Donald Trump photo without ear bandage raises eyebrows
www.newsweek.com
Famous photographer Pete Souza has seemingly deleted his X account after a post doubting whether Trump was shot in the ear.

Updates:

Might be best for mods to lock this post at this point (is that a thing on Lemmy?) because this story is basically wrapped. The FBI says a bullet caused some ear damage. Maybe it was bullet shrapnel from a ricochet or something like that, but later photos show the teleprompters in-tact so it wasn’t shards of glass from those. Trump’s usage of the bandage (and the assassination attempt) as symbols and political tools has been discussed at length and I don’t think conspiratorial thinking beyond that is very productive. Pete Souza took his own account down after getting a lot of harassment, so no further conspiracies are needed regarding X-formerly-known-as-Twitter at this time.

A photo of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump taken on Saturday without his ear bandage has sparked a wave of speculation.

The image, taken by Alex Brandon of the Associated Press on July 27 and shared by photojournalist Pete Souza on X, formerly Twitter, shows Trump walking up an airplane staircase with an apparently fully healed ear wound just weeks after he was shot with a high-powered rifle.

Souza, known for his tenure as the chief official White House photographer for Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, posted Brandon’s photo on his now-deactivated X account on Saturday, writing, “AP photo this morning. Look closely at his ear that was ‘hit’ by a bullet from an AR-15 assault rifle.”

Souza’s profile, @PeteSouza, which had over 200,000 followers, now reads, “This account doesn’t exist, try searching for another,” implying that he has deleted or deactivated it. If he had been banned, it would read, “Account suspended. X suspends accounts which violate the X rules.”

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      38·
      5 months ago

      There’s pictures of right after that show his ear…

      https://www.usatoday.com/gcdn/authoring/authoring-images/2024/07/14/USAT/74396917007-20240713-t-235354-z-1577583182-rc-2-mu-8-aisn-4-v-rtrmadp-3-usaelectiontrump.JPG?width=1320&height=882&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp

      No bullet wound. Just what seems like an insane amount of blood… If you’ve never seen an excited elderly person on blood thinners get the smallest scratch imaginable.

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      5 months ago

      THANK YOU! Jesus folks, if you don’t have experience with shooting AR-15 loads, just stop, admit you’re not really sure.

      Also, I’m thinking a lot of people are imaging the big, bad AR as shooting monster bullets. (That’s a joke pic BTW.) ARs are illegal to hunt with in some states because they’re not deadly enough to produce a clean kill. It’s a military round meant to be incapacitating and lightweight.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
      0·
      5 months ago

      From the Herrera vid, the first shot on the lower portion of the ear is more indicative of what, imo, likely occurred, inasmuch as:

      There is no missing chunk, it is actually just a graze.

      All you have to do is get a shot like that to just barely graze across the top of the upper rear earlobe, as opposed to blowing completely through the ear as their second shot does.

      A shot like that, just barely grazing along the upper ear lobe, is consistent with the scene as it played out, as well as the relatively rapid healing of basically a superficial scratch to an area with tons of small blood vessels.

      • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
        0·
        5 months ago

        I was thinking he wouldn’t even necessarily need to have actually been hit. The pressure wave from a bullet alone would have been enough to open up a bleedy wound on an ear.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
          1·
          5 months ago

          I find that highly unlikely.

          It would have made an extremely loud supersonic ‘crack’ or ‘snap’ as it passed very close to his ear and may have caused some degree of temporary, possibly permanent hearing loss, but uh, no the air pressure differential almost certainly would not cause external bleeding.

          You can cause blood vessels to burst if you put part of a human body in a significantly low (negative) pressure situation for a significant duration of time, but a .223 passing by would cause no where near the needed negative pressure, it would be for an astoundingly short period of time and finally such pressure differential situations usually cause internal bleeding which is sometimes visible due to the broken capillaries at the top layer of the skin, but this blood pools within the skin and does not break through its surface.

          You would need something to actually contact and break the skin for the blood from those broken capillaries to leak outside of the body.

          • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
            0·
            5 months ago

            You’d be surprised, here’s an experiment shooting a bullet down the center of a tube made out of aluminum foil:

            https://youtu.be/VXIUfMGEXX8

            They don’t specify the caliber, but they do mention it’s going about 1,600fps which is about 1/2 the speed of an AR round.

            If that were ear tissue instead of foil, it would get ripped up pretty good.

            • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
              1·
              5 months ago

              They say its a slug, meaning its out of a shotgun. They do not mention the gauge, but its safe to say basically any shot gun slug is significantly larger than a .223 round and thus has way, way more air displacement.

              Also, they’re using aluminum foil, not human flesh or any kind of analog to it. Utterly, completely different and non analogous material, especially to ‘demonstrate’ what you are claiming it does.

              Could a near miss from a .223 or a shotgun slug cause a pressure wave that temporarily makes a bit of your ear wiggle?

              Sure, maybe a tiny bit.

              Would this cause your ear to start externally bleeding?

              No. To verify this, flick your upper ear, such that it moves by a centimeter.

              Is your ear now bleeding externally?

              Unless you broke the skin with your nail, no, it is not.