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As you know, I’ve been on this story for a while: why there was never any law enforcement briefing or qualified medical report on the Butler, PA shooting incident or information of how Donald Trump was injured. I was especially interested in this because originally Pennsylvania State Police briefed reporters that Trump had been hit by flying debris kicked up by the gunfire. The storyline changed when Trump went on Truth Social and announced that a bullet had hit his ear. From that moment that was the story followed universally in the press.
But yesterday FBI Director Christopher Wray said, ironically in response to a question from Rep. Jim Jordan, that it’s not clear whether Trump was hit by a bullet or debris kicked up by the gunfire. I think in context that’s likely a bureaucratic and gentle way of saying Trump probably wasn’t hit by a bullet. But let’s stick to the precise words. “There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.”
Here’s the actual exchange.
We’re almost two weeks after this happened. This is the first official word about it. As I’ve explained before, after the shooting, Pennsylvania State Police briefed reporters saying that Trump had been hit by flying glass. Flying debris, shards of glass, shrapnel — these are all basically the same thing: tiny hard objects kicked up at high velocity by bullet impacts. (There are reports that bullets hit the sound equipment on the stage.) Four local police officers who were just feet away from Trump when the shots were fired also received minor injuries from flying debris from the bullets. (It seems probable that Secret Service agents may have been hit too but we simply haven’t gotten those details. The only reports about the local police officers came from the police department itself and appeared solely in the local press.) It was only after Trump went on Truth Social and announced that he’d been struck in the ear with a bullet that the story changed. All mainstream media took Trump’s word for it and ran with that version of the story.
Let’s be honest: Trump is a notoriously self-promoting pathological liar. This is hardly a controversial statement. I think even many of his supporters would concede the point. From a journalistic standpoint the idea that anyone would simply take his word for this is bizarre, a total journalistic failure. Not only is Trump thoroughly unreliable, it’s not clear he would have known one way or another. One can be generous and say that maybe he thought it was true.
From first post I wrote on this I’ve been crystal clear that this is certainly not the central part of this story. A 20 year old with a typical school-shooter, mass-shooter profile tried to kill Trump and might very easily have succeeded. That’s the core reality. But anytime something like this happens we get and expect to get briefed by law enforcement and medical personnel about what they believe happened. In this case, uniquely, it never did. That’s another significant failure. It’s not that we’re looking for deep, dark secrets. This is a genuinely major historical incident. The public hears from law enforcement about what happened, the details. That’s just how it works. In this case, it’s hard not to believe that it didn’t work that way at least in part because it necessarily involved stepping on the crisp storyline that Trump himself branded onto it in the immediate aftermath. He rapidly raised the stakes for contradicting him by making his story the central message of his whole convention.
I learned over the last week that at the upper echelons of the major press organizations there was a clear understanding that there was no real basis for Trump’s story, not withstanding the fact that all of those organizations ran with it as a canonical part of the coverage. The consensus seemed to be that the bullet story was just Trump’s opinion. And if we’re generous with the word “opinion” that’s probably right. They appear to have been pretty open among themselves that it simply wasn’t a big enough deal to merit getting into a public fight with the Trump campaign over. And as we know, it would definitely be a fight even to ask for additional details about the story that quickly become the central element of what amounted to Trump’s canonization in Milwaukee.
The fact that Trump now routinely says he “took a bullet for democracy” as a way to deflect from any bad story or question gives some indication of why reporters should not stop asking basic questions just to avoid the anger of the people they’re covering. It seems quite likely that the story Trump has been telling constantly over the last two weeks simply isn’t true, that he and his campaign know it’s not true or at least that there’s no evidence for it. And the press has too.
It’s worth considering a hypothetical.
Let’s consider political candidate Fred Smith. Routinely during his speeches Fred talks about how he was shot by someone trying to kill him and only miraculously survived. That’s a great candidate story. But imagine that then it turned out that it wasn’t clear Fred had actually been shot at all. He may have just been nicked by flying debris. And other people were seriously wounded and killed. What’s your experience as a consumer of political news about how reporters generally react to that kind of news development — not how they should maybe but how they do? My experience is not very well. Indeed, they often press for crazy and over the top levels of details, and just when the person knew his story either wasn’t or might not be true. And if our candidate Fred Smith isn’t forthcoming the story quickly expands into meta-discussions of character and credibility. Some of these aspects of press behavior will go beyond what’s necessary and move into obsessive and nitpicking. But that’s how they operate.
Some of the press hesitation is explained, if not quite justified, by the true gravity of what happened, a genuine near miss assassination and massive shooting attempt that could have dramatically changed the course of American history. But that’s no excuse for dropping the most basic blocking and tackling of ordinary reporting.