Another Journo Debunks Trump’s “1/4 Inch From Death” Story, Still No Medical Report

The days are ticking by. A week ago today was Donald Trump’s fateful event in Butler, Pennsylvania, where something happened to his right ear, which caused bleeding and some scratches or blood smears on his face. Trump saw fit to report it as a “bullet” and nothing has been released from the emergency room at Butler Memorial Hospital, where Trump was immediately taken after the incident. Seth Abramson is kicking in his two cents. He goes directly to the 93-minute speech which Trump gave Thursday night at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, and points out the profuse lies and exaggerations which Trump deployed and how he used last Saturday’s incident in order to gain sympathy from his followers.

TRUMP: Let me begin this evening by expressing my gratitude to the American people for your outpouring of love and support following the assassination attempt at my rally on Saturday.

As you already know, the assassin’s bullet came within a quarter of an inch of taking my life (1). So many people have asked me what happened (2). “Tell us what happened, please.” And therefore, I will tell you exactly what happened, and you’ll never hear it from me a second time (3), because it’s actually too painful to tell (4).

Notations:

(1) All of this is either false or—as Trump is well aware, and pretending otherwise—unconfirmed. Because the FBI hasn’t been able to locate any motive behind the shooting yet, and the shooter Thomas Crooks was at the time of the incident also researching large gatherings of Democrats, it remains possible that he intended a mass shooting in the mold of the Las Vegas Massacre rather than simply an attack on Mr. Trump. That the case is being investigated as an attempted assassination is wise and correct; that there has been an investigative conclusion about what Crooks aimed to do in Butler is untrue.

But more importantly—and more important by far—there is at present (a) no public evidence confirming that what caused Mr. Trump to bleed was a bullet, though it certainly might have been and almost certainly was, and (b) no indication that Trump’s life was saved by “a quarter of an inch,” however much that phrase might please Trump’s ear.

If it was indeed a bullet that grazed Trump’s ear, he evaded death by a distance of one to two inches. That’s a startlingly close brush with death, but Trump chooses hyperbole here—and this is critical to note—because even a startling truth is not good enough for a pathological liar. Moreover, he is quoting a distance estimate offered not by a neutral medical professional but his political crony Ronny Jackson, who Trump asked to write a memo about the Butler incident in a disturbing and frankly bizarre episode the likes of which we have seen before. (But it certainly quelled media demands for a real medical report.)

(2) There’s no evidence that anyone has been asking Trump what happened, or to tell his story of The Butler Incident, either publicly or privately—largely because the event was public and everyone knows what happened, indeed everyone knows better than Trump does because he spent the incident at the bottom of a pile of Secret Service agents and/or being hustled toward a giant SUV while apparently experiencing some sort of post-event shock (as he kept asking the agents for “my shoes,” which doesn’t suggest a man whose account of events anyone presumes is the most reliable available).

Trump tells this lie about being pestered with questions he’s in no way qualified to answer because he needs a justification for retelling in Milwaukee the story of his alleged assassination attempt. While we would naturally expect him to discuss it briefly, no one expected him to talk about it as a war story because doing so is creepy, self-aggrandizing, and (as noted already) superfluous given that we all saw and heard what happened. To deflect accusations of hubris and blustering piffle, particularly in the face of some of the victims of the attack still being hospitalized, Trump must pretend America has been clamoring for the story he told in Milwaukee.

(3)/(4) This is a very typical, Matryoshka Doll-style Trump lie: a lie within a lie within a lie. Having lied about what we know of what the Butler Incident was, and then having used that lie to justify telling a story of the event no one actually asked him for, Trump—having proven that this is an unnecessary, maudlin story he’s far too gleeful about telling even though it’s clearly too early to tell it accurately or in good conscience—must declare that none of this is so by trying to convince listeners he’s telling the story against his will and only because it was demanded of him.

Obviously, the opposite of what he says here is the truth: not only is this story not too painful for him to tell, his election to tell it was his and his alone, and entirely gratuitous. But because a lie-within-a-lie-within-a-lie isn’t good enough for most pathological liars, Trump encodes a fourth lie here by falsely claiming he’ll never tell this story again.

In fact, he’s told it before and will tell it hundreds and hundreds of times in the future for both personal profit and political gain; he claims otherwise as a transient attempt to make his RNC speech seem special rather than merely a preview of a tall tale he’ll be telling the rest of his life. No reporter Proof could locate accepts as true that Donald Trump will never speak at length about Butler again.

That’s probably the case. However, as the days go by there is an increasing hew and cry by people in general and some members of the media, at least, to get a conclusive report from Butler Memorial. Why is this like pulling hen’s teeth, to mix two metaphors that are commonly used to convey obstinance, difficulty, and scarcity? But, that said, there is also a large group of people, and most of the media, that simply accept Trump’s version that he was 1. hit by a bullet and now we find out, 2. had the bullet been 1/4 of an inch (or even one or two inches) away from where it did in fact hit, that he would be dead.

Where he gets this information, we don’t know. Probably a speechwriter cobbled it together. It is a self serving narrative, like all things Trumpian and it would be nice to find out from actual medical people and law enforcement agencies what happened. We are given to know that the Secret Service and the FBI are conducting formal investigations and it has to be part of the most routine and basic form completion, I would think, to get the plain facts: 1. What instrumentality struck the candidate, an actual bullet? Shrapnel? Plastic? Glass? 2. How was that determined? 3. Where is the evidence (a blood tinged bullet in a baggie and labeled Exibit “A” for instance?) and that 4. is currently stored where?

If this was anybody else but Trump, everything would be going by the book, the release of the medical report (again, look up Ronald Reagan and his attempted assassination,) the results of the CT scan or other testing, the medical prognosis, all of it. We’ve been down this road before, unfortunately. But naturally, Trump takes us down not the usual road but down the primrose path.

That’s understandable and expected. That’s who he is. The truly tragic part of this, to my mind, is the utter complicity of the mainstream media. Nobody seems to care about the basic facts. And it is a valid point, whether he was struck by a bullet or is simply making that part up because it plays out more dramatically than being hit by a small piece of wood chipped off of the podium, for instance.

Those of us who have been questioning the actual facts have been labeled as conspiracy theorists. I don’t see it that way. Where is the Reagan-esque medical report? That’s all anybody is asking for. Until we see that, and we know for a fact certain what happened, all this is, is Donald Trump’s self serving version of what took place. And unfortunately, we now live in an America where that is enough. Few people, including journalists, seem to care about basic facts, basic truth. I find that immensely disheartening — if not downright  depressing.

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