Years of political tumult and low public trust have led many Americans to question the official version of events.
Three days later Donald Trump survived a life-threatening attack, federal authorities had already deemed it an act of domestic terrorism and were investigating how Secret Service protocols failed so tragically. They said the 20-year-old subject, Thomas Matthew Crooks acted alone.
Whether Americans believe them or not is another question.
A wave of conspiracy theories erupted moments after former President Trump was attacked at a rally Saturday afternoon in Butler, Pennsylvania. It has been largely unabated since.
Anti-Trump voices falsely accused him of staging the entire episode, arguing that the shocking and heroic images of the bloodied former president raising a defiant fist were too good to be true. Others on the right have advanced unfounded theories that the “deep state” planned or deliberately left Trump vulnerable to attack and have argued that Democrats’ rhetoric triggered the assault.
These ideas have taken hold on social media, in group chats and in informal conversations across the country, with elected officials and political figures from both sides joining the fray.
The conspiracy theories land on particularly fertile ground and at a particularly fertile moment in American history. Disbelief that the Secret Service would allow a gunman to open fire from a rooftop at a political rally, grazing Trump’s ear and killing one person in addition to the alleged shooter, has fueled doubts among some about the official accounts. Others say that years of political tumult and low trust in government and public institutions — amplified by social media — have given them a sense that skepticism is entirely justified.
RC Anderson, a 52-year-old civil servant from Fredericksburg, Virginia, said he still doesn’t know what to make of Saturday’s events. He’s not normally drawn to outlandish theories, but lately a chaotic and confusing media environment has led him to skepticism.
“I feel swept away by the seriousness of conspiracy theories,” Anderson says. “I think everything we see now is being called into question.”
Megaphones in social networks
In the hours since Saturday’s shooting, two major false claims have reached maximum speed: that the Secret Service’s failure to stop the attacker was secretly ordered by President Biden, or that the incident was staged by Trump.
About 300,000 mentions of the word “setup” circulated around X, as did about 80,000 uses of the term “insider job,” according to NewsGuard, a company that tracks misinformation on the internet. Falsehoods about the shooter’s identity and political affiliation also circulated widely.
About 12% of posts on X and the Telegram platform about the event were conspiracy theories in the 17 hours after the attack, according to PeakMetrics, a company that monitors online threats. Other posts blamed the media for the shooting or shared images of a man wrongly suspected of being the shooter.
Some Republicans and Democrats were quick to express doubts about the official version of events.
Represent him Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) claimed on social media that there was something sinister behind the shooting.
“I don’t care what people say about me when I say this, because everyone knows we all think it,” he wrote Sunday.
The representative Michael Collins (R-Ga.) said Saturday night that he believed Biden ordered the shooting. Other Republicans have blamed Democratic rhetoric for the assassination attempt. There is no evidence for either claim.
Spokespeople for Greene and Collins did not respond to requests for comment.
A political advisor to LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman — one of Biden’s biggest donors — suggested the shooting may have been staged, without providing any evidence.
“One possibility – which in the US seems horrific, foreign and absurd, but is quite common around the world – is that this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and perhaps even staged so that Trump could get the photos and benefit from the reaction,” Dmitri Mehlhorn said in an email sent Saturday to Semafor and other publications.
On Sunday, Mehlhorn said he regretted making the comments and apologized. “We must come together to condemn this type of violence in all cases, without reservation. Any other topic is a distraction,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
Hoffman, who has donated more than $8 million to Biden, separately condemned X’s shooting.
less confidence
In some aspects of American life, there has always been a tendency toward conspiratorial thinking. Competing theories about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy have persisted for decades, with Trump himself alleging in 2016 that Senator Ted Cruz’s father had participated in the assassination.
Low trust is now a reality of American civic and political life. Trust in key government and civic institutions has fallen dramatically in recent decades, according to polls. Gallup Averaging opinions of 14 major institutions, finds that 28 percent of Americans have a great deal of trust in those institutions this year, down from 43 percent in 2004. Their assessment includes opinions about the presidency, Congress, the media, organized religion, banks and other institutions.
The results mark the third consecutive year that trust in large institutions as a group has fallen below 30%.
Shannon Tyree’s first reaction to the assassination attempt was the same as her reaction to most current events: Can I really believe this?
What first got him thinking was how the Secret Service might have failed to secure nearby buildings and Trump’s quick turn toward the crowd in a dangerous situation.
Tyree, 54, a former public records investigator in New York, said her doubts were dispelled when she saw more media coverage over the weekend. But he said he has been exposed to so much misinformation over the past decade of American politics that his defensive, questioning attitude has become a reflex he often tries to resist.
“The whole point of all this misinformation is for us to not believe anything,” Tyree said. “And I don’t want to be that.”
At an anti-Trump rally outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Monday, attendees lamented the shooting and said the official version of events seemed plausible, even if there was still much to learn. Still, some said there was reason to be skeptical.
Chris Anderly, a 57-year-old hotelier, said the photo of Trump with a bloodied face, face first in the air, and an American flag in the background, made him think twice.
“It was just seeing that image. It looked choreographed,” he said.
“Like a photo shoot,” added Mary Braun, a recently retired Milwaukee resident.
According to John Banas, a professor at the University of Oklahoma who studies mitigating misinformation and conspiracy theories, people’s daily experiences with institutions they believe aren’t serving them breed deep distrust. Political rhetoric riddled with lies—a phenomenon that Banas says occurs on both sides of the political spectrum, to varying degrees—isn’t helping either. Distrust leads to paranoia.
“If you don’t believe what your government says, what teachers say, what scientists say, what the media says, who do you turn to for information?” he added. “You turn to a YouTuber who has a conspiracy theory.”
Source: Latercera
I am David Jack and I have been working in the news industry for over 10 years. As an experienced journalist, I specialize in covering sports news with a focus on golf. My articles have been published by some of the most respected publications in the world including The New York Times and Sports Illustrated.
