Early on, police at the scene said the cut was caused by glass. Tom was using an AR-15 rifle, an astonishingly common weapon in the US. The Washington Post reported that there are enough of these rifles for one in twenty Americans, and you can buy them online. However, an injury caused by an AR-15 should cause much more damage than this.
Yet, Trump is widely proclaiming that a bullet "pierced" his ear. As you can see, the ear is intact and not pierced. This injury seems much more typical of a shrapnel wound. However, there were three shots fired; one person was killed, and two were critically wounded. The media has stopped asking questions about it. Why? We want to know why the media has stopped asking questions. Usually, after an event like this, we get detailed reports about the trajectory of each bullet and medical reports. One person was killed, two critically wounded, and all we hear about is Trump's ear? Yet there have been no medical reports about Trump's ear. As for the picture of a bullet speeding towards Trump, the trajectory is wrong; it's too low to have hit Trump's ear. It must have sped past him. So, what caused this injury? We want to know. Is this even real blood? We can't ever believe anything Trump says.
Trump then shows up at the Republican National Convention with a BIG bandage over his ear, even though he had only a small bandaid on it while golfing the day after the incident.
Everyone seems to accept that this was an assassination attempt, partly because Biden and Pelosi have graciously accepted it as such. But what if it wasn't? What if it was a hoax, a lie, like the "Big Lie" of the supposedly stolen election? Biden and Pelosi could have said, "We don't know anything; it's early days yet, let's wait until the FBI finishes their investigation," while making dark insinuations or overt accusations about this being FAKE. In the meantime, Republicans did no such waiting: JD Vance and Rep. Jim Banks (the GOP nominee for the Senate in Indiana) immediately accused Democrats of "shooting Trump."
Here's the thing about Republicans, especially Trump: they often accuse others of what they are doing. You couple that with the fist pump and Trump milking the big white bandage, and it adds up to:
Republicans shot Trump! Well, shot at him, anyway. In his vicinity. But would they be so cavalier about human life? Would they be so vile, so low, to cause some excitement around Trump and make him look like a hero? It does seem odd that the Secret Service "didn't see" the shooter until after he got three shots off.
Of course, maybe they asked young Tom to shoot over everyone's heads.
Here's how it could have gone down: let's say Tom Crooks loved Trump. True fan. And someone reached out to him. We asked him to do this. "We need you. You will save America. You donated $15 to a Dem cause; we saw that we have the record. People will believe this, that the Dems were out to murder President Trump." Tom actually did make that donation: Snopes did an exhaustive fact-check. A Thomas Crooks from his home address donated $15 the day Biden was inaugurated.
You wouldn't want anyone with a real hatred for Trump doing this, not someone who is a good shot with real bullets. Somehow, Tom agreed to go along with it. Young people can be manipulated. Older people too, but young ones especially. And maybe it was even promised to him that he could get out of it, that Trump would be magnanimous and pardon him: young boy and all that misguided youth. There would be a photo op with the Big Man shaking his hand. Forgiveness is divine.
Of course, they would need a true believer to do this. The shooter would have to be a crack shot to make it believable and someone rock solid for Trump—someone who could be flattered.
But then Tom thought he'd make it look really real. He was a good shot, a great shot. Instead of shooting over everyone's heads (which would have been plenty believable; it was so far, after all), Tom thought he would make it really, really close. Maybe even graze Trump's ear. And so the Secret Service had to "blow his head off," which is what one bystander said they did. Or maybe the Secret Service always meant to kill him, no matter what had been promised to him. So he could never, ever talk.
