Recommended: At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall notes law enforcement's unwillingness to confirm or deny Donald Trump's declaration that the injury to his ear was caused when he was grazed by a bullet two weeks agoāand that's not something that's often happened before.
When we first heard the story, police officers told reporters that Trump was injured by debris caused by the bullets impacting elsewhere on the stage; multiple police officers also had minor injuries from that debris. But then Trump announced that it was a bullet that hit him, not shrapnel, and the press scrambled to report it the same way, and law enforcement clammed up.
From first post I wrote on this Iāve 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. Thatās the core reality. But in every case anything like this 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. Thatās another significant failure. Itās not that weāre looking for deep, dark secrets. This is a genuinely major historical incident. The public hears from law enforcement about what happened, the details. Thatās just how it works. In this case, itās hard not to believe that it didnāt 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.
While it would explain why Trump walked away with only trivial injury despite being shot at with a rifle known for pulverizing flesh in a wide area around wherever the bullet hits, the exact physics of how Trump's injury happened is mostly a matter of documenting the historic details of a historic day; it makes little difference when compared to the reality that the shooter came quite close to carrying out a planned assassination. The part that matters more is the part where journalists settledāwithout any evidence at allāon Trump's version of events. "From a journalistic standpoint the idea that anyone would simply take his word for this is bizarre, a total journalistic failure," writes Marshall.
The unnerving aspect is that this is, of course, is one of the ways histories are rewritten. A nation's citizens may think they have seen or lived through one thing, but if figures in power insist that it happened a different way and the press goes along with that, then from there on in the newspapers, and then the history books, "document" the altered version rather than the true one. Over and over we've seen the press bend their narratives to whatever the gaslighting, coup-attempting Trump declares them to be; our current political press corps lives and dies by "access," and has long seen repeating quotes given to them by political figures as the central duty of their jobs. Checking whether reality conforms with the quotes isn't part of the job, and at best is shunted off to their paper's "fact checking" columnist, if one even exists.
So the noteworthy part of this story isn't the physics of how Trump was injured. It's that if law enforcement is withholding that information so as to not once again become one of Trump's rhetorical targets, and if journalists are fine writing down the aggrandized version Trump wants to tell instead, then fifty years from now there likely won't be any record of those details other than Trump's own. They'll have been erased from the historical recordāunrecoverable.
It's a little odd to see it happening in realtime, and on purpose, and only for the sake of flattering a potential new autocrat.
Read it at Talking Points Memo.
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