This call to have the rival party’s nominee riddled by bullets generated negative press, as most adults, many adolescents, and even some precocious toddlers would’ve expected.

The Boston Globe quickly gave him a chance to reconsider his remarks. He declined, stating that “without a doubt” he stood by his professed desire for Hillary Clinton to be shot to death. “When you take classified information on a server that deals with where our State Department, Special Forces, CIA, whatever in other countries, that’s a death sentence for those people if that information gets in the hands of other countries or the terrorists,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s information for the enemy. In the military, shot, firing squad. So I stand by what I said.”

(Notice that in the course of defending the death penalty as a punishment for Hillary Clinton, he changed the alleged crime from Benghazi to a private email server.)

At the time, the media quoted these remarks verbatim.

CNN reported that the Secret Service would investigate the remarks. And some fellow Republicans criticized the language. "That's not keeping with the best traditions of American politics,” Senator Tom Cotton told Jake Tapper. “We have opponents. We have adversaries. We don't have enemies in American politics so I can't agree with that kind of rhetoric. That kind of rhetoric has no place in our politics."

Soon the incident was mostly forgotten. Trump says too many outrageous things on a weekly basis for the words of an obscure campaign adviser and ally to have much staying power.

That brings us to Tuesday, when Springfield Republican reporter Shira Schoenberg followed up with Baldasaro:

CAMBRIDGE — An adviser to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump doubled down Tuesday on comments he made saying that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton should be shot for treason. But New Hampshire state Rep. Al Baldasaro, a Republican who co-chairs Trump's national veterans' coalition, stressed that he was not saying someone should assassinate Clinton. "The liberal media took what I said and went against the law and the Constitution and ran with it, and they said that I wanted her assassinated, which I never did," Baldasaro told The Republican/MassLive.com. "I said I spoke as a veteran, and she should be shot in a firing squad for treason."

Even as this man insists that he wants Hillary Clinton to be lined up and shot to death for the third time, he seems to truly believe “the liberal media” is the cause of his problems. Never mind that his characterization of how the media initially covered the story is dubious at best, or that his notion of what constitutes treason is cartoonishly ignorant. His desire that the Democratic nominee be put to death will obviously strike the vast majority of Americans as creepy and unhinged, regardless of whether he imagines the firing squad as a legal or extra-legal remedy!