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Donald Trump’s ear appears to have come out relatively unscathed from the July 13 attempt on his life during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, according to a reporter who recently sat down with the former president for an interview.
New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago in August, just weeks after the assassination attempt.
The journalist wrote that during their interview, Trump “raised his right hand and grabbed hold of [his ear]. He bent it backward and forward.”
“They didn’t need a stitch,” Trump said at the time.
“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 added. “I felt immediately that I got hit by a bullet. I also knew it was my ear.”
But Nuzzi wrote in the lengthy piece that “an ear had never appeared to have gone through less.”
She added: “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.”
Former Obama and Trump White House physician Ronny Jackson, now a Republican Texas congressman, told New York that the wound was shaped like a “half moon.”
He added that “there was nothing to stitch” because the bullet had “scooped” some “skin and fat” from the top of the ear.
Jackson also told the magazine that he designed the square bandage that Trump wore over his ear during the Republican National Convention. The ear was inflamed and irritation could lead to further bleeding, so Jackson dressed it with antibiotic ointment and some gauze, before using the square bandage to cover it all up.
“I’m an emergency medical physician,” Jackson told the magazine. “I’m not a nurse. I did the best I could.”
Following a Pentagon report that found that he had taken inappropriate actions during his time as the White House physician, Jackson surrendered most of his medical privileges in 2022. He was also demoted from rear admiral to captain.
Nuzzi wrote that as she inspected the ear, “The particular spot that he identified with his tap was pristine. I scanned carefully the rest of the terrain. It looked normal and incredible and fine.”
When asked about the wound during a recent press conference, Trump said he has “pretty much recovered” and that he’s a “fast healer.”
But after the shooting, Trump was immediately taken to Butler Memorial Hospital, where he asked a doctor, “Why is there so much blood?” The physician told him it was because of the “vascular properties” of cartilage, according to New York.
One person died in the rally shooting, and two others were wounded. The gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, fired eight bullets before he was shot and killed by a Secret Service sniper.
The FBI announced at a press conference last month that so far, the investigation into the shooting has not found that Crooks had any collaborators, that he had a “mixture of ideologies,” and that he had searched for information on events for both Trump and President Joe Biden.
