Assassination conspiracy theories? Blame Trump

Let’s be clear up front: There is no evidence that Donald Trump has staged any of the three high-profile attempts on his life in the past two years.

I’ll likely get some angry reader feedback to that assertion because a lot of people believe at least one of the would-be assassinations — and quite possibly all three — were false flag operations. A new survey from NewsGuard shows that 54% of Americans are open to the theory that at least one of the attacks was staged, with only 38% saying definitively they believe all three were real. When asked about each separate assault — the 2024 shooting that grazed Trump’s ear at a Pennsylvania campaign stop, the arrest of the armed man at the president’s West Palm Beach golf course later that year and the recent incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — fewer than half said these events were authentic.

No one deserves more blame for this state of affairs than Trump himself, and not just because he’s spent a decade lying and sowing his own conspiracy theories, giving permission to both his allies and his opponents to take a looser approach to the truth. Once in a while, a conspiracy theory may be wrong but still manages to channel authentic frustrations. This particular one is false, but its underlying assumptions about the president — that he’s a liar, and that he’s manipulative, corrupt and politically desperate — are all too real.

There’s an obvious explanation for why this conspiracy theory is so popular: Trump would fake such a thing if he thought he could get away with it. Anyone who doubts that has been asleep for the past decade, which have been marked by one Trump conspiracy after another. In 2019 he tried to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into lying about his political opponent, Joe Biden, which led to his first impeachment trial. A year later Trump was part of an elaborate scheme to steal the 2020 election, resulting in a second impeachment trial and multiple indictments at the federal level and in Georgia. He is currently embracing shadowy cryptocurrency schemes that are generating massive profits. He’s also openly bullying his Justice Department into not releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files, suggesting that what’s hidden implicates him even more than the eye-popping stuff that has already emerged about his longtime relationship with the deceased sexual predator.

It’s not just that Trump is without morals. He seems to relish plotting and scheming. But while he might conceivably fake an assassination attempt for some perceived political gain, there’s strong reason to believe that he hasn’t done so. As the litany of his ruses shows, Trump lacks the talent for hiding his conspiracies from public view. If anything, he only gets away with them by being so brazen. It’s hard to imagine his administration being competent enough to fake such actions without at least one conspiracist letting the secret out, even by drunkenly bragging about it to a would-be mistress. Trump would even probably let the truth slip in one of his rambling diatribes to the press.

The conspiracy theories around the attempted assassinations don’t just speak to this larger truth about Trump’s corruption. They also channel the public’s rapidly growing frustration with a president who has broken every promise, while simultaneously focusing on self-aggrandizement, and it reflects an accurate sense that he would rather resort to cheating and lying than simply striving to do a better job in an effort to regain his lost political ground.

While Trump didn’t fake an assassination attempt to interfere with the upcoming midterm elections, he and the GOP are cheating — again, right out in the open — by aggressively gerrymandering and relying on corrupt courts to get away with it. In the face of near-certain Democratic wins in November, Republicans are throwing all law and legal precedent out the door to redraw congressional maps, decimating the ability of Black voters in particular to choose their own congressional representatives.

Conservative judges have been breathtakingly shameless in their efforts to tilt the election. The Virginia Supreme Court, which is controlled by right-wing judges, threw out redrawn maps approved directly by the voters in a statewide referendum by relying on technicality arguments so thin that even sober, respectable commentators, like Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times, are arguing that Virginia’s legislators should simply ignore the decision. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority isn’t even bothering to hide its bias, allowing states to redraw maps that favor Republicans at the last minute, while forbidding Democrats to do the same.

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It’s no wonder that Republicans are so desperate. Trump won in 2024 based on his promise to lower prices for American consumers, but instead he ushered in the fastest-growing inflation rate in three years by mismanaging economic policy and starting an unnecessary, unauthorized war with Iran. His approval ratings have plummeted, but because he runs the GOP as a cult of personality, most Republican candidates have no leeway to distance themselves from him to appeal to swing voters. The situation will likely get worse for Trump if Democrats are able to retake the House in November. For one thing, the party will likely be able to release even more materials from the Epstein files, showing Americans what Trump seems eager to hide.

What’s ironic about the false flag theory is that every indication shows that the attempted assassination at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner did not make Trump more popular. Even after wall-to-wall coverage of the attack, allegedly at the hands of a 31-year-old California man, the president’s approval ratings have continued to decline. His reaction to the event likely made his political situation worse. He immediately tried to exploit the shooting to tout the need for his garish White House ballroom, an indulgence Americans already disapprove by a two-to-one margin, according to a Washington Post poll. Trump’s self-indulgence will only look worse as gas and grocery prices continue to soar for everyday Americans.

Republican demands that Americans foot a $1 billion bill for Trump’s tacky ballroom have only made it easier for voters to channel their frustrations into this shooting conspiracy theory. What’s especially interesting is that the notion may be creating an off-ramp for Trump voters looking for a face-saving excuse to give up on the president. The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell conducted a focus group of nine disillusioned Trump voters shortly after the attempted shooting and found that six of them already believed the false flag conspiracy theory.

“I feel like it was a ploy to get his ballroom that he wants, and that’s his reason,” one explained. 

Most Trump voters are stubbornly sticking by the president, unable to admit that liberals were right about him all along. But the focus group captured a small but important trend. While Democrats were most likely to endorse the false flag theory, 23% of independents and 13% of Republicans also believe the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting was staged.

Trump’s addiction to conspiracy theories gave him a way to connect with voters who shared similar paranoia and hostility to the reality-based world. But the same mindset is now giving a small but significant number the story they need to turn their backs on the president.