Whizzing Sound
Trump’s account of the shooting goes like this: “I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin … Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening.” This doesn’t really add up. The video of the shooting shows Trump grabbing his right ear, but when his hand comes away, there’s no blood on it. Right after that, he jumps down to floor of the platform, behind the lectern from which he’d been speaking. During the scrum under the podium in the seconds after the shootings, an agent informed Trump that his head was bleeding. Before this he apparently didn’t know he was bleeding, in spite of his claim that he felt the bullet tearing his flesh.
An image of his right ear taken after the security team had lifted him back up shows two notable abrasions: a deep gash in the soft area between the front part of the ear and the skull, and a nick on the upper back part of the outer ear. If a bullet had hit the flesh of his head just in front of the ear, it would at the very least have torn his ear to shreds; likely, it would have gone straight through to his brain. A more plausible explanation for the wounds goes like this: Trump grabbed his ear when he heard a bullet buzzing less an inch past his head; this, plus the sounds of the two shots that preceded it, convinced him that he was in danger, so he ducked under the podium. When the Secret Service agents rushed in to shield him, he probably hit the side of his head against the base of the podium, causing the two parallel cuts in his skin and cartilage. Trump is no doubt on a blood thinner to control blood pressure, which is why the bleeding was so profuse and runny.
In the conversation between the agents and Trump, the former president showed no interest in whether anyone else had been hurt; all he cared about was retrieving his shoes. Before the agents whisked him away, he insisted on pausing for a moment to pump his fist and shout, “Fight!” Though it was clear by then that the shooter had been killed, Trump didn’t take the opportunity to look around him, to see what had happened in the crowd and especially to the people in the line of fire directly behind him. Instead, his instinct was to face the cameras and make a gesture of defiance.
Why does any of this matter? Because it underscores what a profoundly silly, empty person Donald Trump is. He was the center of a mass shooting which almost left him dead. But his only real concern was to mythologize the moment, inventing details of a non-existent bullet wound, making sure the cameras saw him as the man of the hour, grandstanding theatrically while people around him were wounded and dying.