Opinion: Bullet? Shard of Glass? Welcome to Donald Trump’s Ear Wound Theater
On Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray triggered a firestorm when he told a congressional hearing on the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, “With respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.”
That’s right. Nearly two weeks after gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire on a Trump rally, the director of America’s top law enforcement agency said under oath that law enforcement did not know what caused the injury to the president’s ear that launched a thousand stories of divine intervention and Trumpian heroics. Now, the New York Times reports, the FBI wants to interview Trump, as the agency examines “numerous metal fragments found near the stage” where he was speaking as the incident in Butler, Pennsylvania, unfolded on July 13.
Inevitably, Trump turned on Wray in a characteristically bellicose post on Truth Social Thursday night, claiming Wray’s “only focus is destroying J6 Patriots, Raiding Mar-a-Lago, and saving Radical Left Lunatics, like the ones now in D.C. burning American flags and spray painting over our great National Monuments—with zero retribution. No, it was, unfortunately, a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard. There was no glass, there was no shrapnel. The hospital called it a ‘bullet wound to the ear,’ and that is what it was. No wonder the once storied FBI has lost the confidence of America!”