'Minor distortion': Writer gets close-up look at Trump’s shot ear during Mar-a-Lago visit

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09 September 2024

New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi went to Mar-a-Lago for a sit-down chat Donald Trump's — and got a close-up look at his right ear.

The attempted assassination of the ex-president in Butler, PA, in July left many asking questions after his son, Eric Trump, claimed at the Republican National Convention the shooter "took off half" of his father's ear.

But several, including a Republican lawmaker, wondered if medical records on the injury were being hidden to keep the extent of the wound from the public.

“Trump has posted that his ear was pierced by a bullet, but the sad fact is that he’s an unreliable source. News organizations need to wait for more credible confirmation of what happened,” wrote journalist Steven Beschloss at the time.

Nuzzi's details from the visit three weeks after the incident might explain why Trump's team has been so quiet.

"An ear had never before been so important, so burdened," she wrote on Monday. "An ear had never before represented the divide between the organic course of American history and an alternate timeline on which the democratic process was corrupted by an aberrant act of violence as it had not been in more than half a century."

But when it came to what she observed, it seemed more bark and less bite.

"Yet an ear had never appeared to have gone through less," Nuzzi wrote. "Except there, on the tiniest patch of this tiny sculpture of skin, a minor distortion that resembled not a crucifixion wound but the distant aftermath of a sunburn."

Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), who was the White House physician for Trump, described the specifics of the injury to the reporter.

The wound was “kind of a half-moon shape,” he claimed. “There was nothing to stitch.”

He said the bullet had “scooped” a small amount of “skin and fat” off the top of Trump's ear.

Nuzzi wrote, "By which he did not mean to imply that Trump has especially fat ears."

It turns out, “Everybody has fat and skin on top of their ears,” Jackson said. “He’s got good ears.”

Trump was seen wearing a bandage over his ear at the Republican National Convention days after the shooting, though he took if off soon after because he's reportedly a "fast healer."

Obama photographer Pete Souza was attacked on X after posting a photo of Trump's ear after the incident, showing what Nuzzi appeared to see.

"I was perplexed by photos online of Trump boarding his plane en route to a Bitcoin conference," he wrote on Instagram. "There was no bandage on his right ear. I re-posted one of the photos on Twitter and wrote, 'look closely at his ear that was ‘hit’ by a bullet from a AR-15 assault rifle.'"

The response was so "ugly" he left the platform for Threads.

Read the full piece here.

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