New York Post declares Trump didn't say what the White House just defended him for saying.

…(cont) Then there's the page I keep coming back to, not because it's the strangest thing in the stack, but because somebody got paid to write it: the White House said the man was warning about the risk of a nuclear Iran. I underlined it, because that's a specific kind of sentence built around a specific other sentence, and I wanted to see if they'd still fit together read side by side.

I drive out to the turnpike most Thursdays—old car, fan belt's been complaining since summer, and I don't trust the toll box not to rattle loose—and there's a camera over the gantry that takes your picture whether you want it to or not. If I called up the turnpike authority and told them the camera never caught me that Thursday, what do you suppose they'd send back—my own bumper, or an apology?

So here's the New York Post, that same week, same rally, headline saying he never asked Iran to do any such thing. Their own writing underneath says he was comparing a short-term bump in gas prices to the cost of Iran going nuclear. Which one is that—the thing the governor heard twice, or the thing about gas prices? I wrote both down. They're on the same page.

Down in the corner, smaller writing, there's a note about a man named Hasan Piker, who streams for a living, saying his own 2019 remark was far less damaging than this one. I don't know what a remark is worth measured against another remark. I just know it was in that same stack of paper, so I wrote it down the way I write down everything that ends up in front of me.

I was about to close the book—the dog's been waiting by the door through all of this—when I saw I'd dog-eared a page from the end of August without remembering why. It's a post from the man himself, five weeks before any of this: a video, made up out of nothing, of American forces bombing the island where Iran keeps its oil terminal. The next day's page says that if Iran hit back, they'd be hit again "at a much harder and higher level." That one's dated too. September first.

So which one was the warning—the one he gave at that rally in October, or the one he posted in August, five weeks early? I've got the page. I just can't find the one that says which.