Of All the New Lies He Told in Milwaukee, Trump Disturbingly Saved Most of Them for His Account of The Incident in Pennsylvania
At a time he had the sympathy of many Americans over what’s being described as an attempted assassination, Trump chose to tell 80+ lies about the incident in 9 minutes. Why? This report has an answer.
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Introduction
{Note: Proof has had the same position on political violence since the day it was founded back in 2021: resolutely against. What happened in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13 was a national tragedy—and nothing in this report should be taken as making light of it. In fact, the opposite is true: this report is intended to give the event the journalistic coverage it clearly deserves as a major inflection point in modern American political history.}
For a moment, let’s put aside the truly jaw-dropping fact that Americans have heard nothing from the hospital that treated Donald Trump after what has been described as an assassination attempt. There’s no precedent for Americans being kept in the dark about the emergency medical treatment of a presidential candidate under these circumstances, but let’s leave that aside. Let us forget, too, that Trump has insisted on being the only one in his political campaign to address the incident in public, with the exception of his now-disgraced former doctor Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), whose name Trump cannot recall and who, when he isn’t on Twitter inciting violence among Trump supporters, spends his time fending off robustly confirmed evidence that he ran an illicit pill dispensary in the White House that President Trump himself may have frequented for all we know. The only thing we need to know about Jackson is that as Trump’s doctor (and afterward) he said whatever he had to say about Trump to advance his own, now realized political aspirations; his lackadaisical, unprofessional assessment of Mr. Trump’s injuries in a post-Butler memo that is squarely a political document rather than a medical one can be easily ignored.
For the purposes of this Proof report, let’s even put aside the fact that (a) we know Trump had a CT scan whose results he and his team are hiding; (b) Trump has a history of demanding that doctors sign illegal NDAs that casts a worrisome pall over the otherwise inexplicable refusal of the Pennsylvania hospital that treated him to hold even a single press conference; (c) emergency-room physicians universally concur that if a bullet struck Mr. Trump’s ear as he says it did there’s a real chance of trauma to his brain (exactly the sort of trauma voters would have a right to know about); (d) everything Trumpworld has said about the injury is self-contradictory (the license-expired “Dr.” Jackson first said a bullet took off “the top” of Trump’s ear even as Eric Trump said there was so little injury that no stitches were needed; meanwhile, Trump himself said he could feel the bullet pulling his skin off and used his RNC speech as a forum for a bizarre digression on why ears bleed so much—as if bleeding is shameful and somehow requires explanation); and (e) the entirety of the internet seems sure that Mr. Trump wasn’t struck with a bullet at all but a piece of glass from a teleprompter.
Some of the above must be left behind for the purposes of this report because it’s not relevant to the question asked in the subhead above, and some is simply too thorny to try to unpack in any report not explicitly dedicated to such esoteric issues in isolation.
For example, we know bullets were fired in Butler, Pennsylvania last week because we have a photograph of one near Trump (see below), because a rally-goer named Corey Comperatore was tragically killed by one (and two other rally-goers were critically injured by bullets), and because many of us have by now seen the haunting close-up photograph of the dead shooter, Thomas Crooks, who had with him exactly the sort of AR-15 Donald Trump wants to ban exactly nowhere but within range of his own self.
So claims that there was no shooting in Butler are farcical. There was a shooting, and it was tragic and vile. We can even say—with some certainty—that a rifle bullet was in Trump’s vicinity.
What is only slightly less clear is whether there was an attempted assassination, and what’s not just unclear but indeed preposterous to suggest is what Trump and his allies are now banking on as the sole public takeaway from The Butler Incident: the claim that God has not only chosen Donald Trump to be President of the United States, but has now proven this by sending an angel to Earth to keep Trump from harm.
That this narrative, which Trump has gleefully adopted, cruelly implies that God had no opinion at all on whether Comperatore—a lifelong public servant in his local fire department—lived or died appears not to trouble Trump supporters much at all (for all that Trump awkwardly posed onstage in Milwaukee beside Comperatore’s work jacket, a moment about as convincing as Trump awkwardly hugging an American flag on a similar stage years ago).
We need not doubt why Trump is now using what happened in Butler as a supposed confirmation of his own prior blasphemous claim that he is God’s “Chosen One.”
{Note: The same MAGAs who howled in anger and laughter over Oprah Winfrey once calling Barack Obama “The One”—meaning, the one best suited to shepherd America out of the degradations of the Bush era—on the grounds that it was blasphemous and offensive to say so (though President Obama had nothing to do with Winfrey’s words) are the ones most avidly enthusiastic about a rich white felon and confirmed rapist staking his claim to be God’s Elect. This isn’t so much ironic as a confession of racial animus and fealty to white identity politics.}
What we do need to doubt is the Team Trump account of what happened in Butler, as it simply doesn’t match what we saw and heard on television with our own eyes and ears—and certainly appears to be a wildly cynical disinformation campaign aimed at disrespecting the memory of the event’s dead and injured, one that positions Trump in the story in a way unguided by how events actually unfolded and treats the affair as a newly won, almost mystical political cudgel rather than what it was: a national tragedy.
Donald Trump’s RNC Speech
In the spirit of the viral Proof review of Donald Trump’s Atlanta debate performance, which was easily the most dishonest in contemporary U.S. political history—602 lies in just over 40 minutes of speaking—let’s take a look at what Mr. Trump said about The Butler Incident by reviewing the transcript of his remarks and denoting every easily disproven lie that appears in it. As before, the number in parentheses at the end of certain words, phrases, and sentences is a running tally of how many lies Trump has told about an event that now forms the cornerstone of his 2024 presidential campaign.
Mr. Trump’s words are in italics, below; the notations authored by Proof are in bold.
{Note: It’s important to understand, in reading the speech and annotations below, that Proof is with each dissection of a Trump lie building the case for how we must understand the man’s position on what happened in Butler. So the annotations should be read as building blocks in an edifice of sense and to be detailed even more robustly in the “Conclusion” to this report.}
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 Servant 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.
TRUMP: It was a warm, beautiful day in the early evening in Butler Township in the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (5). Music was loudly playing, and the campaign was doing really well (6). I went to the stage and the crowd was cheering wildly (7). Everybody was happy (8). I began speaking very strongly, powerfully and happily (9). Because I was discussing the great job my administration did on immigration at the southern border (10). We were very proud of it (11).
Notations
(5) It was in fact a hot day—90 degrees—so not just warm. And it was partly cloudy, not “beautiful” (if we take beautiful to mean largely or entirely cloudless). The lack of any meaningful breeze (7 mph) would have made the heat worse for the large crowd who, per usual, had been waiting for hours to hear Trump speak in an open field. Given that many Trump fans have experienced medical emergencies during their hours of waiting for him in outdoors venues across America during this historically hot summer, you might wonder, why are these events being held outdoors at all? Indoor events are both safer for Trump and much cooler for his fans. For that matter, why not hold outdoor events where there’s any chance of some shade?
The answer is simple: money. Much of Trump’s campaign coffers appear to be dedicated to his legal fees, or else be disappearing out the back door to locations unknown. And as Trump was taught by his father Fred to treat even every penny as worth haggling over, so Trump is subjecting his fans to intense heat for the simple reason that it enriches him to do so. It’s also why he must lie about the weather at his events and pretend it was pleasant. This summer that’s rarely been the case.
(6) Who knows what Trump means by his campaign “doing really well” as of July 13? But if past is precedent, this is his toned-down version of claiming his campaign was up “big” over President Joe Biden on that date. Yet in actuality, the July 13 rally occurred in the shadow of the lowest ebb for the Trump campaign in many months: the release of a new non-partisan poll showing him losing to Biden by 2 points (the only non-partisan poll released the day before the rally).
So why does Trump chose to tell this lie? Because it gives Crooks a motive to want to kill him, at least as the poll-obsessed Trump would see it: a desperate desire to stop a presidential campaign cruising at full steam toward victory. But in fact, if Crooks had been an obsessive fan of the sitting POTUS (which he wasn’t; he was a registered Republican from a Trump-supporting family who was part of a Trump-supporting friend group and, according to his classmates, expressed notably conservative views whenever he did mention politics) wouldn’t have chosen July 13 to try to insinuate himself into the 2024 U.S. presidential election—because that date was a high-water mark for President Biden.
(7) This is a minor lie—but one that’s important to Trump’s ego nevertheless. In fact, what Trump has been experiencing out on the campaign trail this year is the same thing major media admits he experienced as he entered to give his RNC speech in Milwaukee: a muted crowd response. To be sure, Trump’s fans do love him; their muted response is actually due to the fact that when he enters a room fans hold up their phones to record or photograph him rather than cheering or clapping. See this video from Butler:
Trump is correct in claiming that music was blaring—but in fact the reason music must now blare at Trump rallies is to cover how few people are actually cheering or clapping (again, not because they don’t love Trump, but because they value getting digital evidence of their involvement in the rally more than they’re focused on their hero hearing their love). Trump lies about this to frame the MAGA “movement” as about love for him rather than selfishness and love of self; this lie is therefore a metaphor for the difference between what Trump says MAGA is and what it really is.
(8) Only those who have never been to a Trump rally would not understand the reason for this lie. A Trump rally is not a happy event to attend: getting through security is arduous; you must arrive hours early to get a spot where you can even see him (and even then your view is often partially obstructed because so many rally-goers hold up their phones while he’s speaking); he arrives between one to three hours late; the event is held outdoors, which means it’s hot and unpleasant in the summertime; and when he starts speaking he just repeats what he says at every rally.
But even beyond this, the idea that Trump needs people to believe everyone at his rallies is happy is so farcically authoritarian an insistence that it’s even been—to great effect—lampooned by Saturday Night Live:
But Trump lies about his fans being happy for another reason, too: to support his repeated, absurd claim that his “movement” is one of “love” (you may recall him saying the January 6 criminals were filled with “love” on Insurrection Day). In fact his explicit aim as a politician has been to incite fear, anxiety, anger, bitterness, and confusion among his fans to render them pliable. These are profoundly unhappy people who must be presented otherwise by their leader not just to obscure who and what they are but more importantly who he is and what he’s deliberately done to them.
(9) From the first sentence of his speech, Trump was unhappy, whiny, and reactive. He began his speech by complaining about the “fake news” being unwilling to show the size of his crowds; his second sentence included a mocking impression of Joe Biden’s voice as a means to question the size of his rival’s rallies; and after saying hello to the crowd he moved immediately to “Our country is going to hell, in case you haven’t noticed: millions and millions of people are pouring in from prisons and mental institutions.” He then quickly added, “Our country’s been stolen from us, you see that. It’s one of the greatest crimes, what they’ve done over four years.”
Others can call this mocking, whining, plaintive tone strong and/or powerful, but no one would call it “happy.” And candidly, using schoolyard nicknames—as Trump did in his first two minutes of speaking in Butler (“Crooked Joe Biden and Laughin’ Kamala Harris,” mispronouncing the Vice President’s name and mocking her laugh for no clear reason)—isn’t seen as the mark of a strong person who feels themselves to be powerful.
(10) No. Trump opened his speech by calling President Biden a criminal, falsely accusing the president of stealing the 2020 presidential election, and claiming that Joe Biden had perverted the spirit of America in such twisted ways that anyone listening to Trump could be forgiven for thinking he was implicitly condoning violence against anyone (including President Biden) who would do such a thing.
Trump claims that he spent most of his time at the start of his speech focusing on his accomplishments, because had he done so it would have been consistent with the false portrait he wants to paint of what was happening in Butler at the time of the incident: he was happy; the crowd was happy; and he was speaking of happy things.
That portrait allows him to paint Crooks as the monster who suddenly intruded on a gloriously happy day with unexpected misery. Yet even Trump, just minutes before gunshots first rang out, described his own fans multiple times as being “desperate” people who felt they needed to do anything possible to “take back” their country from the criminals running it (and as for the Governor of the crowd he was speaking to, he repeatedly called him a “stiff”—an insult Trump likes because, as many of his insults, it carries an undertone of violence; someone is a “stiff” if they’re corpselike).
(11) No, Trump was not proud of the record he left on immigration. He was proud of the false record he pretends he had on immigration—a critical difference, as we will soon see. As you can observe below in a chart published by The Economist, as Trump left office illegal southern border crossings were increasing at an alarming rate after a drop that was due almost entirely to the pandemic and not at all to anything Trump had done. His internal analyses while he was president would have shown him just this, not anything for him to crow about at a campaign rally years later in 2024.
So Trump does here what he often does: “doubles up” his lies by having them work for him in multiple ways. The lie that he was exclusively focused on celebrating his immigration accomplishments when his rally was fired upon hides that (a) he was in fact going through a litany of false complaints about America that could inspire in an unstable person (like Crooks, but in this instance not Crooks specifically) inspire violence against politicians, and (b) he has nothing to be proud of on immigration: he saddled President Biden with a border disaster that took the administration two years to even begin to recover from. (As we see above, it was President Obama, who Trump detests for many reasons including the color of his skin, who decreased the traffic at the border and kept it low; but for the pandemic, Trump would’ve had one of the worst records on illegal immigration of any president of the last fifty years.)
While this can’t count as an additional lie because Trump didn’t raise it during his RNC speech, the fact remains that in the minutes before the shooting Trump was focused on how even the “fake news” admits that it’s “never seen a movement like this” and that the GOP is “more united” than it has been in 40 years. But in fact, not only does major media not report this, the hard data doesn’t show that. The AP now reports, in a poll taken from July 11 through July 15—in other words, a poll that was in the field while Trump was speaking in Butler—that a staggering 1 in 4 Republicans want Trump to retire from politics and end his 2024 campaign. That’s definitely not a united party.
TRUMP: Behind me, and to the right, was a large screen that was displaying a chart of border crossings under my leadership (12). The numbers were absolutely amazing (13). In order to see the chart, I started to, like this, turn to my right, and was ready to begin a little bit further turn (14), which I’m very lucky I didn’t do, when I heard a loud whizzing sound and felt something hit me really, really hard (15). On my right ear. I said to myself, “Wow, what was that? It can only be a bullet” (16).
(12) This is one of Trump’s stranger lies from Butler, and no one ever talks about it. When the rally was fired upon, Trump had just claimed to the crowd that he was going to “go off the teleprompter” to—off the cuff—ask his team whether they had his “favorite” chart on immigration available to put up on one of the screens on either side of him. Why does he pretend here that he hadn’t planned this display in advance? Why pretend that he didn’t know if the chart was available? Why make a show of his dishonest discourse on immigration being ad hoc rather than carefully planned? I feel no certainty on this, but Trump’s own words offer a clue: as his team is getting up on the screens in under five seconds a chart Trump falsely claimed they weren’t preprepared to show, Trump makes a comment about how “damn boring” teleprompters are. This suggests that perhaps he’s lying about this moment being unscripted because he’s aware of the criticism he’s taken lately for staging his rallies so predictably in order to ensure he’s not asked to say or do anything unexpected.
As for the chart that goes up on screen at this point in the rally, it’s one followers of Mr. Trump like to put up on social media: a doctored chart that bizarrely claims he left office in January of 2020 rather than January of 2021, and that treats President Biden’s immigration policies as taking effect the day he assumed the presidency rather than—as anyone with half a moment to think about it and research it would realize—in May 2021 at the earliest. As a result, the chart makes it look like illegal border crossings were plummeting when Trump left office (they were not, in fact they were skyrocketing) and that Biden inherited a great situation at the border (as he did not, and indeed by the time his immigration policies took shape—which was about as quickly as anything can be done in Washington, as Trump himself well knows—the situation Trump left him at the border had gone from a disgrace to an active crisis).
The chart above is infamously disinformation. So Trump was literally spreading hate and animus and systematic falsehoods at the moment violence broke out at his rally. It of course goes without saying that this in no way justifies anything that happened in Butler; it’s mentioned here only to note that the religious cast Trump is about to put on what was happening when gunshots were heard in Butler is truly perverse.
{Note: Trump references the “big red arrow” that is the focal point of the disinformation in this chart just forty seconds before the first gunshot. He then proceeds to tell so many lies in the next forty seconds that it’s almost hard to count them, from lying about the arrow having been put in the chart by the federal government—it wasn’t, and is disinformation—to saying that the arrow correctly shows when he left office (it doesn’t) to saying that “20 million” have entered America illegally under Biden (directly contradicting the chart) to saying that things have gotten worse since the chart was created (in fact illegal crossings are dramatically down since then) to saying that the chart shows the “lowest” level of U.S. immigration in “recorded history” coming under his presidency (it wasn’t the lowest, and it was, in any case, due to a once-in-a-century pandemic and not anything Mr. Trump did as president) to saying that the chart proves Joe Biden is “the worst president in the history of our country” when in fact non-partisan historians have said Trump holds that honor and that Mr. Biden in fact ranks well inside the top third of all presidents ever, and just outside the top quartile.}
(13) See above. The numbers were not amazing—they were dismal—so the simple fact is that it would be and is a lie to say the immigration numbers under Trump were “absolutely amazing.” But it’s also bracing to hear Trump try to obscure the fact that the most dishonest and openly nasty part of his speech in Butler was what preceded the shooting there. Again, nothing can ever justify political violence; it is Trump who almost seems to think otherwise, as he appears to believe that only if he can falsely state he was in the midst of doing something innocuous when his rally was fired open will it make unacceptable an event that (he implies) normal people otherwise might disagree about the basic decency of. Yet no normal American doubts that what happened in Butler was tragic; only Mr. Trump seems defensive about it.
(14) Using this video for reference, we find the following:
[6:55]: Head turned toward to the right (toward the side monitor).
[6:56]: Head turned back toward crowd.
[6:57]: Head remains toward crowd.
[6:58]: Head turned toward to the right (toward the side monitor).
[6:59]: Gunshot heard and Trump grabs right ear.
I’ve no idea why Trump claims he “was ready to begin a little bit [of a] further turn, which I’m very lucky I didn’t do,” but it could be his own misunderstanding of the Hand-of-God explanation his followers have provided for what happened in Butler.
There would have been no reason for Trump to “begin a little bit further turn [to the right]” at the moment the rally was first fired upon because he was already looking at the monitor when he was injured. What he could have said, if honesty were his ambition, is that if he’d turned his head back to the crowd—that is, to the left—he might have been more grievously injured. And perhaps this is true, though to be clear Trump wasn’t about to turn his head back to the left, either. Indeed, he had just turned his head toward the massive wall of disinformation he was presenting to his fans, and clearly would’ve kept it there in the coming seconds. What’s true, though this isn’t what Mr. Trump says, is that the gun was fired when he had his head facing the crowd—so if he had not been so enamored with his own vile disinformation, his head would’ve stayed in that position. But that’s surely not the most romantic way to describe evading a serious head injury, so Trump invents a new sequence of events.
(15) No, if the bullet had “hit[ ] him really, really hard” he would no longer be alive. Indeed, the whole point of this part of the story needs to be—for the story to make any sense—the startling fact that whatever hit Mr. Trump only grazed him slightly (he is correct in noting that the ear can bleed out of proportion to damage caused to it).
But Trump can’t position himself as the victim he needs to be in this story if he admits he was only grazed by an object, so he changes the course of events to a bullet “hitting [him] really, really hard.” No one who understands ballistics would take this account seriously.
To be sure, the grazing was likely painful. But Trump shows no indication at all of being in much pain—which is a problem for his story given what comes next. As a result, he needs his tale to involve him doing everything he did after being grazed by an object as coming in the wake of him actually having been “hit really, really hard.”
(16) No, this is a lie. Not only did Trump have no time to think this, but also no reason to think that a shooter had been able to infiltrate a Secret Service-protected rally. He might have seen a little blood on his hand and realized that the way to get the Secret Service to come to his aid was to get down immediately—per the USSS training he would’ve received—but the idea that he had sussed out exactly what had happened within one second of it happening is nonsensical, and candidly is not likely something Trump even expects anyone to believe. Indeed, as we see in the next section of the speech, Trump is saying he knew it was a bullet before he even knew he was injured. And that takes us from improbability to sheer impossibility.
TRUMP: And moved my right hand to my ear, brought it down. My hand was covered with blood (17). Just absolutely blood all over the place (18). I immediately knew it was very serious (19). That we were under attack (20). And in one movement proceeded to drop to the ground (21). Bullets were continuing to fly as very brave Secret Service agents rushed to the stage (22). And they really did. They rushed to the stage.
Notations
(17) No, video shows a very small drop of blood on his hand. It was not “covered with blood” in any sense of any of those words.
(18) Same as above—though here Mr. Trump demonstrates his “self-inflating lie” technique. In the guise of repeating a lie, Trump actually subtly amplifies its scope. He began by saying there was blood all over his hand (a lie) but then finds himself instinctively wanting a bigger lie, so he moves to the equally false “absolutely blood all over the place.” There wasn’t blood all over the place—at least not up on stage—and indeed there would’ve been no blood anywhere Trump could himself see except the small amount on his fingertips he’d accrued from touching his own ear.
(19) See above. Trump couldn’t know what had struck him at that point, so he could not ascertain the seriousness of the situation.
(20) This is an attempt by the draft-dodging Trump to portray himself as being in a combat situation. Not only did Trump not know there were bullets involved in the situation at this point; not only did he not know that any other person at the rally had been injured; not only did he not know whether an “attack” was happening; but he certainly would have had no sense that “we”—that is, he and the crowd together—were facing a threat, though it makes the telling of his story much more rhetorically effective to bring his fans into the narrative in this transparently manipulative way.
(21) This is a minor lie, but a lie nonetheless. The admonition to “drop” during a live-fire event suggests a spry person who can throw themselves to the ground without fear of injuring themselves. That isn’t what happened with the 78-year-old Trump, and understandably so. Instead, in the video we see him crumple backwards slightly and sort of “lower” himself awkwardly to the ground. It was absolutely the right thing for him to do and the right action to take however he was capable of taking it. So it’s worth noting that he falsely says “in one movement [I] proceeded to drop to the ground”; he appears to be trying to make himself sound more alert, responsive, and gymnastic than he actually is, or than he actually was on July 13. It is a useless, stupid lie, but then, so are many of the lies pathological liars pathologically tell.
(22) No, this did not happen. As the video clearly shows, Crooks had stopped firing—and was possibly dead—before Trump was on the ground. That last sentence is worth reading twice.
Trump falsely claims that bullets were still flying into the rally to craft a better story and imply his own heroism and that of the Secret Service agents in his detail beyond what the truth supports. In situations like these, it’s not like the movies; the scene is not an active war zone, as much as Trump might prefer that for the sake of his story (even if that made-up circumstance he details would have killed far more rally-goers).
Because the USSS has sniper placements at its events, the most that could happen in a situation like this—and that did happen in Butler—is that a sniper gets one to three shots off with an automatic weapon Republicans want available to almost everyone in America before the shooter is killed himself. By the time the would-be victims can react, even before the Secret Service near the president can react in any meaningful way, the shooter has already been downed by the Secret Service. And again, that’s exactly what happened here. So no, it’s manifestly false to claim that “Bullets were continuing to fly as very brave Secret Service agents rushed to the stage”—though Trump of course is telling the truth (it may be the first truth in this part of his RNC speech) in saying agents rushed to the stage once shots were fired.
Trump is willing to tell the truth about this part of the story because it is self-aggrandizing; he likes the idea of manly men rushing into danger to save him because of how important and valuable a person he is. Nor am I exaggerating, here: as a matter of volume, Trump lies far more than he tells the truth, so when he tells the truth it’s a choice. Trump is choosing to tell the truth about what the USSS did after shots were fired because the truth flatters him. If it benefitted him to lie about what agents did to protect him did in order to tell a more self-flattering story, he would do so in an instant. He has no loyalty to them or to the truth whatsoever.
TRUMP: These are great people at great risk (23), I will tell you, and pounced on top of me so that I would be protected. There was blood pouring everywhere (24), and yet in a certain way I felt very safe because I had God on my side (25). I felt that (26).
Notations
(23) This is an odd lie because it is so close to the truth. Trump’s decision to use the present tense in his teleprompter-read—i.e., pre-prepared—RNC speech confirms he intended to lie, here. Yes, USSS agents are willing to put themselves at great risk to protect their charges. But that is not what Trump is saying here. He is saying that at the point that they jumped on him the agents in his present-tense-told story “are…at great risk.” But in fact he knew by end-of-day on July 13, let alone by July 20, that in fact the shooter was already dead by the time agents got to him and that there were no other shooters. So he is choosing to lie here by saying that as the agents covered his body they were at that moment at great risk. They were not, and he knows this.
(24) As already covered, this is untrue. Trump was bleeding robustly from his ear but it was not “pouring everywhere”—a deliberately and needlessly grisly (false) image Trump uses not because it is true but because he understands that his biggest fans like stories with violence in them, whether they’re Hollywood movies or lies told in a political speech.
(25) Trump is an atheist with no religious beliefs or faith, so while he may have felt safe because five people were literally on top of him, it had nothing to do with God and there is zero chance—ask any Trump biographer—that Trump was thinking about God in this moment, or candidly that if he did believe in God he would believe God would be on the side of a sinner the size and scope of sinner Trump well knows himself to be.
(26) As ever, Proof journalism counts “lie repetitions” as new lies. Any fact-checker must do this as a matter of professionalism and ethics.
TRUMP: The amazing thing is that prior to the shot, if I had not moved my head at that very last instant, the assassin’s bullet would have perfectly hit its mark and I would not be here tonight (27). We would not be together.
Notations
(27) This one is a close call, but it’s adjudicated a lie because Trump didn’t move his head at the last instant; because Crooks would have been well aware that Trump was moving his head back and forth between the crowd and the monitor, so there was nothing particularly fortuitous or shocking about the head movements Trump was making at the time; and because we do not even have confirmed by any independent source that Trump was struck with a bullet or that Crooks specifically intended to assassinate him (e.g., he may have been aiming at the stage generally or intending to wound Trump, we simply don’t have conclusive evidence on this yet, as Trump is well aware). Is it a popular far-right meme to show the angle of Trump’s head before and during the shot as a way of suggesting a literal angel sent by God saved his life? Yes—and that’s likely why Trump tells the story this way. But the truth is far more esoteric. Still, this is a white lie compared to the many other whoppers Trump told at the RNC (if we can treat any willful lie by a known pathological liar as anodyne).
TRUMP: The most incredible aspect of what took place on that terrible evening, in the fading sun (28), was actually seen later. In almost all cases, as you probably know. And when even a single bullet is fired, just a single bullet (29), and we had many bullets that were being fired (30), crowds run for the exits or stampede. But not in this case. It was very unusual (31).
Notations
(28) According to this CBS News tick-tock, Trump was injured at 6:11 PM. Sunset in Butler was at 8:51 PM ET. The incident occurred more than three and a half hours before sunset, so Trump claiming that the event occurred in the “fading sun” was purely for poetic effect and had nothing to do with what actually occurred.
(29) This is historically baseless. In fact, in most shooting events where only a very small number of shots are fired, there’s no stampede because people are confused about what they’ve heard and usually attribute to it an innocuous explanation (e.g., that a firework has been set off). In instances where only one shot is fired there’s often enough no crowd reaction at all because either people can’t hear it, hear it but ignore it, or hear it and attribute an innocuous explanation to it because the sound isn’t repeated and so can’t be further assessed as either dangerous or anodyne.
(30) It’s false to say that “many” bullets were fired at the rally. Thomas Crooks fired between 1 and 3 rounds over less than 2 seconds, and then the USSS responded with approximately 4 or 5 shots over two seconds. A total of 5 to 8 rounds being fired in four seconds is not “many” from the standpoint of a mass shooting event; in fact, it is beyond any doubt at the lowest end of the range for such events. Consider that at the infamous Las Vegas shooting in 2017, the shooter fired well over 1,000 bullets (not a typo) across 11 harrowing minutes. What Trump—who has ignored or given a muted response to hundreds of more serious shootings, even telling Americans to “get over it” in the wake of such an event in Iowa—is trying to do here is make his mass shooting the best and biggest one, partly to flatter himself and partly to cover for not caring much at all about other mass shootings (though most such shootings, again, are more deadly and bullet-filled than the one at the Trump rally in Butler).
(31) No. Trump knows why there was no stampede from those fans behind the stage: because his campaign had fenced them in on three-walled metal risers with bunting all over them further making egress difficult if not impossible. The rally-goers were (a) packed in like sardines, (b) had nowhere to go, and (c) could clearly see that there was more danger in the direction of escape—toward Trump—than where they were, so they stayed put. Had any of them tried to rush the stage they not only would have been rushing toward the violence but also risking being shot by Secret Service agents.
Beyond this, the simple fact is that, as CBS News details, those who could run did (and wisely so). In fact, per the CBS timeline, they began fleeing before shots were fired:
No disrespect is intended to any of the Butler rally-goers in saying that Trump hasn’t told the truth about their conduct. They reacted appropriately in fleeing the scene when and as they could. What’s disrespectful is Trump implying his fans are categorically braver than those of his political opponents when there’s no evidence to substantiate that implied claim. And lying about what civilians did during a mass shooting event is an ugly thing to do, even for Trump; we must exert the maximum grace toward people who believed their lives might be in danger, and not use their immobility—orchestrated by a political campaign—to turn them into mere props.
TRUMP: This massive crowd of tens of thousands of people (32) stood by and didn’t move an inch (33). In fact, many of them bravely but automatically stood up (34), looking for where the sniper would be. They knew immediately that it was a sniper (35). And then began pointing at him (36). You can see that if you look at the group behind me. That was just a small group compared to what was in front (37).
Nobody ran (38) and, by not stampeding, many lives were saved (39). But that isn’t the reason that they didn’t move. The reason is that they knew I was in very serious trouble (40). They saw it (41). They saw me go down. They saw the blood (42), and thought, actually most did, that I was dead (43).
Notations
(32) Media says the crowd was “thousands,” not “tens of thousands.”
(33) There was a mass flight from the scene by those in a position to flee, as reported by major media.
(34) No, it was the opposite—everyone did what you’re supposed to do and got as low as possible, as seen in the live shot below (Trump is behind the podium under a pile of Secret Service agents).
What’s so odd about this lie is that the whole world knows Trump has no idea how any rally-goers reacted to the gunshots, as the whole world saw him crumple behind the podium and disappear from view. And the whole world saw the crowd do the smart thing and get low. To lie about this is to needlessly invite skepticism and ridicule.
(35) No, they did not. No one did. It was mass confusion. There was no such clarity.
(36) No, they didn’t. Because by the time anyone knew what had happened, Crooks was dead and his body—if it ever had been—wasn’t visible from the rally any longer. What happened, as we see below, is people pointing to fellow injured rally-goers:
If you know Donald Trump, you know why he told this particular lie. And it’s a truly disgusting reason.
As every biographer learns of Trump almost immediately upon beginning research into his life and worldview, “the Donald” views showing concern first and foremost for others as a sign of weakness; going on offense—for instance, trying to aid law enforcement in locating a shooter—is strength. So in video of Trump fans valiantly trying to get help for their fallen comrades, which was exactly the right thing to do, what Trump wanted to see, instead, was the self-deputization of a mob (which would have been silly and counterproductive). But he didn’t see that, so he invented a new reality more to his liking. This is unsurprising given that he is deeply mentally ill.
What Trump may be trying to weave into his story in a dishonest way are the actions of those not inside the rally who did try to get police to apprehend the shooter ex ante. But Trump never saw those people, never spoke to those people, and did not admit them to his rally, and their story doesn’t center him and camera shots he appears in, so he’s transplanted their heroism to inside the rally and different “in-frame” people.
(37) It was actually a large group behind Trump, not a small one—and for a known (if not good) reason. Trump has long complained about fixed-station major-media cameras not doing something they would never do during a political speech, namely moving off the speaker and scanning the crowd, and has done so so consistently and unyieldingly, though the complaint is groundless and even incoherent, that his team has increased in size the crowd behind him that’s “in-frame” during rally speeches.
The only downside of this is that it reduces the crowd in front of Donald Trump by a commensurate amount, which doesn’t happen at his “tarmac rallies,” where the only thing behind him is “Trump Force One.” Trump likes having lots of people behind him but also does not like having fewer people before him, so it is something of an irresolvable dilemma. But the upshot is this: even in describing a horrific event that led to multiple Trump-fan casualties, what Trump is doing here is preemptively grousing about coverage of his crowd size by falsely claiming very few people were behind him as compared to the crowd in front of him. To be sure, there were many more people before him than behind him, so this is only a white lie, but it’s still that.
(38) A repeated lie. For those counting, this is the third time now he has repeated it.
(39) Stampede deaths are somewhat common on religious pilgrimages in the Middle East and in southeast Asia, but they’re almost unheard of in the United States.
Trump is here fantasizing about his crowds being like religious congregations living under a foreign dictator and/or what he’d deem an exotically deferential religious dogma, but in fact, despite his implicit bloodlust, there was no danger of stampede deaths at the Butler rally—and Donald Trump is almost certainly the only politician who would implicitly wishcast otherwise.
(40) The rally video doesn’t show this at all. What it reveals is an extremely confused crowd with no idea what had happened. Indeed, it didn’t even know why Trump was on the ground. So it not only did not know he was injured—let alone by what he may have been injured—but did not know that he was in “serious trouble” (nor was he, as it turned out, as Crooks was dead within seconds of Trump noticing something had grazed his ear).
(41) There is no evidence from any video of the Butler rally that the rally crowd saw Trump get struck and/or understood that to have happened.
(42) They wouldn’t likely have seen the blood, as most of it came out after Trump was covered up entirely by Secret Service agents on the stage. And since Trump went down almost immediately after touching his ear—and agents “rushed” to the stage, as Trump earlier conceded—there was simply no opportunity for onlookers to see exactly what had happened. Unsurprisingly, many weren’t even looking at Mr. Trump at the time: they were looking at his immigration chart, or looking out at the crowd, or looking at one another, or looking at their phones, or looking at media. They’d been in a hot field on metal risers for hours, and were standing behind the candidate; after hours in the sun, they had no particular reason to be staring at the back of the man’s head. Arguably, they had the worst seat in the house and knew it.
(43) This is purely a construction of the hothouse of Donald Trump’s brain. There is no evidence that rally-goers thought the former president had perished—and many rally-goers have been interviewed by media about their reaction(s) to the event.
TRUMP: They knew it was a shot to the head (44). They saw the blood (45). And there’s an interesting statistic. The ears are the bloodiest part (46). If something happens with the ears they bleed more than any other part of the body (47). For whatever reason the doctors told me that (48).
And I said, “Why is there so much blood?” He said, “It’s the ears, they bleed more.” So we learned something (49).
Notations
(44) None of this is true. They did not know it was a “shot,” and did not know he had a “head” injury.
(45) Another repeated lie. Indeed, this is a lie he has already repeated multiple times.
(46) The ears bleed a lot, it’s true, but not even close to “the most.” As a two-second Google search explains:
Trump is telling this lie because he’s embarrassed about having been seen in public bleeding, as he considers blood unsightly and—incredibly—a sort of weakness (and no, the metaphor here shouldn’t be lost on anyone, given his bloodless sociopathy). Many parts of the body bleed more than the ears; arteries are simply one example.
(47) A repeated lie.
(48) They almost certainly told him that ears bleed a lot. But they couldn’t have said that the ears bleed more than any other part of the body and remained reputable doctors intending to keep their medical licenses. It’d be medical disinformation.
(49) A repeated lie—but also, more interestingly, a self-acknowledged one. Trump here admits that the doctor didn’t say the ear is the “bloodiest part,” but in telling a fact in support of a false claim he turns what wouldn’t otherwise be a lie into a lie.
TRUMP: They just, this beautiful crowd, they didn’t want to leave me (50). They knew I was in trouble (51). They didn’t want to leave me (52). And you can see that love written all over their faces (53). True (54).
Notations
(50) That is not what happened, as explained above.
(51) A repeated lie.
(52) A repeated lie.
(53) Trump couldn’t and didn’t see their faces. He was face down on the ground and then busy getting hustled into a waiting SUV.
(54) A repeated lie.
TRUMP: Incredible people. They’re incredible people. Bullets were flying over us (55), yet I felt serene (56). But now the Secret Service agents were putting themselves in peril (57). They were in very dangerous territory (58).
Notations
(55) A repeated lie.
(56) A repeated lie.
(57) A repeated lie.
(58) A repeated lie.
TRUMP: Bullets were flying right over them (59), missing them by a very small amount of inches (60). And then it all stopped. Our Secret Service sniper, from a much greater distance (61) and with only one bullet used (62), took the assassin’s life. Took him out.
Notations
(59) As already noted, there were no bullets flying in the rally grounds at this point.
(60) This is another example of Trump quickly augmenting a lie with another lie that is loosely based on the first one. The U.S. Secret Service was heroic on July 13; that Trump feels he needs to lie about what they did and the danger they were in to flatter himself is frankly grotesque.
(61) An easily disproven lie. The distance was the same or closer to the distance of the Crooks shot. There’s no need for Trump to opine that the Secret Service is better at sniping than Crooks—it’s self-evident—but he does so anyway, because he sees his USSS detail as “his” Secret Service team and therefore a reflection of him. They have to be the best at everything and be better at everything than anyone else is (him excluded, of course).
(62) Trump is well aware of how many bullets the Secret Service fired on July 13, and it was far more than one. This is more self-aggrandizing grandstanding; it assumes public opinion of his Secret Service detail and public opinion of him are conjoined.
TRUMP: I’m not supposed to be here tonight. Not supposed to be here. [Crowd chants “Yes, you are.”] Thank you. But I’m not. And I’ll tell you. I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God (63).
Notations
(63) Trump is certainly entitled to say that he was “supposed” to be killed on July 13, as that’s his opinion. What he can’t do without being called out for lying is pretend to be a believer—let alone attribute the death of Corey Comperatore instead of him as an act of “almighty God.” That is simply garish.
TRUMP: And watching the reports over the last few days, many people say it was a providential moment (64). Probably was (65). When I rose, surrounded by Secret Service, the crowd was confused because they thought I was dead (66). And there was great, great sorrow (67). I could see that on their faces as I looked out (68). They didn’t know I was looking out; they thought it was over.
Notations
(64) This is a very sneaky lie. Yes, evangelicals say it was a providential moment, but note that Trump here attributes this view to “reports” that can be “watched” on TV or online—in other words, major-media reports. No one in major media is putting Trump’s survival down to God. So Trump is implying a religious ecstasy among the D.C. media over his survival that is simply, again, a sad and fantastical self-creation.
(65) A repeated lie. Trump doesn’t believe he was saved by God, as indeed there is precisely no evidence whatsoever—and a mountain of evidence to the contrary, in his repeated private mocking of all religious persons—that Trump believes in God. I have provided over 20 major-media reports on Trump’s mockery of religious persons on the Twitter feed associated with Proof, so I won’t repeat those well-known links.
(66) Trump is an amazing liar—an actually impressive liar. Many will miss this, but in this statement we find another “augmenting and amplifying” lie. Trump, having just told his evangelical fans that he’s a devout believer when he’s not, now says “When I rose…the crowd was confused because they thought I was dead.” Yes, that’s right: he is comparing himself to Jesus Christ, the man Christians believe is the Son of God.
It is no coincidence that Trump has called himself God’s “Chosen One” and is now describing himself in a manner conspicuously intended to invoke the Resurrection.
(67) A repeated lie. There was no “sorrow,” because the crowd was confused and did not know what had happened for certain—not even after Trump stood up. And note how Trump personally approved a speech that here slips into King James Bible-like language: “And there was great, great sorrow.” This is manifestly a continuation of him comparing himself to Jesus.
(68) A repeated lie. He did not have the time to see the faces of the crowd, and there is no evidence that he did so based on his sight-lines in all videos of the event. But we also must note here more Biblical language. As anyone who really likes to watch evangelical sermons (as I do) for reasons they can’t even explain to themselves will know, evangelicals are often told that God’s watching you even when you don’t think He sees you, and that when you feel your life is over he has plans for you that you still can’t see. Thus: “They didn’t know I was looking out; they thought it was over.” This line makes no sense unless you understand that Trump is comparing himself to God and Jesus simultaneously in this portion of his categorically blasphemous speech.
TRUMP: But I could see it and I wanted to do something (69) to let them know I was okay (70). I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousands of people that were breathlessly waiting (71) and started shouting, “Fight, fight, fight!”
Notations
(69) If you have watched the Butler video carefully, you know why this is a lie. First, Trump began pushing the Secret Service in order to make a gesture to the crowd before he could see anyone in the crowd based on his sight-lines, so he didn’t decide to gesture to the crowd in response to the looks on the faces of rally-goers. He more probably did it because, as a lifelong entertainer obsessed with being on camera, he instinctively knew the importance of optics in that particular moment of his life.
(70) Yes, this is a separate lie. Had Trump in fact signaled the crowd that he was okay, it would’ve suggested he was worried about them more than himself. In fact, this is just another “augmenting and amplifying” lie: having falsely told the RNC that he saw the faces of his fans and wanted to respond to their look(s) of grieving, he now adds the further lie that the response he gave was one of love and caring. In fact, as we can see in the video, the look was one of anger: he shouted “Fight! Fight!” with a closed first—the very words he knows helped bring on the destruction and carnage of January 6—rather than simply waving to the crowd, which is the universal signal for indicating physical safety all athletes, celebrities, and other public figures use.
(71) A repeated lie. The crowd was in confusion; it wasn’t “breathlessly waiting” for his signal. But of course it flatters his vanity—ultimately the only point of a Trump speech—for him to think so and, even more so, for him to say so publicly and on TV.
TRUMP: Once my clenched fist went up, and it was high into the air (72), you’ve all seen that, the crowd realized I was okay and roared with pride for our country like no crowd I have ever heard before (73). Never heard anything like it (74).
Notations
(72) Who knows why this lie was necessary; it appears to be about the poetry of the thing. As video of the event clearly shows, Trump insisted that Secret Service agents in the midst of doing their job—who he claims were in mortal danger—“Wait! Wait! Wait!” to take him to a waiting SUV so that he could create a made-for-TV moment.
It is a decision we see Trump making in the video as he is looking down at the ground and then fixing up his hair for his big moment (yes, really, watch the video) rather than while he’s looking at the crowd. And Trump, because he’s fighting his own Secret Service detail to make a political ad whose timing endangers them—per him—is in fact not able to get his fist fully up over their shoulders, he instead gestures with his fist toward the audience rather than at the sky. But since iconic fist-pumps are always toward the sky (and God) rather than toward the Earth and Man, Trump tells the lie that his fist was “high into the air.” It wasn’t. But we can see poetry and potential Biblical resonance in Trump falsely saying a symbol of his might appeared “high in[ ] the air” after the Butler Incident.
(73) There was a cheer, but not an abnormally loud one. Largely because—as noted—the crowd was more confused and scared than anything else. And understandably so.
(74) A repeated lie.
TRUMP: For the rest of my life, I will be grateful for the love shown by that giant audience of patriots that stood bravely (75) on that fateful evening in Pennsylvania. Tragically, the shooter claimed the life of one of our fellow Americans: Corey Comperatore. Unbelievable person, everybody tells me (76). Unbelievable (77).
Notations
(75) A repeated lie. Most in the crowd were crouching, not standing, as is clear from the video and as—again—was wholly appropriate under the circumstances. It would have been idiotic, truly and deeply imbecilic, for rally-goers to be standing upright and as tall as possible rather than trying to stay low. But crouching makes for a bad visual and an even worse narrative.
(76) The lie here is not that Corey Comperatore was an amazing person. I’m sure he was. The lie here is that “everybody” told Trump this, because in fact major media reports that Trump exhibited little concern for Comperatore until much later, and discussed him with almost no one. Rather, after The Butler Incident Trump got on the phone and started calling political allies and advisers to determine how the event would play in the campaign; he made no move to contact Mr. Comperatore’s widow.
That came much, much later.
So what the lie here is intended to do is make listeners think he immediately began talking about Comperatore post-event, asking people about him and trying to learn more about him and contacting many people who knew him well enough to speak to his character. But in point of fact, none of that actually happened.
(77) This lie is somewhat ambiguous, but as the word “unbelievable” is intended to double down on Trump’s false story of him seeking out “everybody’s” opinion on Mr. Comperatore, it must be treated as a repeated lie.
TRUMP: And [the shooter] seriously wounded two other great warriors. Spoke to them today: David Dutch and James Copenhaver. Two great people. I also spoke to all three families of these tremendous people. Our love and prayers are with them and always will be. We’re never going to forget them. They came for a great rally. They were serious Trumpsters, I want to tell you. They were serious Trumpsters and still are. But Corey, unfortunately, we have to use the past tense. He was incredible. Yeah. He was a highly respected former fire chief. Respected by everybody. Was accompanied by his wife, Helen. Incredible woman. I spoke to her today. Devastated. And two precious daughters. He lost his life selflessly acting as a human shield to protect them from flying bullets. He went right over the top of them and was hit. What a fine man he was. I want to thank the fire department and the family for sending his helmet, his outfit and it was just something, and they’re going to do something very special when they get it.
Notations
Trump gets a pass on all of this, as confusion can still exist about the seriousness of other injuries at the rally—we don’t have medical documentation or a presser from the hospital, so we can’t know much in the way of details—and Trump pretending that people he spoke to for a matter of seconds are “great people” because he has made that assessment from speaking with them rather than saying it automatically of anyone who attends one of his rallies is par for the course with him.
Of course Trump doesn’t pray; of course he’s already forgotten the fallen from Butler; of course he has only a limited sense of how deep into MAGA these alleged “serious Trumpsters” (a phrase repeated twice) actually were and are. Of course he doesn’t have enough information about Corey Comperatore to know if he was “incredible” and “respected by everybody,” but since we all certainly hope this is true, and also hope that Helen Comperatore and everyone else Trump meets who likes him and flatters him is “incredible,” I am not going to say any of this is deceitful despite the fact that some of it likely is.
TRUMP: We did something which cannot match what happened. Not even close. But I am very proud to say that over the past few days we’ve (78) raised $6.3 million. For the families of David, James and Corey. Including from a friend of mine just—called up, he sent me a check, right here, just got it. One million dollars. From Dan Newlin, thank you, Dan.
Notations
(78) The GoFundMe effort wasn’t spearheaded by “we” the Trump campaign (despite false claims it was set up by Trump campaign finance director Meredith O’Rourke, it was in fact set up by Jason Bubb; a second, later fund set up by Ms. O’Rourke as “President Trump Authorized” was intended to draw attention away from local do-gooder Bubb and turn attention to Trump instead, perhaps even with an eye toward using language in the setting up of the Johnny-come-lately fund that would allow the campaign to use some donated money) but I’m certainly glad it happened, even if Trump adding his fundraiser’s total to Bubb’s while cutting Bubb out of the story is an obscenity. Will Dan Newlin’s check make it to the families of victims without Trump getting his cut—which can be up to 33%? If past is precedent, honestly no. But I certainly hope it does. In any case, Trump is lying about the involvement of his campaign in a publicly popular fundraiser, just as he’s infamously done in the past.
TRUMP: And again, when speaking to the family, I told them, I said, “Well, I’m going to be sending a lot of money, but it can’t compensate.” They all said the same thing: “You’re right, sir; we appreciate so much what you’re doing, but nothing can take the place, in the case of Corey.” And the other two. By the way, they were very, very seriously injured. But now they’re doing very well. They’re going to be OK. They’re going to be doing very well. They’re warriors.
So now, I ask that we observe a moment of silence in honor of our friend Corey.
Notations
Trump again gets a pass here because we don’t know what was really said between him and the families of the Butler victims—though certainly telling a family that money can’t replace the loss of a loved one is inconsistent with Trump’s personal ethos and therefore something it’s rather difficult for a Trump biographer to believe he said. Remember, this is the man who had to have put on notecards a reminder to show sympathy for shooting victims and their families. Yes, really.
Does Trump know if the victims are warriors? Does he know the extent of their injuries? Does he know how their recovery is going? No, of course not. But we can safely put such easy assurances in the category of mere “bullshit” rather than lies.”
TRUMP: There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for others (79). This is the spirit that forged America in her darkest hours (80). And this is the love that will lead America back to the summit of human achievement and greatness. This what we need.
Notations
(79) This is specifically something we know Trump doesn’t believe. I needn’t quote all the major-media reports—there were scores—confirming that Trump told his then Chief of Staff John Kelly, a decorated military officer, that anyone who lays down their life for others is a “loser” or “sucker” because there’s “[nothing] in it for them.”
For Trump to cynically express the opposite view at the RNC is nauseating. But Trump does often try to kill two birds with one stone with his lies—and this lie covers territory that has caused him political grief in the past and that he would want to find a way to address without causing too much new focus on it. In other words, he is repudiating his own prior statements about personal sacrifice without acknowledging he ever made them. (And in fact he never has; he has chosen to libel and slander the military veteran Kelly instead, framing him as a disgruntled former employee; in fact, Trump let Kelly go only after learning Kelly was about to resign.)
(80) This is not just a repeated lie but one that directly contradicts everything Trump had ghost-written into his torrent of published “autobiographies.” For years Trump has made very clear that he believes the spirit that has sustained America from its Founding is one of capitalistic rapaciousness, toxic masculinity, and above all the “killer” instinct his father trained him to have. Yes, that’s right—Fred Trump often spoke to Trump of becoming a “killer,” and specifically inculcated in him the view that thinking of others first is weakness. But as it would not do for Trump to say that he has proudly become what Thomas Crooks clearly was—a killer—before an RNC crowd that somehow still thinks he has principles, he lied instead and said that he believes (as he does not) that “the spirit that forged America in her darkest hours…[is having the] love [of country] to lay down one’s life for others.”
{Note: As observed above, this report gives Trump a temporary pass on countless statements that would normally be deemed lies, confirming that the proper final tally of lies in the nine minutes and change Trump spent speaking the words above would be slightly north of eighty.}
Conclusion
Trump believes he can win in November in significant part on the strength of what happened in Butler and the newly aggressive rhetoric it will—in his view—afford him.
But to achieve that end, he has to ensure that he alone is heard above the din of voices with respect to what actually happened in Butler. Not President Joe Biden, who spoke to the nation after the event; not the FBI and DOJ, who are investigating it even as Trump threatens to destroy both of them with an iron fist if he’s re-elected; not the MAGA rally-goers who spoke to major media after the incident and in some instances said things about what happened that don’t make for a tight, politically advantageous narrative.
So Trump has silenced his doctors; silenced his campaign; and even appears to have made it so that he would be the one focusing on the events in Butler in Milwaukee, not anyone else. He wanted his version of events—which includes events to which he was not a percipient witness, imagined episodes that bring him into the story in false ways, and the scores of lies we have seen above that range from timeline distortion to actual blasphemy—to be the controlling one, confirming that he sees the Butler Incident as a powerful political weapon that he can now wield as he pleases.
And for all that, the speech excerpt above was intended to be—incredibly—Trump at his most reasonable. All of these lies were delivered in a calm, deliberate tone that was supposed to presage a new “Unity Trump” (sort of like the final form of a Squaresoft boss in a Final Fantasy game) but of course gave way to hateful rhetoric before Trump had even finished speaking in Milwaukee.
Even more disturbingly, this is was also Trump at his most scripted: he had put all his lies on a teleprompter and then read (at least at first) from the teleprompter dutifully; he started to go off-script later on in his speech, and not surprisingly as soon as he had freed himself from the shackles of giving a conventional, disciplined speech written in advance he was as bitter, acidic, and hateful as ever. And yes, he told many lies in the 80 minutes of vitriol that followed the ten minutes of relative if dishonest calm that preceded them. But the newest lies, the most staggeringly implausible lies, and the ones that were the most subtle in shade and highest in density were the ones about Butler.
Why?
Why, for that matter, work so hard to shroud in secrecy the medical records that were produced as part of an incident Trump claims has only made him more popular and led to an outpouring of support? Is it because CNN confirms he had a CT scan, and releasing its results might show more of what is happening in Trump’s brain than he would prefer? Is it because even being grazed by an assault-rifle bullet can cause a traumatic brain injury, as not just CNN’s medical experts but every medical expert this side of “Ronny Johnson” has confirmed? Is it because he wasn’t hit by a bullet but by a fragment of glass or metal blown free by a rifle shot, which would call into new relevance not just the divergent descriptions of his injury but whether he was the main target of the attack at all? Who knows. Certainly, the smart money would be on this being (a) a legitimate assassination attempt that (b) was conducted using an AR-15 with live rounds, and (c) Trump’s ear being grazed by one of those rounds. But if the truth is as simple as that, which it likely is, why work so hard to hide it from America?
And indeed, Trump is hiding these medical reports and is barring these doctors from speaking to the country at a time when there’s increasing doubt about his own mental acuity, mental health, and long-term physical stamina. One imagines that a medical report of a recently shot 78-year-old isn’t going to deliver any news that voters would deem “good”—it’s just odd that Trump is taking the view that such a man has a right to hide all his records from voters at a time he and his followers are carpet-bombing America with claims Joe Biden can’t be president unless and until he agrees to make his medical records a public free-for-all. One hardly expects intellectual consistency from Donald Trump, but he’s taking a pretty big risk—at least on paper—by hiding these records at a time when it would dovetail with his political rhetoric far more effectively to share them. And when hiding them only encourages people to think there’s something in those medical records that Donald Trump feels he needs to hide.
And in fact, the group most likely to think something’s being hidden here are MAGAs, not Democrats. Overheated, borderline-hysterical op-eds about “Blue MAGA” and “BlueAnon” notwithstanding, in fact it’s Trump’s biggest supporters who are now claiming—I hate to even spread this nonsense, but it’s already all over the internet—that there was a second shooter on the water tower in Butler who was killed at the same time Crooks was, that the Secret Service deliberately used Crooks as cover for a failed “deep state” assassination attempt, and that one reason America needs to see Trump’s medical records is that they’d reveal what angle the bullet struck him at and therefore where the “real” shooter was. Yes, this is deranged rambling—but the fact that Trump won’t release his medical records to put a stop to all of it suggests a darker motive than any previously contemplated: that Trump wants his fans to falsely think the so-called “deep state” is trying to kill him because it will activate their desire to vote (and be violent if he loses in November) as much or more than anything else will.
As for Democrats? Media criticism of them aside, most are simply saying (a) they would like to hear from doctors rather than politicians after the first assassination attempt on a presidential candidate in well over half a century, and (b) if the Secret Service wanted Trump to be killed they could make it so in a million ways much less positively Byzantine than this—so anyone saying otherwise is an abject moron. (This is the view Proof takes of these far-right conspiracy theories about Butler, in any case.)
A man who will lie about a national tragedy in Butler is the same sort of man who would lie about a national tragedy at the World Trade Center—as Trump did in falsely claiming he saw U.S. Muslims celebrating the 9/11 attacks, or as he did in going on national TV on 9/11 ostensibly to talk about the effect of the attacks on New York but immediately began using his precious air-time to crow about one of his buildings now being the tallest in New York. A man who will lie about Butler will likewise lie about a helicopter crash that killed a good friend of his, as Trump did and as I reported while writing for HuffPost back in 2016. A man who’ll lie about getting shot at because he thinks he can cynically make hay about a national tragedy is also a man who’d stage a tragedy for personal profit. Do I think Trump did here? No, I don’t.
But I think he has done so in the past—from lying about the threat posed by Qasem Soleimani being imminent when he worked with his friend Benjamin Netanyahu to illegally assassinate the Iranian leader in early 2020 (a war crime that almost sent America spiraling into a hot war with Iran, and impossible to justify even despite the fact that Soleimani was a villain) to Trump calling mere “headaches” the TBIs scores of our soldiers received when Iran retaliated for the illegal Trump-Netanyahu hit.
From him politicizing an Afghanistan withdrawal plan that his own concessions to the Taliban made necessary—making him significantly responsible for the deaths of 13 soldiers during that withdrawal—to him helping murderous autocrat Mohammed bin Salman cover up yet another national tragedy: the assassination, dismemberment, and immolation of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
These are just a few examples. Trump has regularly created national tragedies only to try to profit from them on the back end—from January 6 to the way his jack-booted, masked federal army brutalized nonwhite protesters in D.C. in the summer of 2000 (only for Trump and allies to use that brutalization as a post-January 6 talking point, claiming that the supposed need for such brutalization only underscored how violent an [actually peaceful] D.C. protest had really been)—so if some Democrats imagine Trump might have been hit by a piece of glass in Butler and not grazed by a bullet, they ought to be forgiven for being of the view that Trump lying to all Americans about a tragedy would merely be a return to form.
Democrats are right to think that Trump and his team are trying to use Butler as a justification for quelling dissent over Trump’s plot to turn transform America from a democracy into a Christofascist kleptocracy. Democrats are right to demand a level of transparency from Trump he’s never offered to voters, whether it’s about tax returns or the White House visitor log or medical records or his many draft deferments or his many Emoluments Clause violations while in office or conversations with Vladimir Putin that were supposed to be transcribed and never were. It’s natural for a man who plans tyranny to hide it; it’s natural for a sociopath to on occasion see the benefit in hiding what he is. But if America is going to be hearing—and yes, it will, including from Trump himself—repeated references to what happened in Butler over the next fifteen weeks, we’ve a right to a modicum of truth instead of the 80+ lies Trump told about The Butler Incident in Milwaukee.
If there was any intervention going on the day of the shooting it was Satan’s. As dark magic does indeed have power. Look how many people fall inline behind Trump.
Satan’s gift is deception, with Trump as one of Satan’s head lieutenants, he’s been empowered with this gift also.
It will be those with light in their hearts who will be voting for Biden making sure evil does not enter the Oval Office again.
Per CBS, the doctor who treated Trump said he didn't even need stitches.