THE IMPLICATIONS OF WANTING TO KILL CITIZENS. If you had a babysitter threaten to shoot one of your kids, but ultimately didn't, would you hire them again?
Not even Esper said he thought Trump wanted to kill anybody. This was an off-the-cuff, moment of frustration, in the course of wanting to quell the violent and destructive riots happening across the country. Were they all violent/destructive? Of course not. But, they needed to stop and there was little success in doing so, for many reasons.
Just the insured damage alone that summer approached $2 billion. It was the costliest civil disorder event in U.S. history, which previously was the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Trump was looking for a way to stop and/or deter them from continuing.
I simply don't accept that his remark demonstrates a real desire to "kill" anybody both for the reasoning I've already given but especially because the question itself demonstrates an inherently non-lethal desire. "In the legs" clearly eliminates any reasonable argument that he wanted to "kill" anybody, even if it was theoretically a serious order that was given (nobody is claiming it was) and subsequently not followed.
Were you just as concerned when Joe Biden told donor just days before an assassination attempt "It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye"?
What about Dan Goldman in an interview saying that Trump "has to be eliminated"?
Or when Maxine Waters encouraged people to "get more confrontational" with Trump administration officials and said "If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them." or "I just don’t even know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country, and maybe there will be."
How about Chuck Schumer saying about two Justices, "You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions." A guy travelled across the country to try and assassinate Kavanaugh right after those remarks.
These are all public statements. Are they disqualifying? I'm not advocating that the "shoot them in the legs" question was appropriate, even if I assume it wasn't borne of frustration over the course of a much longer cabinet meeting where Trump is trying to figure out how to stop what was happening. But, I'm also not going to accept that it demonstrates a real, legitimate desire to kill anybody.
Lord help us if every statement we've ever made in our lives was recorded for posterity and the worst of them published with or without full context for all the world to judge.