Last night, formerly deceased President Rudy Ruiz took the stage at the national GOP debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, claiming to be the first person billionaire-backed biotech company RevTech has ever successfully treated with what has been described as a “miraculous” advancement in medicine. According to Ruiz, RevTech, and a cadre of supporters, the company is capable of reversing “mortal events” — in plain speech, bringing people back from the dead.

But one Turner Falls resident takes exception to an important part of that characterization.

“I don’t want to take anything away from Rudy — I mean, the president, Mr. President,” said Mitch Carter, who was injured in the Independence Day storms that saw tornados touch down at the Treetops Trailer Community and in downtown Turner Falls, TX. “But he got a lot of firsts under his belly already. I was first on this thing.”

For Carter, “this thing” means RevTech — short for “revival technology” — a regenerative treatment based in stem cell research that the biotech startup says it can use to reverse death. Carter first heard of RevTech at the same time as his neighbor, local nurse and his Treetops landlady, Linda Lyle. They both received flyers in their mailboxes for a “medical fair” on July 4th, promising screenings for a variety of conditions, including “mortal events.” (And fireworks.)

“Can’t talk no shit about their timing though, I’ll tell you what!” laughed Carter, who said he took a foot-long length of rebar to the back of his neck while sheltering from the storm in the Treetops pool house with his neighbors. His last memory before the storm is of getting his blood drawn by a RevTech medical assistant when the tornado sirens went off, then huddling in the concrete-blocked building with two-dozen Treetoppers and three of the neighborhood mutts.

About twelve hours after the storm, Carter said he woke up in his own trailer feeling “like coon piss on a live wire.”

“Felt like the worst dang hangover I’ve ever had, and I’ve had some mean motherfuckers in my day,” Carter said, gesturing to the twin-sized bed tucked into a corner of his trailer. “Woke up right here with my ass ablaze. They ain’t takin’ that away from me.”

Lyle introduced me to Carter earlier this week, pseudo-smuggling me into Treetops in the back of her Cutlass Supreme. Today, Treetops is teeming with RevTech operations at its southernmost end — medical tents, originally set up after the July 4th storms, and what now look to be more permanent structures, all set behind a towering construction fence blocking out lookie-loos.

I first noticed a pervasive smell in that sector of Treetops when I visited the trailer community in mid-July before the RevTech/Ruiz news blew up. It’s kind of a rancid-vinegar scent, rotten-eggs-meets-cleaning-fluid. And Carter’s trailer absolutely stinks of it, too, even though his lot is a solid mile from the RevTech set-up.

“It ain’t the smell blowing over here. It’s me,” admits Carter, who now keeps the windows of his trailer cracked open despite triple-digit heat. “You can go ahead and print that. I ain’t ashamed and there’s nothing I can do about it, no how.”

Another thing Carter isn’t ashamed of is the almost invisible scar left behind after his mortal injury, which he showed off with pride.

“I fucked up my body all kinds of ways, half of it I done at work over there at the plant,” said Carter. “I got a 15-year-old scar on my ass from an unwise interaction with local wildlife that still looks gnarly as all hell. But this thing? No bigger’n a mosquito bite.”

Carter said RevTech’s team told him he’d need periodic follow-up treatments from their physicians; he’s been back once for what he describes as an “infusion.”

I couldn’t stop myself from asking the question that has to be on anyone and everyone’s mind right now: are we really, really bringing people back from the dead? Does Carter genuinely believe he died on the night of July 4th? Not that he wasn’t just very seriously injured?

“I seen my medical papers, talked to the people who treated me that night,” said Carter. They told him he “coded” around 10 p.m. and spent 87 minutes well and truly dead in both brain and body before they were able to resuscitate him. There is precedent for these kinds of medical miracles — the phenomenon is known as Lazarus syndrome, and one woman was revived after being reportedly dead for 17 hours. Carter said he “didn’t know” if he’d been to “heaven or the other place,” but he does feel strongly that there’s an afterlife waiting for all of us.

“I went somewhere that night, sure as shit did,” said Carter. “But I ain’t ready to talk about that yet.”

I also asked Carter if he feels any way special or different, now that he and the president are reportedly connected in this almost unbelievable way.

“I don’t go in for that political stuff, they’re all goddamned crooks,” he said. “But Rudy’s a nice guy, I known him from around town before he went off to Washington. I guess we are kinda like brothers now, if you think about it.”

What else is happening:

As for what’s going on on the national stage in the 24 hours since Ruiz made his (re)debut: Ruiz hasn’t released anything publicly since his appearance in Milwaukee last night, and the White House has so far issued just one brief statement, asserting that “America is safe in President Grantham’s hands,” and there is “no cause for alarm as to the safety and security of the federal governing apparatus.” I know I certainly feel reassured.

Usually I close my newsletters with a roundup of interesting links, but I wanted to take a second to look at how the media is covering this literally fantastic story. It’s hard for me to imagine how I would be covering it if I were back in New York writing for HazMedia — if I hadn’t spent a half-hour grilling Rudy Ruiz on Turner Falls trivia, or listened to Carron Nielsberg’s RevTech pitch while armed guards looked on, or if Pastor Kathy Donaldson hadn’t shown me her own sworn affidavit attesting to President Ruiz’s resurrection.

• Many of my colleagues back in New York tell me they’ve received the same packet of documents Nielsberg gave me last month, and after a little reporting, are coming to the same conclusions I did — if Ruiz’s records are fake, they’re great fakes.

• The legacy print papers and magazines are taking the most reserved approach to the story so far. The New York Times and the Washington Post, along with the major metropolitan dailies and the Atlantic, are using hedge-language like “claims” and “alleges” when referring to the man who appeared on stage Wednesday evening. “President-apparent” is emerging as the preferred mainstream terminology, and papers are being very careful to note that RevTech/Nielsberg/Donaldson “say” they have done this or that, rather than report RevTech’s claims as fact.

• The sub-story here is, of course, what any of this means for the American government and President Grantham, and the explainers are rolling in. The gist: no one knows! For about 24 hours in March 1877, before the passage of the 20th Amendment clarifying presidential terms, Ulysses Grant and Rutherford Hayes were both technically president at the same time. White House pool reports have been pretty measured so far, but my Beltway colleagues tell me that it’s sheer chaos behind the scenes in D.C.

• The left-wing press, to the extent it exists any more, has focused coverage on demands from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for the Ruiz Commission, which has been conducting a formal investigation into the July 4th crash that killed (“killed?”) Ruiz, to investigate the president-apparent himself, including what Schumer has called a “necessary but respectful exhumation” to examine the contents of the casket interred at Beaulieu Hills Cemetery outside Turner Falls. (FWIW, I noticed a National Guard presence at the cemetery gates on my way into town this morning; it seems someone in the federal government wants to make sure the Ruiz Commission are the only ones getting a look at whatever’s in that coffin.)

• The right-wing press is simply all in on Ruiz’s resurrection. Of course they are — they’ve never liked Grantham, who they consider to be an “establishment” crony that Ruiz used solely to build credibility with the mainstream GOP. (They’re not wrong.)

That’s all from me for now — let’s hope everyone stays firmly on this side of the mortal coil for a little while.

You can take the job away from the reporter, but you can’t take the reporter away from the keyboard. Subscribe to Minne Moves Home for dispatches on national news, the ‘24 presidential race, and snapshots of small-town Texas life.