Farhi observes, "Trump's advocacy of extrajudicial killings was widely covered by newspapers and TV stations in California but generally ignored by the national press. No mainstream TV network carried his speech live or excerpted it later that night. CNN and MSNBC mentioned it during panel discussions over the next few days. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR and PBS didn't report it at all. The New York Times wrote about it four days later, playing the story on Page 14 of its print edition."

The Post media reporter notes that Trump also recently suggested that former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley should be executed, adding that political journalist/author Brian Klaas has used the term "banality of crazy" to describe responses to the former president's violent rhetoric. In other words, Trump says so many outrageous things that, according to Klaas, people become desensitized to it.

The Bulwark's Charlie Sykes, a Never Trump conservative, told the Post, "If the former president of the United States endorses extrajudicial killings of shoplifters, and we have to ask 'Is that newsworthy?' we need to reevaluate what we regard as important.'"