President Trump is a motor-mouth, and he tends to speak in a strange, garbled way. He frequently lies. But that doesn’t mean everything he says is untrue. And yet, the media often interprets his comments literally so that they seem untrue and fantastical, even when reading them in context shows that what Trump means is something much less outrageous, or at least different.

In the spirit of comity, let me offer a data point where I have to side with Gobry. The story that broke Monday was that Trump said Obama is behind the protests and leaks plaguing his populist-but-not-popular administration.

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Here are some headlines from that story:

You get the idea.

Now, as written, these kind of headlines make Trump sound a wee bit paranoid and whiny. But let’s go to the source of all these stories, Trump’s interview with “Fox & Friends.” Here’s the relevant clip:

If you watch the clip, a few things become immediately clear:

1) Brian Kilmeade of “Fox & Friends” asked the question in a ridiculously leading way. As Ryan Lizza noted in the clip, Kilmeade “pushed” Trump into agreeing with the premise of the question. In a perfect world, Trump wouldn’t have accepted the premise without hard evidence. Absent a flat denial, however, reporters probably would have accused Trump of speaking ill of Obama no matter what he said in response.

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2) Trump says the words that explain the headlines above. But he also says he thinks that Obama’s former staff members are involved. I would suggest that it’s a sloppy inference, but by the standards of Trump’s norm violations, this is pretty pedestrian.

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3) Trump’s tone throughout all of this is, particularly by Trump’s standards, not hostile at all. He says “that’s politics” with a fair degree of equanimity at least three or four times. He certainly doesn’t sound like he’s whining. He refuses to condemn Obama despite several openings served up by Kilmeade. The only thing he seems motivated to talk about in that segment is the national security leaks, and even there he sounds more sorry than angry.

I’m pretty dubious of the nominal claim that Obama is behind the protests. But this is one of those stories where, if you read the headlines, it sounds way worse than hearing what Trump said in context.