I'll say it again, the argument that "it is obviously a joke" simply does not hold water. You need to mount a better argument than "duh" to be convincing here. It did not seem like a joke to me or several major media outlets or the former CIA director.
We ran into the same kind of issue when Hillary responded to the server wipe question by saying "with a cloth or something?". It was a terrible joke to make, gave all the wrong impressions, treated substantive issues as trivial, but ultimately we knew she wasn't being serious because she laughs, and follows up with "I don't know how it works digitally". Trump talks in a very unusual way that is very 'stream of consciousness' so we don't get the same markers but to me, the way its suddenly inserted into this long rambling answer, how it ends with saying the media would reward them, the "if you're listening" thing is a standard line in NSA style jokes, that to me suggests he's trying to contrast the current media coverage with how (he thinks) they would act if the 'missing emails' were found by the Russians and not an actual invitation to hacking.
The media is not an objective barometer for interpretation of people's speaking patterns and has competing motivations in how they depict stories. The former CIA director is also a former Clinton Chief of Staff, at the end of the day we can't really say he's more of an expert in interpreting Trump's speech patterns than Newt Gingrich. Of course, people on the conservative side have a vested interest in defending Trump (particularly Newt) just as people on the liberal side have an interest in destroying him (for good reasons though).
Trump is a complete and utter idiot but that doesn't mean we have to assume everything he says is 100% serious; if anything we should be conditioned to assume he's going to say increasingly outrageous and ridiculous things like any other troll. I'm not condoning that behavior as being any better than actually meaning it, it is still disgusting and wrong, but I'm also not going to interpret every thing that comes out of Trump's mouth as a serious policy proposal regardless of context.
If we're just going to say that Trump is so crazy that it's impossible to discern what's a joke versus a serious policy proposal, well sure, I could be sympathetic to that. But I feel pretty comfortable saying that wasn't intended seriously given the context of the entire rambling answer. Just because Trump is a horrible human being doesn't mean he's always going to be horrible 100% of the time; even a Trump is "stupid-right" twice a day.
