What I learned when Trump let me examine his ear

Donald Trump's ear, which was injured in the assassination attempt in July, now appears to be fine – at least according to a reporter who had an unusually intimate encounter with the ear.

New York Magazine reported Monday that journalist Olivia Nuzzi took a very close look at Trump's right ear – the ear he infamously bandaged for the RNC – during an interview at Mar-a-Lago and declared it looked “normal” and “fine.”

“Never seemed an ear less to have gone through,” wrote Nuzzi.

In early August, Nuzzi visited Trump's Florida estate, less than a month after he nearly escaped death at his Pennsylvania rally on July 13.

Like many others in recent weeks, Nuzzi appeared to fixate on Trump's injured ear, marveling at how it could heal so quickly after a bullet flew right past it and it bled. She asked Trump about his injury, which left his face and ear bloody onstage, and she reported that he responded by tapping the spot that was supposedly hit by a bullet fired at him by Thomas Matthew Crooks.

“The spot he identified with his fingertip was pristine,” Nuzzi wrote. “I carefully searched the rest of the area. It looked normal and incredible and good.”

Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Nuzzi later added: “Never did an ear seem to have undergone less damage. Except there, on the tiniest patch of that tiny sculpture of skin, a slight distortion that recalled not a crucifixion wound but the distant after-effects of a sunburn.”

A spokesman for Trump's campaign team did not immediately respond to a request for comment on New York Magazine's report.

Ron Filipkowski, editor of MeidasTouch News and a regular Daily Beast contributor, is among the most prominent names to challenge the Trump campaign's claims that the former president was directly hit by a bullet fired by Crooks.

Filipkowski on Sunday shared a recent photo of Trump's ear, which appeared to be fully healed, next to the still disfigured ear of Evander Holyfield, who had the top part of his ear bitten off by Mike Tyson in 1997 and had to have it surgically sewn back on.

When asked about his injury on August 8, Trump said a bullet had hit “the earlobe” and that he had already fully recovered, saying he was a “quick healer.”

Trump was taken to Butler Memorial Hospital after the shooting, where he asked a doctor why he was bleeding so heavily. New York Magazine reported. Trump said the doctor told him it was due to the vascular properties of his cartilage.

Ronny Jackson, the White House physician for Barack Obama and Trump, told the magazine that Trump's ear did not require stitches. He said the wound was “kind of a crescent shape” and that the bullet had “ripped off” some “skin and fat” from the top of the ear.

Brian Snyder/Reuters

Jackson gave up most of his medical privileges in 2022 after a Pentagon report found he had acted inappropriately as White House physician. Jackson, 57, was demoted from rear admiral to captain and now represents a conservative part of Texas that straddles the northwestern border with Oklahoma in Congress.

Jackson said New York Magazine that Trump's ear bandage was his idea.

“I'm an emergency room doctor,” he said. “I'm not a nurse. I did my best.”