A fresh wave of conspiracy theories is rolling through social media across the country following Saturday night’s attempted assassination of President Trump at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner.
The unfounded theories largely capitalize on short video snippets of those in the room and initial breaking news reports filed moments after a gunman tried to breach a ballroom at the Washington Hilton with Trump and hundreds of other government officials and members of the press inside.
By the time Trump had traveled back to the White House to deliver remarks on the incident and posted a photo of the suspected attacker, thousands of social media posts had been circulating online suggesting the episode was “staged” or somehow faked.
Reasons users cited for such a hoax were wide ranging, from a desire to distract from the Iran war to a need to justify Trump’s desired ballroom at the White House for hosting large events like the annual WHCA dinner.
It’s just the latest example of a real shooting prompting false conspiracy theories. The first attempt on Trump’s life at a Butler, Pa., campaign rally in 2024 also sparked false stories, as did the assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk last year.
Experts on disinformation say breaking news is increasingly becoming a breeding ground for unfounded conspiracy theories in part because people are seeing so many things online that turn out not to be true.
“We’re in an information environment where people are just not believing anything they see because they’ve become so exhausted by the steady tide of information everyone is sharing that later turns out to be not true,” Katie Sanders, editor in chief of the fact checking website PolitiFact, told The Hill. “People might want to tune all of it out, but that means they’re not in a good position to separate what’s true when breaking news happens.”
Kirk’s murder was captured on video that spread quickly online. A man accused of shooting him is standing trial in Utah.
But that hasn’t stopped theories from spreading that Israel was responsible for Kirk’s killing.
Conspiracy theories are also sometimes pushed by figures with large social media followings.
Some of the conspiracy theories about Kirk have come from prominent pundits on the right and at least one former top intelligence official in Trump’s administration, Joe Kent.
State actors are also often responsible for spreading conspiracy theories.
Some social media users on Saturday falsely asserted that the suspect in Saturday’s shooting had Israeli sympathies, a claim that was promoted by the Russian-operated state media outlet RT, The New York Times first reported.
The 2022 attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) home targeting her husband, Paul Pelosi, sparked days of online conspiracy theories, including from billionaire Elon Musk.
In the weeks that followed the first assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, many online conspiracy theorists alleged that the shooting was staged to distract from negative headlines surrounding Trump’s candidacy at the time.
Such chatter likely “primed” some of the online skepticism that took place after Saturday’s events, Sanders said.
The White House on Monday publicly denounced misinformation circulating online about Saturday’s incident but stopped short of saying what efforts it had taken to work with social media companies to quell the spread of false rumors about the shooting.
“It’s very important to us that we get the truth and the facts about this case and any case out there as quickly as possible, to dispel some of that crazy nonsense that you see running rampant online,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at the White House.
“As far as we’re concerned, [we want] to provide maximum transparency. And hopefully people will believe the truth instead of the lies and the conspiracies that so often do go crazy on social media,” she added.
Sarah B. Rogers, under secretary of State for public diplomacy, said Sunday she had spoken with at least one journalist who “lamented mass-hysteric brainrot among their readers” about the incident.
“For self-serving or myopic reasons, some people try to pigeonhole this sort of malicious, motivated conspiracism as a partisan phenomenon. It isn’t,” Rogers said. “What matters is how we react to it, especially given that censorship is (rightly) off the table.”
Trump and his allies have pointed to a manifesto left by the suspect in Saturday’s attack espousing anti-Christian and anti-Trump rhetoric as they blame Democrats for criticism of the president that they say inspires such attacks.
Trump, speaking from the White House podium just minutes after the attack, suggested the security breach was evidence of the need for White House ballroom. This may have further fueled unfounded speculation the attack was “staged,” particularly among social media accounts and users critical of the president.
The progressive pundit Don Lemon posted a video of himself interviewing people on the street about the incident, some of which told him they “could believe” Saturday’s attack might have been faked.
Others pointed to the ongoing fight in Congress over funding for the Department of Homeland Security, a point that Republicans have harped on since Saturday’s incident as they warn America and top U.S. officials are less safe without proper security funding.
“If they’re willing to die to assassinate, imagine what they will do if they gain political power,” wrote Musk, the billionaire owner of social platform X who has a history of sharing false or misleading information online.
Others on the right, including conservative pundit Matt Walsh, mocked such theories.
“I’m officially convinced. It was a hoax. The Trump Administration recruited a leftist Kamala Harris voting Trump hater to participate in a staged assassination that would include the shooter getting shot at and then locked in federal prison for the rest of his life,” Walsh wrote in a sarcastic post on X.
Some observers say people buying into conspiracy theories stemming from politically motivated acts of violence is a way for Americans to cope with unexplained, traumatic events.
Conspiracy theories are only likely to gain steam in an increasingly volatile American political climate, these people say.
“Shootings or reports of shootings are chaotic environments, and the chaos is what attracts the conspiratorial thinker,” said Geoff Dancy, a political scientist at the University of Toronto. “People who seek out conspiracies are often looking for comfort or order among disorder. It could be a comforting thought to think this is all planned. It sort of allays your fears to think this isn’t just some person who had access to weapons and snapped … that’s scary.”
