One reason (out of , oh, a thousand or so) that I dread another four years of Donald Trump is the inevitable avalanche of “get Trump!” stories from the mainstream news media, trying to instill fear based on what he reportedly said or thought or considered as reported by some malign mole, or, as in this case, deliberately spinning some off-the-top-of-the-head careless musings into existential threats to the nation. These are sinister and disgusting breaches of journalistic ethics supporting Trump’s description of the media as “enemies of the people,” or, in the alternative—there’s that darn Hanlon’s Razor again!—move evidence that bias makes you, or in this case, them, stupid.

I have a confession: when I read the multiple headlines screaming that Trump had said that he would prosecute political foes if he was elected President, I just assumed that he really said that. What’s the matter with me? I know all of these sources are corrupt, dishonest, and determined to undermine Trump’s candidacy by any means necessary, and yet I still default to the romantic, Pollyanna notion that journalists can be trusted.

I owe Ann Althouse for this one: she read one of the hit jobs (in The Guardian), and correctly (if too mildly) diagnosed it saying the description was “written by someone pretending not to understand sarcasm.” Similar scary headlines and stories appeared in the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and many others, taking off from this statement Trump made to Univion’s Enrique Acevedo regarding the indictments and criminal cases currently being brought against him by Democratic prosecutors in federal and state courts:

“What they’ve done is they’ve released the genie out of the box. If they do this and they’ve already done it, but if they want to follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse. If I happen to be president, and I see somebody who is doing well and beating me very badly, I’ll say, ‘go down and indict them.”

Ann is right: Trump was puckishly characterizing what the Democrats are doing to him and why, and saying, “I guess that means it’s OK to do this to political opponents. OK, I can play that game too.” His statement isn’t sinister at all; it isn’t a threat or a warning. He is accurately chiding the Democrats while making the same point many, many analysts—including me— have been making throughout the 2016 Post-Election Ethics Train Wreck: the unethical, unprecedented tactics the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance”/Democrats/captive mainstream media) have used on Trump, as with the two political impeachments, have created dangerous precedents moving the boudaries of what had previously been considered acceptable politics, and now their own tactics are certain to be used against Democrats. That’s a fact, not a threat.

However, this is only a partial defense of Trump’s statement. What’s wrong with him? He knows—he has to—that saying things like this will be deliberately distorted. It is just incompetent and irresponsible for him to keep giving unethical and ruthless foes exactly what the want and need to misrepresent him. Yet he keeps doing it.

And genies are in bottles, not boxes.