Liam Scott
About one in four Americans think the April shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner was staged, with a marked partisan divide, according to a survey published on Monday.
Roughly one in three Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about one in eight Republicans, according to a survey published on Monday by NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of online news outlets. Respondents aged 18 to 29 were also more likely than older respondents to believe the incident was staged, the report found.
Last week, a federal grand jury in Washington indicted the alleged gunman, charging Cole Tomas Allen with four felonies, including the attempted assassination of US President Donald Trump. Soon after the incident that led to his arrest at the Washington Hilton, conspiracy theories began to spread online that falsely claim the Trump administration staged the incident to manufacture support for the president, the Republican Party and his planned White House ballroom.
The NewsGuard survey found that 24 per cent of US adults believe the incident at the Washington Hilton was fake, compared with 45 per cent who believed it was legitimate. An additional 32 per cent said they were unsure. The survey of 1000 American adults was conducted by YouGov from April 28 to May 4.
“It’s very striking,” said Sofia Rubinson, an editor at NewsGuard. The results underscore broader scepticism that Americans feel towards the government and the press, she said. “Increasingly, people on all sides of the political spectrum are distrustful of both this administration and also the media,” she said, though they were willing to trust unverified information they saw online.
The White House rejected the conspiracy theories in a statement provided after publication. “Anyone who thinks President Trump staged his own assassination attempts is a complete moron,” spokesman Davis Ingle said.
Joan Donovan, a Boston University professor who researches media manipulation, said the results were an indicator of the role of showmanship in Trump’s presidency. “It just seems incredibly Hollywood to imagine that this is staged,” Donovan said of the correspondents’ dinner shooting.
“The entire apparatus of the government has been turned into a reality TV show.”
The April incident came after two assassination attempts on Trump in 2024: one at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the second at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.
No evidence has surfaced to support the conspiracy theories claiming that any of the three gun-related incidents at Trump’s public events was staged. But many Americans still think each was.
Regarding the Butler assassination attempt, 24 per cent of respondents said they believed it was staged. Forty-two per cent of Democratic respondents said they thought the shooting was staged, compared with 7 per cent of Republicans.
Meanwhile, 16 per cent of respondents said they believed the golf club assassination attempt was staged: 26 per cent of Democrats and 7 per cent of Republicans.
In total, 21 per cent of Democratic respondents said they believed all three events were staged, compared with 11 per cent of independents and 3 per cent of Republicans.
‘Those poll numbers don’t terribly shock me. They’re definitely bleak. Conspiracy theorising has infected our body politic now to the point where it has become a gut reflex for a seemingly growing portion of the population.’
Jared Holt, senior researcher, Open Measures
Donovan said she wasn’t surprised that Democrats were more likely to doubt the legitimacy of the incidents. “If you look among folks on the left, there is a rising tide of conspiratorial thinking, and a lot of it has to do with people being very unsure about the reliability of all of our institutions,” she said.
Jared Holt, a senior researcher at the online extremism tracking group Open Measures, said the statistics show how conspiratorial thinking is becoming more common in the United States.
“Those poll numbers don’t terribly shock me. They’re definitely bleak,” Holt said. “Conspiracy theorising has infected our body politic now to the point where it has become a gut reflex for a seemingly growing portion of the population.”
It can be natural for people to fall for conspiracy theories when they’re trying to make sense of complicated events, Donovan said.
“Unfortunately, when governments or institutions are hiding the truth about what they’re up to, or they’re playing fast and loose with certain regulations, or they’re not imposing certain laws on different people,” Donovan said, “it is much easier to believe in a conspiracy against oneself than it is to believe that the system has become rotted.”
The Washington Post
Get fascinating insights and explanations on the world’s most perplexing topics. Sign up for our weekly Explainer newsletter.
