Fauci writes off worries over Trump’s health post-shooting: ‘Superficial wound’

Former White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci denounced questions around former President Trump's health following the failed assassination attempt a week ago, noting he was suffering from a “superficial wound.”

“I don’t think there is much more to it,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Friday, after watching clips of Trump speaking about his ear, which was grazed by a bullet during the shooting in Pennsylvania. “I mean, from what we’ve seen and what we’ve heard, it was … a bullet shot that grazed his ear and injured his ear.”

Fauci said that according to the physicians who examined the former president, there was no further damage.

His comments come after 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed a roof with a direct line to the former president and began firing off shots during a campaign stop in Butler, Pa., just outside Pittsburgh. Crooks and one event attendee were killed, and two others were critically injured, per the Secret Service, which has come under intense scrutiny following the event.

Fauci, who served under both the Trump and Biden administrations, added that he thinks the former president is “in the clear” related to the “bullet itself.”

“As far as I can see, I mean, it’s dangerous to make diagnoses from a distance. From what I’m seeing, the way he’s acting now and what his physicians report saw, it seems to have been a superficial wound to the ear and that’s all,” Fauci said in comments, highlighted by Mediaite.

Just days after the assassination attempt, Trump formally accepted the GOP presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

While Trump had a visible presence at the convention this week, little information about his recovery or lingering effects from the shooting have been released. The former president wore a large white bandage on his ear throughout the RNC, but has not provided a formal update.

In his speech at the convention and in a post online after the shooting, Trump said he heard a “whizzing sound” during the shooting and then noticed that his ear hurt.

Fauci explained that he would imagine that the physicians who examined the former president after the incident did some sort of brain study, such as a CT or MRI scan, but he can’t say that was done with certainty.

"That would be a reasonable thing to do following an encounter the way he had with a bullet,” the doctor, known mostly for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Friday.