Ear Today, Gone Tomorrow: The Abject Weirdness of Trump's RNC Speech

That wasn't a call for unity. That was just plain weird.

It’s not just JD Vance.

Decades have passed since Donald John Trump gave his weird-ass acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on July 18. The news since then has come so fast and so furious (POTUS dropped out; the sitting VP became the Democratic nominee; the Republican VP candidate became the butt of sofa jokes) that the abject weirdness of that speech, which was so disturbingly off the rails that even his staunchest boosters began to worry it would cost him the election, has largely been forgotten.

Trump speaks at rallies every other day, it seems. He says crazy shit about Hannibal Lecter, confuses Biden with Obama and Nikki Haley with Kamala Harris, and makes ridiculous, easily disprovable claims on the daily. We’ve all seen the clips on Twitter. But the RNC event was the first time in months that the TV networks were broadcasting his entire speech live on the air. If ever there were a moment to rein it in, to show himself capable of maturity, this was it.

He knew this. His team knew this. But he couldn’t not be weird.

In the wake of the shooting, remember, we were promised a new Trump, a Trump who would rise above it, a Trump who had changed for the better. “Getting shot in the face changes a man,” Tucker Carlson decreed, even though that is not what happened to Donald. Unity was the theme of the night, we were told.

And for a few minutes, Trump hewed to that script:

Friends, delegates and fellow citizens. I stand before you this evening with a message of confidence, strength and hope. Four months from now, we will have an incredible victory, and we will begin the four greatest years in the history of our country.

Together, we will launch a new era of safety, prosperity and freedom for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed.

The discord and division in our society must be healed. We must heal it quickly. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.

I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America.

Needless to say, none of that is consistent with his proposed policies—the nuts and bolts of Project 2025’s weirdo guidebook to lurch America into a fascist dictatorship—or the hateful, xenophobic bile he spews at his rallies on the regular. The cognitive dissonance between Trump promising an “era of safety” for “citizens of every race, religion, color and creed” and the RNC delegates waving signs that read MASS DEPORTATION NOW could cause a Zeus-birthing-Athena-level headache. But still, Trump stuck to the script—just long enough for the lazier newspapers to write misleading next-day headlines about his call to unity.

After that anodyne intro, things got weird. Not weird in a fun way. Just plain weird.

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The first part of Trump’s speech was a recount of his near-death experience at the rally in Western Pennsylvania, which happened the Saturday before the convention. Even the set-up to the story was bizarre. It read like something a fifth grader might write about how he spent his summer vacation:

It was a warm, beautiful day in the early evening in Butler Township in the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Music was loudly playing, and the campaign was doing really well. I went to the stage and the crowd was cheering wildly. Everybody was happy. I began speaking very strongly, powerfully and happily. Because I was discussing the great job my administration did on immigration at the southern border. We were very proud of it.

Like, what is that? A professional writer, even one as malevolent as Stephen Miller, doesn’t write that badly. Did Donald cheat and use ChatGPT?

I forgot to mention that while Trump was speaking, there was what appeared to be a maxi-pad scotch-taped to the side of his head. Since I’ve yet to find a single medical professional who thinks a wound of the kind suffered by the FPOTUS would be treated this way, I have to conclude that it was a prop. He wanted to remind everyone of the attempt on his life he’d narrowly averted. You know, in case you may have forgotten. The whole RNC was built around the mythology MAGA was trying to construct around Donald’s heroic survival of the botched assassination: God had saved him and so on. The Kotex on the ear was part of that. Which didn’t make it any less weird.

But back to his oh-so-dramatic recount:

Behind me, and to the right, was a large screen that was displaying a chart of border crossings under my leadership. The numbers were absolutely amazing. In order to see the chart, I started to, like this, turn to my right, and was ready to begin a little bit further turn, which I’m very lucky I didn’t do, when I heard a loud whizzing sound and felt something hit me really, really hard. On my right ear. I said to myself, “Wow, what was that? It can only be a bullet.”

What struck his ear could also have been, and almost certainly was, a shard of glass from the “large screen that was displaying a chart of border crossings under my leadership” that was “[b]ehind [him] and to the right.” Initial reports from Axios and Newsmax—two Trump-friendly outfits—said that Trump’s injury was the result of a bullet hitting the teleprompter, and glass shards hitting him in the ear. And in the speech, Donald confirmed the close proximity of glass to his right and in the line of fire.

That’s what it looked like, based on his reaction…and the way the Secret Service responded…and the photographs of his bloodied but still perfectly intact ear. If you are hit by a bullet from an assault rifle, even if you are just grazed, major damage happens. Body parts get blown off. At the hospital, you are checked for concussion, for damage to the skull. Maybe the wound requires cosmetic surgery. Maybe your eardrum bursts. None of that happened with Trump. This is from a CBS news story: “According to Dr. [Brent] Rau,” the Medical Director at Alleghany General Hospital, “if the injuries to former President Trump had been more severe, he would have been brought to AGH.”

This suggests Donald didn’t even need to go to the hospital. And the next morning, he was out and about, with no visible bandage on his ear, wearing his stupid MAGA hat, playing golf. As of this writing, no viable medical report has been released—just an incredulous statement from the obsequious MAGA weirdo Ronny Jackson, who is to the medical field what a defrocked priest is to the Vatican. This is from the AP story:

According to Jackson, Trump sustained a gunshot wound to the right ear that came “less than a quarter of an inch from entering his head, and struck the top of his right ear.”

The bullet track, he said, “produced a 2 cm wide wound that extended down to the cartilaginous surface of the ear. There was initially significant bleeding, followed by marked swelling of the entire upper ear.”

Jackson’s report runs counter to what we all saw with our own eyes—on the evening of the shooting and, as pointed out on Twitter by the former White House photographer Pete Souza, in the days that followed: a tiny cut on Trump’s ear. We’ve seen no other photos of the aftermath. No images of the alleged two centimeter wound. Nothing real. Just the word of Donald Trump: a serial liar, who lies especially about his medical history—and who desperately needs his MAGA followers to believe a bullet hit him, to enforce his alpha male/hero/saved-by-Hand-of-God narrative.

Even Chris Wray, whom Trump appointed as FBI Director after he fired James Comey for investigating his crimes, could not confirm that Donald took damage from a bullet. He told the House Judiciary Committee that “with respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that, you know, that hit his ear.”

This sent Trump through the roof. The Bureau was forced to put out a less ambiguous statement: “What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle.” Note that this does not preclude “shrapnel”—a fragment of metal ricocheting off the glass.

Ultimately, what nicked his ear doesn’t matter. The key sentence from the AP story, it seems to me, is this: “Trump’s campaign has also declined to release medical records from the hospital where he was first treated or to make the doctors there available for questions.” If the medical records confirm some ghastly two-centimeter wound on his ear, why not make them public? The logical answer is that the injury Trump suffered was not nearly as serious as he wants us all to believe.

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To be clear, I don’t doubt the account of the actual shooting. This is not some conspiracy theory. The shooter and an innocent rallygoer are both dead, and two others seriously injured. It was not staged.

And that’s another thing that was weird about the RNC speech. The Trump rallygoer who lost his life was named Corey Comperatore. Donald finally got around to mentioning him 20 minutes into his big speech, after making the whole thing about himself:

Tragically, the shooter claimed the life of one of our fellow Americans: Corey Comperatore. Unbelievable person, everybody tells me. Unbelievable.

And seriously wounded two other great warriors. Spoke to them today: David Dutch and James Copenhaver. Two great people. I also spoke to all three families of these tremendous people.

Our love and prayers are with them and always will be. We’re never going to forget them. They came for a great rally. They were serious Trumpsters, I want to tell you. They were serious Trumpsters and still are. But Corey, unfortunately, we have to use the past tense.

We have to use the past tense. Who the fuck talks like that?

And then it got even weirder. Trump wandered over to Comperatore’s fireman hat and coat, which were on the stage. The idea was that this was a shrine to a fallen MAGA. But Donald—who’d dumped the remains of his first wife in a hole on the front nine of his golf course; the sasquatch of Sasquatch Sunset took better care of their dead—doesn’t know how to behave in such a situation, because it’s not all about Donald Trump. What did he do with the display? He fondled it. He kissed it.

The whole spectacle was highly disturbing. I felt bad for Corey Comperatore’s daughters, who had to watch, five days after the death of their father, this serial sexual assailant exploit both their father’s memory and his personal effects. Donald was a national embarrassment, disrespectful of the dead: a disgrace. This is simply not how normal, empathic people behave.

A normal, empathic person in Trump’s situation—that is, a presidential candidate who survived an assassination attempt that killed one of his or her supporters—would have started the speech solemnly, out of respect for the man who just died. Eulogize the supporter who literally took a bullet meant for you. Convince us that you actually talked to his family and learned something about him. (Why was he “unbelievable?”) Show us that his loss affected you. Let us see the change that Tucker Carlson had promised.

That’s not only how a decent human being would behave; it’s also what a smart politician would do. Even if you don’t actually feel anything, at least have the gumption to fake it. Make an attempt to feign empathy. Give it the ol’ college try.

But Trump is neither a normal, empathic person nor a smart politician. He’s a soulless malignant narcissist who must make everything about himself—even if it behooves him not to. He can’t help it. He must be the center of attention at all times. The black hole of his ego demands it. And so, in moments that require humility, solemnity, wisdom—that require, above all, humanity—Donald acts like a weirdo. Because he’s weird. As Kendrick Lamar said of another alleged pedophile, “They not like us.”

Again, this fireman’s hat bit was not improvised. This was thought out, planned, scripted. And Trump still screwed it up.

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There were plenty of other parts of his speech that were gaslight-y, mean-spirited, factually inaccurate, and flat-out bizarre. Presidential candidates tend not to decry the United States as a failure and a shithole, for example, but not Donald. That was pretty much the theme of the evening:

This is a shame, what this administration, the damage that this administration has done. And I say it often. If you took the 10 worst presidents in the history of the United States. Think of it. The 10 worst. Added them up, they will not have done the damage that Biden has done. Only going to use the term once. Biden. I’m not going to use the name anymore. Just one time. The damage that he’s done to this country is unthinkable. It’s unthinkable.

He dusted off the bigoted term for covid-19, because he has to blame someone other than his own administration’s criminally negligence in the pandemic response:

Actually, probably the best trade deal was the deal I made with China where they buy $50 billion of our product. They were buying nothing. They buy $50 billion worth. They had to but I don’t even talk about it because of Covid. I don’t even mention it frankly because of what happened with the China virus.

He told an odd story about his interaction with a waitress:

And we were having dinner at a beautiful restaurant in the Trump building on the Strip. And it’s a great building and the waitress comes over.

“How’s everything going?”

Really nice person.

“How’s everything going?”

“Oh sir, it’s so tough. The government is after me all the time on tips, tips, tips.”

I said, “Well, they give you cash, would they be able to find them?”

…You know, most people who go out they hire consultants.

They pay them of dollars.

But I said to her, “Let me just ask you a question. Would you be happy if you had no tax on tips?”

She said, “What a great idea.”

I got my information from a very smart waitress. That’s better than spending millions of dollars. And everybody, everybody loves it. Waitresses and caddies and drivers and everybody.

He claimed to have been instrumental in the design of new naval vessels(!):

In fact, I had a little design change and we gave them a tremendous for, essentially, what we used to call destroyers. These are now the most beautiful. They look like yachts.

I said, “We have to take the bow, and we have to make it a little nicer, and a little point at the top instead of a flat nose.” And the people at the shipyards said, “This guy sort of knows what he’s doing.” We had the most beautiful ships, right, governor?

He suggested that migrants now crossing the southern border were somehow worse than Hitler’s blitzkrieg, Attila the Hun’s invasion of Europe, and the bloody conquests of Genghis Khan:

The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country. They are coming in from every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, Middle East. They’re coming from everywhere. They’re coming at levels that we’ve never seen before. It is an invasion indeed, and this administration does absolutely nothing to stop them.

And of course he brought up Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer, yet again—I think to scare everyone into thinking that Anthony Hopkins’ iconic movie character is representative of the people who are in mental institutions (which is, by the way, pure bullshit and highly offensive to anyone who has ever been in or had a loved one admitted to a mental hospital):

They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. I, you know the press is always on because I say this. Has anyone seen The Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner. That’s insane asylums. They’re emptying out their insane asylums. And terrorists at numbers that we’ve never seen before. Bad things are going to happen.

And he wrapped it up with a nod to his own humility. No, seriously, he actually said that! “With great humility, I am asking you to be excited about the future of our country. Be excited. Be excited.” And then, because he can’t help himself, in the next breath, Donald reverted back to his sad, tired braggadocio:

And by the way, the news reports. All, look at all of those big networks. Look at them. They’re all here. But everyone one of them has said this could be the most organized, best run and most enthusiastic convention of either party that they’ve ever seen. Every single one. And it’s true. It’s true. And there’s love in the room. There’s great love in the room.

None of that was normal. All of it was weird. It was weird because Donald Trump is weird. That’s why the Republicans began to freak out after the RNC speech: they realized that their candidate was undeniably weird, and he’d picked a VP who was even weirder, and they are stuck with weirdo Trump just as Trump is stuck with weirdo JD Vance. Weird, weirder, weirdest.

In a country desperate for a return to normalcy, the GOP is the weirdo party. Their ticket is weirdness personified.

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Photo credit: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks during the Republican National Convention Thursday, July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite.