The truly steel-man assessment of the President's statement of "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" is that he meant it empirically, not normatively -- describing what inevitably occurs in an environment of sustained looting (shootings committed by people guarding property, looters, and law enforcement).
If you want to be extra charitable, he possibly made that statement empirically to describe a tragic situation he wanted to prevent entirely by dispersing protests early. Such a justification and reasoning would be very authoritarian and is arguably wrong in efficacy, but that interpretation does not involve an indirect or direct threat of shooting.
My grandmother (an English teacher) once castigated email and predicted it would condition people at all levels to not be precise in language, and warned of how communications and ideas would degrade as a result. As a young nerd I thought that was absurd and the opposite would be true, but now seeing Twitter I have changed my mind.
My steel-man was an attempt to justify the deletion of Trump's post: by making the best possible case that it's actually a normative call to violence (even if indirect).
If you want to be extra charitable, he possibly made that statement empirically to describe a tragic situation he wanted to prevent entirely by dispersing protests early. Such a justification and reasoning would be very authoritarian and is arguably wrong in efficacy, but that interpretation does not involve an indirect or direct threat of shooting.
My grandmother (an English teacher) once castigated email and predicted it would condition people at all levels to not be precise in language, and warned of how communications and ideas would degrade as a result. As a young nerd I thought that was absurd and the opposite would be true, but now seeing Twitter I have changed my mind.