Welcome to Media Events by Drew Millard, where you can find high-level cultural commentary at recession-proof prices. Today, we’re talking about Donald Trump, golf, and one detail of the assassination attempt story I have not seen people discuss elsewhere.

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This is super petty and trivial, but I haven’t seen anyone point this out yet so here goes: On Sunday, when the Secret Service foiled a would-be assassin waiting for Trump at the perimeter of one of his golf courses, the former president was playing golf. He was reportedly on the green of the fifth hole.

According to Sean Hannity, who spoke to Trump shortly after the incident, he was shooting even on the day and was about to take a birdie putt before they pulled him off the course. Cool, yeah, sure, why not. Because I am obsessed with golf, and also a masochist, I have watched an entire 56-minute video of Donald Trump playing golf with Bryson DeChambeau, and came away from it willing to believe that Trump is a pretty good golfer. His swing is kinda off-kilter and his putting stroke is super goofy, but he’s able to hit it where he’s aiming and he’s got pretty good touch on and around the greens. If he’s playing on a course he owns, he probably knows it really well, and if he were having a good day I could absolutely see him being even par over four holes with a chance at birdie. This version of events has been widely accepted as fact, and by that I mean they were incorporated into the lede of this CNN story. 

However, there is a wrinkle in this narrative. On Sunday evening, Trey Gowdy, the former South Carolina congressman who is now apparently a Fox News host, had Lindsey Graham on his show to talk about the assassination attempt. Graham had also spoken to Trump after the incident, and claimed that he’d told him he was “two-under after five.” In this version of events, Trump had completed the fifth hole, and had already notched two birdies (or one eagle).

So was Trump even on the day, two under par, or something else? In order to make an educated guess as to the answer, first we have to figure out which set of tees Trump plays from. If you’re a non-golfer reading this, what I mean here is that each hole on a golf course has different spots you start from, which you choose depending on your skill level and ability to hit the ball real long. The hardest and longest version of a golf course you can get is usually denoted by a pair of black markers and is referred to as “the tips.” Each set of tees makes the course progressively easier from there. The second-hardest set of tees is denoted by blue markers, the medium-hardest by white ones, the second-easiest with gold, and the easiest with red. Some courses have more or fewer sets of tees and use a different color-coding system, but those intricacies aren’t super important. According to footage from a LIV Golf tournament held last year at Trump Bedminster in which Trump himself played, he hits from the white tees, aka the medium-difficulty tees. 

Let us now transpose this knowledge onto Trump International Palm Beach, the course where Trump was playing when all the stuff happened. According to its publicly available course tour, the first five holes here include the second- and third-toughest holes of the front nine, but also the easiest. There’s also one par five, and regardless of their stated difficulty it’s almost always easier to get a birdie on a par five than a par four or three. There exists a version of the world in which Trump made birdies on the easy hole as well as the par five, and then got par on three other holes. But I am probably only slightly worse than Trump at golf, and as someone who’s in his general skill band, that’s not usually how things work — if Trump got a birdie, it was probably offset by at least one bogey somewhere else, because golf is hard and also very frustrating. 

Instead, I find the following scenarios most likely:

1. Trump calls Sean Hannity in a state of shock immediately following the incident and tells the truth about his golf score. After taking time to collect himself, he then calls Lindsey Graham and lies about his score. 
2. Trump is honest about his score to both Hannity and Graham. Hannity then dutifully reports the score on TV. Lindsey Graham, however, is unaware of this, and that night, in an attempt to flatter Trump, massages his score downward and as a result presents conflicting information.
3. Trump lies about his score to both Hannity and Graham, giving himself a more impressive score each time he tells it. 

None of this actually matters, of course. Hannity’s version of the story has Trump about to putt on the fifth green, while Graham’s has Trump having just finished putting, but each version would have still placed him on the fifth green when everything went down, so there isn’t even a logistical difference there. More than anything, I’m just fascinated that Trump, after going through the second attempt on his life in as many months, felt it necessary to comment on what he was shooting at all when relaying the story to people. Sure, a trivial detail like that works as a bit of scene-setting, or it can serve as a tension-defusing punchline if you cap the story off with it. 

Besides, Trump is not exactly the most introspective guy. “Usually, something like that would be considered a surreal experience, where you sort of don’t realize it, and yet there was no surrealism in this case,” he told New York Mag following the first assassination attempt, the one where he actually got shot. “I could understand how it would affect some people. Because you’re an eighth of an inch from really bad things happening,” he said elsewhere in the piece. “I like not to think about that because I think that’s positive. You don’t want to think about it too much. But it was pretty amazing.” 

The fact that Trump was alone, save for a friend and some Secret Service guys, means that he largely gets to craft the narrative of what happened himself. In that sense, I’m almost surprised that he didn’t get back out there after being rushed off the course in what appears to have been an armored golf cart, finishing his round after waiting for the all-clear as if the course had been hit by a mere lightning watch. He’s a master of immediately seizing upon the most dramatic thing he could do at any given moment, and then incisively doing it. This is the guy whose first reaction, upon getting shot, was to wonder where his shoes were, before striking a pose and helping create an image so instantly iconic that, for a brief moment, we all began to wonder if the version of Trump that exists in reality might have actually resembled the Trump that exists in his own head.

Getting escorted off the course by Secret Service because of a would-be shooter and then going back out there and finishing his round — or, even better, using the leftover adrenaline to break 70 — really feels like the sort of thing he would do, or at least claim to do.