supercuts of Trump-hating liberals using the word in similarly innocuous contexts to a high-brow article by Matthew Schmitz in Compact magazine defending the substance of Trump’s views on trade. By the end of Sunday night, “the bloodbath hoax” was the story on right-wing Twitter.

The Right’s view of the matter isn’t entirely wrong — although Trump’s wording left more ambiguity than his defenders suggest. He also muttered something about how the bloodbath for the industry would be “the least of it” because there would also be a “bloodbath for the country.” But Trump really was talking about the auto industry both immediately before and immediately after he used the word.