There was a rumor that the ear was damaged by pieces of the teleprompter. There is much to do on Youtube over the FBI director testifying to Congress, “We don’t know if it was a bullet or shrapnel”.
What does it matter? The kid was shooting at him.
If it is shrapnel, it increases the odds of it being a false flag operation by…I don’t know. 0.1% or something.
It doesn’t really matter except for the historical record. Lying about the historical record is worth criticizing, if it turns out someone is lying.
Because if it’s teleprompter shrapnel, it means the bullet missed him by several feet, and not several millimeters. Dude still shot at him, but it wasn’t divine intervention that he avoided a shot between the eyes.
I doubt that he could tell what struck his ear, and I doubt he has the intellectual ability to consider that he may have been mistaken.
I don’t believe it was divine intervention in either case.
I’m not even sure anyone will actually know the truth of the matter. And I agree it ultimately doesn’t matter either.
It gives more drama and glory if it was a bullet.
If it was a bullet, then Trump’s supporters can crow, “He was 1 millimeter from death yet lived!”
If it was glass shrapnel, then it was more like, “He was several meters from death,” which doesn’t have the same catchet.
In fact, one Christian “prophet” on social media is already crowing about how God had told him in March 2024 that Trump would take a bullet to his right ear but live. If it wasn’t a bullet but just shrapnel, a lot of the spiritual substance is gone.
I didn’t mean to give that impression. But there are plenty of MAGAts that have all prostrated themselves in front of whatever god they worship to thank them for sparing Trump by a mere hair’s breadth.
I think about like if it was me.
“Damn that hurts!”
I would wonder who the hell shot “at” me, and why? I wouldn’t care what I was hit with.
Excellent comment, Beck, as always.
I can tell you as a gun owner and someone who used to regularly do target practice (though I haven’t in a long time), a “mere hair’s breadth” really is the difference between getting in a deadly shot at someone and missing them entirely if you’re shooting at someone more than a short distance away. They wouldn’t be wrong in this.
Does this “prophet” have a screenshot from March proving this?
Doubt it.
The latter is no excuse for lying, if it turns out he is.
That’s what I find suspicious too. But my broader point is that having a bullet come within millimeters (and, in fact, the head turning to the right at just the right time) of death gives immensely more drama and a sense of predestination than if it were some flying glass from some object.
The bullet carries a lot more weight, in the figurative and non-figurative sense. That’s why Trumpers care a lot about it not being shrapnel.
Atamasama, have you seen the youtube video where Brandon Herrara shoots the ear of a target head? It destroyed the ear, do you have an opinion on that?
Thanks.
Only to say that it shows that Trump didn’t take a direct shot to the ear. That doesn’t mean a slight graze or a bullet’s ricochet could not have resulted in him literally being hit by a bullet without suffering nearly as much damage.
It is impossible to recreate what happened to Trump when we don’t even know what happened. 
On the other hand, if someone insists a bullet went through-and-through the ear to pierce it, that’s clearly a lie. And you’d definitely be able to tell afterward. A bullet isn’t a needle, and a bullet tends to deform whenever it strikes something, so even a small caliber would make a really big hole in anything it penetrates.
I assume that one of the teleprompters was damaged?
It wasn’t.
Here is an article from around the time of the shooting, which is the kind of reporting that led to the idea that it was glass from a teleprompter.
This later article says there was no damage to any teleprompters, however.
Initial reports speculated that Trump might have been struck by shattered glass when a bullet hit the teleprompter. However, this theory was debunked when photos showed both glass screens intact after the attack.
I know it’s weird that both of those articles are from India, but I am having trouble finding any other articles discussing the issue one way or another.
ETA: Here is a story out of Cleveland that verifies that the story about the teleprompter is clearly inaccurate.
The evidence is simple; the teleprompters are intact in photos taken after the shooting. If they were shattered enough to send glass flying everywhere to injure people they would have been very visibly damaged.
Thank you for that insight - I’m not a gun owner, and haven’t shot one for a few decades. That makes sense.