I am 99.9 percent sure that Donald Trump was not shot on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. I am 100 percent sure he was shot at that day. It sounds like the Federal Bureau of Investigation agrees with my assessment. Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio that “There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.” I don’t think he’d offer that answer if had any concern whatsoever that he’d later be proven wrong to express doubt.

Let’s start at the beginning. Like all of you, I watched the video of the shooting, and Trump reacted to being injured like you’d react to being stung by a wasp or hit with something hard and sharp. He swatted at his ear and then went down for cover. He wasn’t knocked off his feet. He didn’t seem like he’d been shot.

Then there’s the injury itself. While it’s possible to be just barely grazed by a bullet, in general a round from an AR-15 has terrifying destructive power. In 2023, the Washington Post published an extensive visual report on “how bullets from an AR-15 blow the body apart.” I wrote about it here.

The AR-15 fires bullets at such a high velocity — often in a barrage of 30 or even 100 in rapid succession — that it can eviscerate multiple people in seconds. A single bullet lands with a shock wave intense enough to blow apart a skull and demolish vital organs. The impact is even more acute on the compact body of a small child.

“It literally can pulverize bones, it can shatter your liver and it can provide this blast effect,” said Joseph Sakran, a gunshot survivor who advocates for gun violence prevention and a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

During surgery on people shot with high-velocity rounds, he said, body tissue “literally just crumbled into your hands.”

More typical than a scrape on the ear is what happened to Corey Comperatore, which was described by fellow rally-goer Dr. James Sweetland who tried to help him.

“When I got to him, and I stumbled over people that were hunkered down, there was a large pool of blood. Unfortunately, there was a brain matter there. I did a brief examination of him. He had a bullet wound just above his right ear. And it looked to be fatal,” he said.

After moving Comperatore onto the bleacher bench, Dr. Sweetland performed CPR but said the man had no pulse and was not breathing.

The only medical report we’ve received on Trump’s injury came from Rep. Ronny Jackson, the disgraced ex-director of the White House Medical Unit (WHMU) who does not have an active medical license to practice outside of a military facility.

According to Jackson, Trump sustained a gunshot wound to the right ear that came “less than a quarter of an inch from entering his head, and struck the top of his right ear.”

The bullet track, he said, “produced a 2 cm wide wound that extended down to the cartilaginous surface of the ear. There was initially significant bleeding, followed by marked swelling of the entire upper ear.”

…“Given the broad and blunt nature of the wound itself, no sutures were required,” Jackson wrote.

Jackson simply isn’t credible in any way, so nothing he says can be accepted without some corroboration. By his account, however, an AR-15 bullet hit Trump in the ear and caused nothing more serious than “a 2 cm wide wound” that required no stitches. Photos of Trump’s ear since the incident indicate no scabbing or missing flesh.

But, as Josh Marshall notes, the initial report from Pennsylvania State Troopers was that Trump had been “hit by flying debris kicked up by the gunfire.” That’s consistent with this:

Four local police officers who were just feet away from Trump when the shots were fired also received minor injuries from flying debris from the bullets. (It seems probable that Secret Service agents may have been hit too but we simply haven’t gotten those details. The only reports about the local police officers came from the police department itself and appeared solely in the local press.) It was only after Trump went on Truth Social and announced that he’d been struck in the ear with a bullet that the story changed.

Add this all up, and it’s clear why the FBI doesn’t think it has been established that Trump was struck by a bullet, so he has not, as he claims, “taken a bullet for democracy.”

Yes, he was shot at and almost killed, and he could tell the story that way if he were an honest man. But he’s not an honest man, and that is a big part of the story of his assassination attempt. Even at his most sympathetic moment, he’s acted dishonorably, and that’s the kind of failure of character that typifies him.