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In recent weeks both MAGA and left-wing influencers have found something they agree on: President Donald Trump, they say, is staging his own assassination attempts.
Within minutes of the Secret Service detaining an alleged attacker at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25, social media was flooded with baseless claims the attack was “STAGED.”
In the days since, these claims have led some prominent pundits and creators to reassess the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, with many alleging, without evidence, that it was also staged.
“This was not a real assassination attempt, and I am also ready to say that it was not a real assassination attempt in Butler during the campaign,” Leigh McGowan, a digital creator known as PoliticsGirl who has partnered with the Democratic National Committee in the past, said in a video posted to TikTok that has been viewed almost 900,000 times. “Yeah, two real people died, but no one tried to kill Donald Trump.”
Bluesky, X, and TikTok are filled with comments related to Butler and the WHCD, with an endless feed of posts and videos claiming that the Correspondents’ Dinner incident is further proof that the Butler assassination was staged. Novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who in recent weeks has posted extensively about whether or not Butler was staged, wrote on X last week, “We can see now, placing Butler PA & the WH correspondents incident side by side, that the same scenario was planned in each instance.”
The trend of left-wing influencers boosting these conspiracy theories comes immediately after a wave of prominent MAGA figures, angry about Trump’s war with Iran and his anti-Catholic rhetoric, promoted conspiracy theories about the Butler shooting. “In our outrage- and rumor-filled online economy it’s no surprise that individuals are trying to capitalize on the moment to farm rage and get clicks,” says Nina Jankowicz, CEO of the American Sunlight Project who was named by the Biden administration as its disinformation czar. “The line between ‘analysis’ and disinformation has never been thinner.”
WIRED has looked at the main claims that conspiracy theorists point to when claiming both the Butler and Correspondents’ Dinner shootings were staged, and why none of the claims stand up to scrutiny.
The Butler Attempt
The “evidence” cited by both left-wing and right-wing figures that the Butler assassination was staged includes Trump’s raised-fist reaction, his injured ear, photographers being ushered to the perfect spot for a photo opportunity, and the lack of information about the shooter and his motive.
Taken together, these anomalies have been woven into a comprehensive conspiracy theory that appears to have convinced millions of people, on the right and the left, that the Butler assassination attempt was faked.
One key piece of so-called evidence cited by conspiracy theorists on both sides of the political spectrum is a video that they claim shows photographers being ushered into position seconds after Trump was hit in order to perfectly capture his raised-fist gesture.
The conspiracy theorists claim the video shows a campaign staffer walking to the left of the stage after the first shots were fired, then returning seconds later to bring photographers to the front of the stage to capture shots of Trump after he was shot.
However, the photographers’ own accounts of what happened in those moments reveals that each of them were just doing their jobs, and footage captured using Meta’s smart glasses by Washington Post photographer Jabin Botsford shows that no campaign staffers were telling the photographers what to do.
