Almost as soon as photographs emerged of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, conspiracy theories wondering whether the shooting could have been fake boomeranged around the internet.
The fevered thinking went like this: The images of Trump pumping his fist and apparently saying “fight” were too conveniently media-ready. The term “staged” promptly trended on X, with multiple viral tweets getting over 100,000 likes. Redditors debated whether it was uncouth to be suspicious that Trump was trying to drum up sympathy votes.
Adding fuel to the fire, eyewitnesses, online observers, as well as some media outlets, reported incorrect information about what had happened, some of it potentially incendiary. The New York Post claimed early on that the shooter was “a Chinese man,” which only served to exacerbate burgeoning conspiracy theory narratives. One far-right activist floated the conspiracy theory that the Secret Service was involved in setting up the assassination, as part of the “deep state intel community.”
Additionally, as we’ve often seen before, people latched onto misidentified “suspects,” including an Italian YouTuber who vlogs about soccer and a Twitter troll who posted a “joke” video claiming to be the shooter soon after he was identified. It was passed around the site for hours despite his assertion that it was a joke. The conspiracy theories came from all corners of the ideological spectrum: the left, the right, and the politically inscrutable.
Many were eager to project their prior partisan assumptions onto emerging information about the shooter. He was a registered Republican, so surely the shooting wasn’t politically motivated — but he had also reportedly made a one-off donation to a Democratic PAC, Act Blue, on the day of Biden’s 2021 inauguration, which would indicate the opposite. Even as the initial “faked” theme faded, members of the public reached for a narrative that would allow them to blame one side or the other.
Fortunately, the conversation shifted within hours as bystander accounts and more information about the shooter were reported in mainstream outlets. Per Google Trends, there was less than a 1 percent interest in searches for “Trump shooting staged,” “Trump shooting fake,” and “Trump shooting conspiracies” over the past 24 hours.
