Within minutes of the Secret Service detaining an alleged attacker at the White House correspondents’ dinner on April 25, social media was flooded with unfounded claims that the attack was “premeditated.”
In the days since, these claims have led some prominent pundits and creationists to reevaluate the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, with many alleging without evidence that it was also staged.
“This was not an actual assassination attempt, and I’m also prepared to say that this was not an actual assassination attempt on 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 nearly 900,000 times. “Yes, two real people were killed, but no one tried to kill Donald Trump.”
Bluesky, Novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who has posted extensively in recent weeks about whether Butler’s ordeal was staged, wrote last week on
The trend of left-wing influencers promoting these conspiracy theories comes on the heels of a wave of prominent MAGA figures, angered by Trump’s war with Iran and his anti-Catholic rhetoric, who promoted conspiracy theories about the Butler shooting. “In our online economy full of outrage and rumors, it’s no surprise that individuals are trying to take advantage of this moment to generate anger and get clicks,” says Nina Jankowicz, CEO of the American Sunlight Project, whom the Biden administration named as its disinformation czar. “The line between ‘analysis’ and disinformation has never been thinner.”
WIRED looks at the main claims that conspiracy theorists point to when claiming both the Butler and reporters’ dinner shootings, and why neither claim stands up to scrutiny.
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“Evidence” cited by both left-wing and right-wing ideologues that Butler’s assassination was staged includes Trump’s raised fist reaction, his injured ear, photographers scrambling to the right spot for a photo opportunity, and the lack of information about the shooter and his motive.
Overall, these inconsistencies have been woven into a widespread conspiracy theory, leading millions of people on the right and left to believe that Butler’s assassination attempt was faked.
A key piece of so-called evidence cited by conspiracy theorists on both sides of the political spectrum is a video, which they claim shows Trump being moved into position to perfectly capture his raised fist gesture seconds after he was shot.
Conspiracy theorists claim that the video shows a campaign staffer walking to the left of the stage after the first shot was fired, then returning a few 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 suggest that each of them were simply doing their job, and footage captured using Meta’s smart glasses by Washington Post photographer Jabin Botsford shows that no campaign staffer was telling the photographers what to do.
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