What I Learned When Trump Let Me Inspect His Ear

Donald Trump’s ear that was injured in July’s assassination attempt appears to be just fine after all—at least according to a reporter who had an unusually intimate encounter with it.

New York Magazine reported Monday that, in a sit-down interview at Mar-a-Lago, the journalist Olivia Nuzzi got a very detailed look at Trump’s right ear—the one he infamously bandaged up for the RNC—and declared that it appeared to be “normal” and “fine.”

“An ear had never appeared to have gone through less,” wrote Nuzzi.

Jonathan Drake/Reuters

Nuzzi visited Trump’s Florida estate in early August. It had been less than a month since he nearly escaped death at his Pennsylvania rally on July 13.

Like many have in recent weeks, Nuzzi appeared to fixate on Trump’s injured ear and marveled at how—after a bullet buzzed right past it, leaving it bleeding—it was able to heal so quickly. She asked Trump about his injury, which left his face and ear bloodied on stage, and she reported that he responded by tapping the spot allegedly struck by a bullet fired at him by Thomas Matthew Crooks.

“The particular spot that he identified with his tap was pristine,” Nuzzi wrote. “I scanned carefully the rest of the terrain. It looked normal and incredible and fine.”

Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Nuzzi later added: “An ear had never appeared to have gone through less. 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.”

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on New York Magazine’s report.

Ron Filipkowski, the editor of MeidasTouch News and a regular Daily Beast contributor, has been among the most prominent names scrutinizing the Trump campaign’s claims that the former president was directly struck by a bullet fired by Crooks.

Filipkowski on Sunday shared a recent photo of Trump’s ear, which appeared fully healed, next to the still-disfigured ear of Evander Holyfield, who infamously had the top portion of his ear bitten off by Mike Tyson in 1997 and had to have it surgically re-attached.

Asked about his injury on Aug. 8, Trump said that a bullet struck “the lobe” and that he’d already fully recovered because he is a “fast healer.” 

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

Ronny Jackson, the White House physician for Barack Obama and Trump, told the magazine that Trump’s ear didn’t require stitches. He said the wound was “kind of a half-moon shape” and that the bullet had “scooped” a small amount of “skin and fat” off the top of the ear.

Brian Snyder/Reuters

Jackson surrendered most of his medical privileges in 2022 after a report from the Pentagon determined he acted inappropriately as a White House physician. Jackson, 57, was demoted from rear admiral to captain, and he now represents a conservative area of Texas—that hugs the northwestern state line with Oklahoma—in Congress.

Jackson told New York Magazine that Trump’s ear bandage was his idea.

“I’m an emergency medical physician,” he said. “I’m not a nurse. I did the best I could.”