One reason that I’m skeptical of any reports of outrageous things Trump says in private is that things he says in public are so often wholly distorted — if his critics can’t get things that are on the record correct, why should we believe the accounts of things he said that we can never have independent knowledge of?
As Noah ably noted on the home page, Trump deployed a crude “chicken-hawk” argument against Liz Cheney, and it’s been made into a threat against her life. This New York Times headline, for instance, isn’t technically inaccurate, but it is highly misleading: “Trump Assails Liz Cheney and Imagines Guns ‘Shooting at Her.’” Left out is the fact that he was talking about a hypothetical battlefield scenario.
It’s bad on the merits that Trump talks in these terms, and it’s foolish politically because it gives the other side fodder, but, still, he didn’t say what they allege he said, and the truth should matter.