“I hate trump, but…”
“I hate elon, but…”
“Look, in the last got to defend trump, but”
These aren’t the statements of people that hate these monsters. These are the beginnings of statements of apologists working to soften the blow.
He threatened her. No integrity in your statement. Even if you needed to classify threats on a spectrum, this registers in several spots on that spectrum, regardless of your attempt to spin here. This was decidedly a threat, even without context of who trump is, but ESPECIALLY with that context.
I’m sorry, but no. He said she would feel differently about war if she were in the shoes of service men and women who have weapons pointed at them.
Do I agree with him? No, but it wasn’t a threat on her life.
Again, in the context of trump, it’s a threat on her life. He’s a chicken shit coward that mostly speaks in dog whistles and always carefully falls on that line of plausible deniability. For many others, you might give them the benefit of the doubt, NOT for trump.
The next day he said if people wanted to shoot him at a rally (where of course, his own supporters try to shoot him), they should shoot through the Press Corps and he’d be okay with that… You want to catch your breath and start defending that one now as well.
I actually agree that he dog whistles quite a bit, but his specific statement this particular time is not that. I think the less honest we are, and the more we just try to make the next sensationalist headline, the less credibility we have. That’s what the other side does. It is not what we should do. He says plenty we can hold him accountable for, we have zero need to make stuff up.