In the seconds and minutes after a traumatic event, all we know is what we already knew before the event. As information starts to come in – what exactly happened, how it happened, who did it – that starts to change. Questions get answered, new questions arise, an overall narrative starts to emerge. But the moment we learn of something truly enormous and unexpected, such as an airliner flying into the World Trade Center or a mass shooting at a school, we don’t know anything other than the fact that something happened. And we want to know more.
Our minds demand more information, more details, more facts. We need to know what’s going on, even if nobody even knows what’s going on. And we want to talk about it, even if we don’t know what we’re even talking about yet. Social media and the speed that information travels now have exacerbated this need to concoct a story when one isn’t available, but it’s always been part of us.
With all this in mind, nobody should be surprised that the seconds and minutes after a 20-year-old loser with a rifle tried to assassinate Donald Trump, conspiracy theories exploded on social media. It was inevitable, given the intensity of the situation, the infrequent nature of such assassination attempts, and of course, the fact that involved Donald Trump.
Each block of conspiracy theories fell neatly down partisan lines.
Pro-Trump influencers have spent months obsessing over the “deep state” trying to assassinate Trump because he’s going to beat Joe Biden (again!) and they only way they can stop this is by taking Trump off the board. And anti-Trump influencers believe that Trump is so craven that he’d stage his own assassination attempt, complete with a pre-made photo-op, to change the conversation from Biden’s refusal to step aside.
The information you allow yourself to take in depends entirely on the information you’ve already taken in.
None of this should be surprising if one has followed Western politics and media for the last few decades. Within hours of the World Trade Center collapsing, major conspiracy figures like Alex Jones and Bill Cooper claimed the hijackings were staged as an excuse to detonate charges on the main girders of the buildings and bring them down in order to take control of the American people. It now takes minutes for “citizen journalists” to declare that “something is wrong” with the story when news breaks of a school shooting. Most of these conspiracy theories are repackaged versions of ones that have come before, and quickly fade out.
What’s new with the Trump shooting is that the volume of right wing conspiracy theories is being overwhelmed by the volume of conspiracy theories from the left. While many Republicans have fallen back on the usual narrative of a surprisingly incompetent deep state hit job, many Democrats have embraced the false and deranged notion that Trump staged his own attempted murder, based on “proof” that doesn’t stand up to logic or scrutiny, and sticking to the idea even once it became clear that multiple people, including the shooter, were killed in those furious few seconds.
“What, you think Trump wouldn’t do it? You think he cares about anyone but himself dying?” is that believers will ask, though these are rhetorical questions designed to reinforce belief. “Why would you put anything past him?”
Left wing conspiracy theories aren’t new, of course. But they’ve never quite caught on the way right-wing myths and disinformation have. They aren’t as compelling, they aren’t as profitable, they don’t offer the same heady stakes and cartoonish villains. And they aren’t equivalent. Left-leaning nonsense doesn’t have the same rotten core of antisemitism and racism and hate and fear. It wasn’t left-wing conspiracy theories that fueled January 6th or Charlottesville. Even health freedom and antivax conspiracy theories, once more the domain of progressives, have been usurped by the far right – Steve Bannon is just as likely to shill for “vaccine detox” as he is for “white genocide” these days.
But that’s changed as Donald Trump’s grip on American politics and discourse has tightened. Trump is an accelerant for left wing conspiracism in the same way Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were for the right. They are all-powerful, pure evil, devious and cunning in ways that defy description, and yet never quite pulls off their dark plans for world domination and mass slavery. They kill anyone they want, but manage to get caught on the internet. They create vast networks of underground bases and camps and terror cells that, for some reason, mostly remain dormant. And when they do activate – a mass shooter “brainwashed by MKUltra” or something like that – the internet figures it out easily.
These are cartoon villains. They’re Cobra Commander in the 80’s GI Joe Cartoon, building a vast army of soldiers and tanks and lasers, hatching plan after plan, and never winning. And like all “world domination” theories, they give a free pass to the real villains. They absolve the food conglomerates, the mass polluters, the actual dictators, the holders of medical debt and the inventors of “lunch debt.” These people get off – while the phony Saturday morning TV villains of the “deep state” keep pumping out their ham-fisted plots in public.
The idea that Trump staged his own assassination, built around one lousy marksman shooting him just close enough to his head to get a once-in-a-century photo, then having that marksman killed, is just as goofy and unserious a plan as much of the far right’s supposed chicanery. Sure, it’s fun to tweet about your belief that WWE-trained showman Trump could duck down just long enough to smear blood on his ear and pop up for a first pump, but once you find out people are dead, that’s not going to stick as a story.
Once you find out the shooting was real, it can’t be staged anymore, right? The problem with conspiracy theories is that they don’t function in the realm of logic. It can be real AND staged. Why not? The details don’t matter and are entirely fungible. You claim no kids died at Sandy Hook, then when overwhelming evidence emerges that they definitely did, you just claim they died but not the way THEY are telling us. The theory changes, but it doesn’t really change.
Likewise, Trump’s “shooting” clearly was real, but it can also be fake. Arguing over the details is pointless, because they’re meaningless. The idea that anyone would let some clown with no training shoot at their head on the off chance that they’d hit their ear is comical – but Trump is evil and Project 2025 will turn us all into breeding slaves in a Christofacist hellscape, so can we really say he wouldn’t do it?
I caught twelve kinds of hell from liberal influencers when I pushed back at the conspiracy theory that Trump had his ex-wife Ivana murdered by throwing her down the stairs, then used her fake burial to hide classified documents in her empty casket. I didn’t push back at it because I love Trump – far from it. I pushed back because it was insane and totally devoid of evidence, while sidestepping actual evidence, like Ivana being in so much pain from degenerating hips that she could barely walk. But people who have turned Trump in dime store villain capable of doing anything to anyone didn’t want to hear it.
The biggest problem with conspiracy theories how they transform their believers into conspiratorial people. They invert trust and faith. They wrap certainty in a blanket of nonsense. And they make people paranoid and joyless, distrustful and cynical. They show us a real and traumatic event and make it cartoonish and bizarre in ways that don’t actually help us process and react to them.
Political assassinations are pretty common in the US. Four presidents have been shot dead, many others have had guns pulled on them or shots fired at them while in office or around then. Gerald Ford had guns pulled on him twice in three weeks. Reagan was nearly killed by a shooter, while Harry Truman survived an assassination attempt as VP. Likewise, the atmosphere at Trump events and around Trump in general is one of chaos and violence and a sickening kind of “anything can happen” energy. It’s not surprising that this happened, it’s more surprising that it took this long.
So the attempt to kill Donald Trump doesn’t require a conspiracy theory. Like so many other hinge points in history, it just requires a dope with a gun who maybe shifts the tides of a generation depending on if they can hit a target or not.
But we process information through conspiracy theories. We fill gaps in our understanding with garbage rather than simply sit in that lack of understanding. We make up better stories than the ones the officials give us because we like stories. And we cast our villains as being so evil they must be stopped while also being so incompetent that they never quite start.
We know who and what Donald Trump is. We don’t need conspiracy theories to make him worse or more devious. We only need look at his history and his plans for the future. It’s all there and obvious. Him “smearing blood on his ear” or conspiring with the Secret Service to be photographed on his good side only obscures his danger in a haze of nonsense.
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Mike Rothschild 