There Is No Evidence the Trump Assassination Attempts Were Staged. People Still Believe They Were

In recent weeks MAGA and left-wing influencers have found something they agree on: President Donald Trump, they say, is staging his own assassination attempts.

Minutes after the Secret Service arrested an alleged attacker at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25, social media was flooded with baseless claims that the attack was “PARTED.”

Since then, these claims have led some prominent experts and creators to reevaluate Trump’s 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, with many claiming, without evidence, that it was also staged.

“It wasn’t a real assassination attempt, and I’m also willing to say it wasn’t 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 and viewed nearly 900,000 times. “Yes, two real people died, but no one tried to kill Donald Trump.”

Bluesky, Novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who in recent weeks has published extensively on the question of whether or not Butler was staged, wrote on »

The trend of left-wing influencers boosting these conspiracy theories comes immediately after a wave of prominent MAGA figures, angry over Trump’s war with Iran and his anti-Catholic rhetoric, promoted conspiracy theories about the Butler shooting. “In our online economy filled with outrage and rumors, it’s no surprise that individuals are trying to capitalize on the present moment to cultivate anger and gain clicks,” says Nina Jankowicz, CEO of the American Sunlight Project, named by the Biden administration as the misinformation czar. “The line between ‘analysis’ and disinformation has never been thinner.”

WIRED examined the main claims conspiracy theorists make when they say the Butler and Correspondents’ Dinner shootings were staged, and why neither claim stands up to scrutiny.

The Butler’s Attempt

“Evidence” cited by figures on the left and right that Butler’s assassination was staged includes Trump’s raised fist reaction, his injured ear, photographers being led to the ideal location for a photo op, and the lack of information about the shooter and his motive.

Taken together, these anomalies have been integrated into an overarching conspiracy theory that appears to have convinced millions of people, on both the right and the left, that the Butler 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 they say shows photographers positioned seconds after Trump was punched in order to perfectly capture his raised fist gesture.

Conspiracy theorists say 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 photos of Trump after he was shot.

However, the photographers’ own accounts of what happened in those moments reveal that each of them was just doing their job, and images captured using Meta’s smart glasses by Washington Post photographer Jabin Botsford show that no campaign staffers were telling the photographers what to do.