There was already a lot of speculation after the “assassination attempt” on Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally a couple months back. It all seemed a little too perfect to have been real.

There was the fact that there was no blood on his clothes. There was his strange need to go get his shoes immediately. There was the fact that the Secret Service allowed him to stand back up, exposed to further gunfire, and fist pump while chanting “FIGHT! FIGHT!”

Nobody doubts that some actual bullets were fired, of course. A man did lose his life after diving over his family to shield them from the attack.

But Trump’s claims just got more and more curious as time went on. Why did he wear that bandage so long, if no stitches were necessary? Why were no stitches necessary, if the bullet clipped the top part of his right ear, like he said? Why was nothing treated like a crime scene? Even the body of the shooter was cremated only a week and a half after the event.

Why was the gunman a Republican? Why was there never a medical report?

After a new picture was uploaded to social media, all of those questions are coming back up. The photo, showing the former president sitting on a plane, dressed in his customary red ball cap and feasting on Häagen-Dazs ice cream, shows something even more pretentious than eating the expensive version of Dreyer’s.

An absolutely pristine ear.

There’s not just no piece missing from his ear, as there would be if a bullet had hit it in any way, shape, or form. There’s nothing. No discoloration, no scar, not even a tiny little snip like the one in my ear after my sister tried to cut my hair with those little plastic elementary school safety scissors. Nothing.

What’s more, he doesn’t even have to make up any “war stories” about the incident, because he took the even tougher-sounding route of saying he doesn’t really think about it. “It healed,” he says.

This isn’t “healed.” This is never wounded.

Yeah, nothing.

And there’s more. Olivia Nuzzi, a reporter for New York Magazine, was at Mar-a-Lago in early August to interview Trump. Nuzzi is quite a looker, so Trump seems to give her access to him whenever she wants it. And she looked at the ear up close. And remember, this was early August, it had been less than a month since he nearly escaped death at his Pennsylvania rally on July 13.

Nuzzi asked Trump about his injury, which left his face and ear bloodied on stage, and she reported that he responded by tapping the spot allegedly struck by a bullet fired at him by Thomas Matthew Crooks.

“The particular spot that he identified with his tap was pristine,” Nuzzi wrote. “I scanned carefully the rest of the terrain. It looked normal and incredible and fine.”

Nuzzi later added: “An ear had never appeared to have gone through less. Except there, on the tiniest patch of this tiny sculpture of skin, a minor distortion that resembled not a crucifixion wound but the distant aftermath of a sunburn.”

He still has his defenders, who insist that because ANYONE was hurt, the whole thing was real. I contend that the conspiracy didn’t even take others into account. A more cynical man, in fact, might come to the conclusion that Trump decided he didn’t care if someone else accidentally got hit.

Trump’s medical attendant, Dr. Ronny Jackson, went on a podcast to describe the injury. “I bandaged it up pretty good this morning…it’s not a clean laceration like you’d have with a knife or a blade….it’s easy to bleed again. If you mess with it, it starts bleeding again. We’ve got it dressed up,” Jackson said.

Does that look like a jagged wound that healed up?

Of course, this picture follows an official, unretouched photo taken by the Associated Press and uploaded by one of the most famous photographers in American media, Pete Souza, that shows basically the same thing as the one Pete had — no damage.

But Trump has played it all to the hilt, even claiming that God intended for the incident to take place. He hasn’t had therapy, insists there’s no need for any of that nonsense, since it just doesn’t bother him at all.

“And you know what I’d love to think, I would love to think it’s God, and it’s God doing it because he wants to save America. He sees what’s happening. God sees what’s happening in America. We’re going bad as a country. Even with religion, we’re going bad. You look at the charts, and I would like to say that it is God that saved me. It wasn’t just just luck, but the reason would be that he saved me, because I can save this country. I hope that’s right.”

Somehow I think God has better things to do than save the life of a 34-time felon who was proven in court to have raped at least one woman, run a hundred businesses into the ground, gotten himself associated left and right with child sex perverts, made leering jokes about sleeping with his own daughter, and is currently threatening anyone who dares to say he didn’t win the election before it even happens with prison time.

God’s busy helping everyone’s football team win these days.