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When Donald Trump uses the word “nasty,” he tends to target those who have the audacity to criticize him or stand in his way. In 2016, for example, the Republican referred to Hillary Clinton as a “nasty woman.” Eight years later, the former president whined about Michelle Obama’s campaign appearances, complaining that the former first lady became “nasty.”
Last year, during a town hall event on CNN, Trump described moderator Kaitlan Collins as a “nasty person.” About a year later, he accused New York Attorney General Letitia James of having a “nasty” mouth. (If you’re noticing the gender similarity here, it’s not your imagination.)
But once in a while, the GOP candidate uses the word in a very different kind of context. NBC News reported:
After a meandering and at times hostile speech [Sunday] morning in Pennsylvania, Trump delivered a more subdued and on-prompter speech to a Georgia crowd at his third and final rally today. As he depicted a second-term Trump administration, he said: “We stand on the verge of the four greatest years in American history. ... It’ll be nasty a little bit at times, and maybe at the beginning in particular.”
The report added, “He didn’t elaborate on what would be ‘nasty.’”
At face value, this isn’t the kind of rhetoric American voters generally hear from presidential candidates. On the contrary, White House hopefuls tend to tell the public that if they’re elected, the country will be vastly safer, stronger, more prosperous, and more secure.
But Trump wants voters to prepare for something qualitatively different: a country where conditions will get “nasty.”
This comes roughly two months after the Republican nominee also told an audience that he and his team intend to pursue a mass deportation policy, and the process of removing immigrants already in the United States “will be a bloody story.”
It also comes a week after conspiratorial billionaire Elon Musk, a prominent Trump surrogate and megadonor, said during a virtual town hall event that Americans will need to endure “temporary hardship” if Trump wins a second term. As the world’s wealthiest man explained, much of the public will feel a real pinch as GOP officials work on “tackling the nation’s debt,” but those who suffer should take comfort in the hopes that the country will eventually enjoy “long-term prosperity.”
In other words, as far as Musk is concerned, Trump and his party will take deliberate steps that will make millions of Americans’ economic situations worse, but that’ll be acceptable to Republicans because conditions will probably get better someday. Maybe. They hope.
The oddity here is that these are the kinds of comments one might expect to hear from Democrats criticizing the former president. But it’s not Democrats who are warning about a “nasty” and “bloody” second term for Trump, filled with “hardships” for much of the population, it’s Trump and his allies who are promising such an outcome.
There’s never been a closing message quite like this one.