Over on X (Twitter), there are thousands of users demanding to see Trump’s medical records. They don’t believe he was struck in the ear by a bullet or that the damage was slight. (Over on Facebook I had a friend tell me that it was a shard of glass from the teleprompter even though both teleprompters were undamaged.) Many are upset by my popular comment to one of these ridiculous tweets:
As you can see above, one of the themes on this and other threads is that folks are justified in demanding answers because others are demanding answers about Biden’s conditions—as if these situations are analogous. There is something clearly medically wrong with Biden. You have to be willfully blind to deny it (millions have been willfully blind for years now). That people want to know what the hell is going on with the man in charge of the nuclear codes, and why the public has been lied to about it for years, is entirely rational, indeed necessary. Is it some form of dementia? Did he have a stoke? Syphilis? Who knew? When did they know? If you don’t care about all that then you don’t care about your country or the safety of your kinfolk and the rest of humanity.
In Trump’s case, we know what happened to his ear: he was hit by a bullet in an assassination attempt. I watched it live. I heard the shots. There is a photo of the bullet for Christ’s sake. I witnessed people, objects, and structures hit by bullets. There was a man with his brains blown out. his name was Corey Comperatore, a fifty-year-old volunteer fire chief who dived onto his family to shield them from the bullets. There were others—David Dutch and James Copenhaver—who were serious injured. I saw video of the shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks on a roof and his body after the threat he posed was neutralized. Even if no bullets had hit Trump it wouldn’t change the fact that there was an attempt on his life—and that is the heart of the matter. If the attempt on his life had been the actions of a lone wolf motived by a death wish campaign by Democrats and the corporate media (see They Tried to Kill Donald Trump Yesterday) or organized by the deep state to eliminate Trump before the convention so Nikki Haley could be nominated in his stead, it was still an attempt on Trump’s life. You’re fucking batshit crazy to deny that—and not to care.
I have seen memes that the blood was fake, that it was ketchup (a former drummer of mine shared such a meme), that it came from a blood capsule that Trump smashed against his ear as the shots rang out. It was staged, they claim. Not a handful of people say this. The number of threads on X about how the assassination attempt was a setup (maybe it was, but not the way they think it was). If they don’t believe it was staged, then they must believe that the president is clairvoyant and knew so far ahead of time that somebody was going to shoot at him and that the bullets would whiz past his right ear that he carried to the rally a blood capsule he could break on his ear in order to make an assassination attempt on his life appear even more dramatic than it did. If it was staged, are we also to believe that the firefighter didn’t die or that Trump is so evil that he had the firefighter killed to make the attempt appear more realistic? I actually heard in a man on the street in view segment a man who said that Trump cares so little for human life that it would no problem at all for him to sacrifice an audience member to make the assassination attempt appear realistic.
Even the corporate media is asking about the medical report. NBC News runs the headline “Three days after the shooting, Trump reveals little about his medical condition.” Ronny Jackson, Trump’s former White House physicians, whose nephew’s neck was grazed by a bullet, dressed the wound this morning and reported that Trump was missing “a little bit at the top” of his ear. Of course, you can see that from the photos. To be sure, there are questions in need of answering. How did this happen? Was it a lone gunman? If so, did he work alone? Why did the police and secret service do such a lousy job of protecting the president and the audience? How did they fail to prevent the event at all? Was it intentional? In any serious investigation, all these questions would be on the table. But that an attempt was made on the man’s life and that he was centimeters away from death or serious injury is not in question. This happened. You don’t need to see his medical records or the wounded ear. What you need to do is acknowledge is the brutal truth of what happened: somebody tried to assassinate the president.
We all know what the freakout tells us: Democrats believe that this event may increase Trump’s chances of winning the presidency again. They know that it is not the assassination attempt per se, but the way the man rose like a lion in defiance of an attempt on his life. Audience members said that when the president did this the fear left their bodies. Courage is contagious. Trump’s actions made obvious what many of us already knew about him: Trump is not putting his life and livelihood on the line for ego. The man has lost hundreds of millions of dollars, scores of friends, and now nearly his life to do what he believes is right. I’ve been following Trump since the 1980s and his love of the United States and the issues that shape his campaign have been the same issues he has talked about for decades (see Republicans and Fascists). Deep down, his detractors know they see before them an authentic man with extraordinary instincts and leadership qualities—and they know that everybody everywhere sees it, too—and they despair. Ideologically blinded, they simply cannot believe their eyes because they are overcome with irrational hatred and loathing for the man.
freedom and reason 
YES. Thanks for bringing the fire.