Less than a month ago, former president and 2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump was the target of an assassin’s bullet, escaping death by a fraction of an inch. Moments later, he stood up, face bloody, pumping his fist and shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

It was an electrifying moment, watched live by millions and captured in an iconic photograph that will no doubt take its place among other instantly recognizable historic images. As germane as that photo is to the ongoing presidential election, it seems strange that we rarely see it in mainstream print or televised media. Moreover, until called out by critics last week, Google’s search function made it unnecessarily difficult for Internet users to find information on the Trump assassination attempt.

Could it be that some people would rather not remind us of Trump’s resilience under fire? And more broadly, it is remarkable how the politicized media and money (gobs of it) manage to reshape reality before our very eyes.

A few examples:

2020 VP candidate Harris — DEI choice. Attending the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week, Trump was challenged to defend his prior statements that Kamala Harris was chosen for DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) optics — the implication being that saying so would be implicitly racist. Trump butchered his answer, rambling about Harris’s black vs. Indian identity. The more simple and direct response would have been, Yes, we know she was a DEI selection because Biden himself said so.

When Joe Biden locked up the 2020 Democrat nomination for president, he announced his intent to select as his running mate a woman of color. And we can all recall the lively media conjecture about which woman of color it would be. Harris’s own presidential aspirations had flamed out months earlier, before the first primary contest. Given that she had never won a single primary vote, it seems obvious that Biden’s choice was driven by considerations other than her presidential qualifications.

VP Harris, border czar. The Biden administration’s wide-open southern border — and its deadly consequences — is a top 2024 election liability for the Democrats. So, when their GOP opponents began reminding the electorate that VP Harris was Biden’s “border czar,” Democrats and the media screamed foul — they tell us it never happened.

But despite the furious denials, we all remember it quite clearly. True, there is no government position called “border czar.” But without question, in response to the public uproar over the flood of illegal immigrations caused by his reversal of Trump’s border control policies, the new president put VP Harris in charge of fixing it. I recall distinctly a Biden interview in which he insisted that Harris was the best person in his administration for that job.

Later, as the illegal immigration situation worsened, Harris attempted to redefine her remit, claiming that her job was to address its “root causes.” But, of course, it doesn’t take a czar to figure out that the root cause of out-of-control illegal migration is leaving the door open and making it clear to the migrants that they won’t be turned away.

Presidential candidate Harris — political moderate. In my view, one of the positive attributes of our vice president is that her ideological and political positions have always been crystal clear. As a U.S. senator, she was an unabashed, hard-core progressive, arguably further to the left than any other senator — and proud of it. Authenticity among politicians is rare, but good.

But now presidential candidate Harris is casually abandoning large swaths of long-held policy positions that might prove awkward in the election ahead. Suddenly, she no longer opposes fracking, she’s tough on crime, she doesn’t want to defund the police, she has no plans to dismantle ICE, she no longer advocates Medicare for All, etc. We don’t know yet whether she still proposes free healthcare, education, and guaranteed employment for illegal immigrants, but keep an eye on that one.

These are not incremental changes of heart — hers is a sweeping, all-encompassing epiphany, a wholesale rebranding. She has reintroduced herself to the public as the sensible, centrist Kamala, evidently hoping that we’ll forget about the old one.

The media are doing their part. Harris has held no press conferences or unscripted media interviews since her sudden ascendance to the head of the Democrat ticket. Rather, they explain to us her newfound viewpoints while carefully sidestepping the glaring inconsistencies with all that they’ve told us before.

Both sides of the political divide keep asserting that the 2024 election will be the most important in American history. They always say that, but this time I suspect they are correct. Our nation is in trouble — we need a fundamental reset. Now the electorate must decide which of the two imperfect presidential candidates is best able to lead that needed directional change.

To make that choice, voters need to know who the candidates really are — not who they or their political teams want us to think they are. In each of the above examples, our watchdog media have all the information they need to resolve the “Who’s Kamala?” debate. Sadly, they choose not to because it does not align with their political agenda.

Donald Trump was president for four years — like him or not, he’s no mystery. But will the real Kamala Harris please stand up?