Former President Donald Trump today sought to defend his declaration over the weekend that the country would face a “blood bath” if he lost in November, saying — as his campaign had previously — that he had been referring only to the auto industry.

“The Fake News Media, and their Democrat Partners in the destruction of our Nation, pretended to be shocked at my use of the word BLOODBATH, even though they fully understood that I was simply referring to imports allowed by Crooked Joe Biden, which are killing the automobile industry,” he wrote on his social media platform.

He made the remarks in a speech in Ohio on Saturday, delivered on behalf of Bernie Moreno, whom he has endorsed in Tuesday’s Republican Senate primary. After vowing to impose tariffs on cars manufactured outside the United States, he then said: “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”

President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign responded in a statement that Trump was “a loser who gets beat by over 7 million votes and then, instead of appealing to a wider mainstream audience, doubles down on his threats of political violence.”

In the same speech, Trump called migrants “animals” and “not people, in my opinion”; described people convicted in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as “hostages”; and suggested that American democracy would end if he lost. “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful,” he said.

The next morning, Fox News broadcast an interview with Trump in which he repeated his past assertions that migrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country.

Trump today followed up his social media post defending his remarks with an all-caps message: “Our once great country is going down the drain. We are a nation in decline! Vote for Trump, what the hell do you have to lose?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.