Here’s something I’ve been confused about. In the first moments of a major news story like the attempted assassination of a former president, there is a chaos to the reporting. Initial reports turn out not to be true. They turn out to have been based on misunderstandings or false assumptions. A lot of that happened in the first minutes and hours after the shooting Saturday afternoon in Butler, Pennsylvania. But there are gaps in the public reporting about just how Donald Trump was injured that have confused me, specifically whether the injury to his ear was caused by a grazing wound from a bullet or whether one of the bullets shot by Thomas Crooks struck his teleprompter and then shards of that plexiglass material struck the former president. In the biggest sense it doesn’t matter: Crooks tried to shoot Trump and in the process Trump was injured. Whether it was the bullet itself or shards of plexiglass, the bullet struck is a matter of kinetics rather than guilt or innocence or the reality that Trump could have been killed. One spectator was killed, and two others injured. The bullet that almost killed Ronald Reagan, if I’m remembering correctly, was actually a ricochet rather than a direct impact. But it’s still something that’s worth having some clear answer to.
Here’s why I’m still looking for more information on this.
Shortly after the incident occurred, multiple credentialed reporters reported via social media that Trump had been hit by glass or plexiglass shards rather than by a bullet. This was reported by journalists from Axios, The Bulwark, Newsmax, TMZ and others. The clearest sourcing, by Newsmax, attributed this to the Pennsylvania State Police. Another report attributed it to a source who had spoken with the Secret Service. Axios reporter Juliegrace Brufke cited it to a “source familiar” but later deleted her tweet without explanation.
It is important to note that initial reports are frequently wrong in cases like this, and not necessarily because reporters get it wrong themselves but because even law enforcement is working with patchwork and preliminary information. But the way this progressed is that this was all the reporting there was. Then former President Trump posted on Truth Social saying he’d been hit with a bullet. And that was it. That’s when the story changed, but there hasn’t been any official word on Trump’s injuries from law enforcement or the medical team that treat him. It feels like an omission, not in a conspiratorial sense, just a departure from the level of transparency we’ve come to expect in situations like this, at least until Trump came along.
To be clear, I had assumed Trump’s account was accurate and that there would later be some official word with additional details either from local or federal law enforcement or from some medical report. I assume, though I don’t know, that an initial medical examination could have determined this. But to the best of my knowledge that has not yet been reported publicly. Maybe I’ve missed some sourcing for this other than Trump himself. So if you’ve seen that please send it to me. But from what I can tell everything goes back to Trump’s post on Truth Social.
At a minimum it seems like there should be some explanation of what the incorrect reports were based on, especially if it involves deleting a breaking news tweet without explanation. But again, fog of war. Initial reports are often wrong. Nothing to be ashamed of, etc.
I should state again that this does amount to fine print. Someone tried to shoot Trump and the direct result of that was an injury to his ear. The precise mechanics are secondary. But this is a pretty big story and if we know anything from our dark history of assassinations, it’s that these kinds of small discrepancies or inconsistencies can give rise to all sorts of conspiratorial nonsense. Let me know what you see.
