Trumps Assassination Attempts: Real or Lazy Conspiracies?

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:02]Nearly a third of Americans believe that at least one of the three attempts on President Trump's life was staged.

[00:00:08]That's the finding from a stunning new survey by NewsGuard and YouGov.

[00:00:12]Respondents were asked about each incident individually, the Butler rally in July of 2024, the golf course in West Palm Beach that September, and then the White House correspondent dinner last month. And with regard to each of the three incidents, respondents were asked to reply to each claim with a response of true, false, or not sure.

[00:00:31]And for every single one of the three attempts, a majority of Americans answered that it was either staged or they weren't sure.

[00:00:39]Averaging 54% across all three incidents. In each case, Democrats were far more likely to believe the conspiracy than were Republicans.

[00:00:48]42% of Democrats think the Butler shooting where Corey Camp Ratorey was murdered and two others were critically wounded was staged, while only 7% of Republicans agree.

[00:01:00]And the Trump assassination attempts are hardly the only conspiracy theories that seem to have gotten automatic and widespread acceptance from both parties in recent years.

[00:01:09]I found an explanation about this in a book published in 2019 before any of the assassination attempts, but it explains the acceptance of conspiracy. This week on SiriusXM, I interviewed Russell Muirhead, professor of democracy and politics at Dartmouth College, co-author with Harvard's Nancy Rosenblum of A Lot of People Are Saying, The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. Their argument, in short, conspiracism has traveled from the margins to the mainstream. Today, no official action is immune to being labeled a conspiracy.

[00:01:43]And while conspiracism is nothing new, what is new is conspiracy without the theory.

[00:01:50]Think about that.

[00:01:51]Conspiracy without the theory. Unlike the conspiracy surrounding something like JFK's assassination where people actually constructed elaborate alternative explanations.

[00:02:02]Today, there seems to be little interest in explanation at all.

[00:02:06]Lazy conspiracism thrives on vague assertion alone. It's enough to say the system is rigged.

[00:02:14]It's enough to say the election was stolen. No backup required. Just repetition.

[00:02:19]And it runs the risk of delegitimizing democracy itself. Hey gang, big news from Parx Casino. If you think Roger Daltrey is big news, and I certainly do cuz he's just been added to the bill.

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[00:03:45]Absolutely. It used to be that, you know, conspiracy theories were real theories. People worked hard on them, as you said. They weren't lazy. They they were like investigative journalists or scholars. They they they probed, you know, anomalies in official explanations, things that didn't make sense. And they looked for alternate facts or or facts that were being hidden shrouded by the official account. And and look, sometimes their accounts were far-fetched. The the the term conspiracy theorist is almost a synonym for somebody who's, you know, not whose cognitive capacities are are kind of in a runaway loop. But but hey, every once in a while and and maybe more than a once in a while, they got it right.

[00:04:24]Because of their hard work, they're able to hold power to account and reveal betrayal. Today's conspiracy theorists just dispense with the theory. They're they're not doing any real research, they're not doing any work, they're just asserting things. And because of our new communications technology, when I go on X and assert something, millions of people can read it. I can share it with the whole world for free. And so anyone else who doesn't like reality, anyone who wants to make their own reality, can tap in to my latest to whatever the latest conspiratorial assertion is that's out there in the world. Today, all you got to do is hit the send key.

[00:05:02]Yeah, it's it's actually totally I mean it's still I'm still as a as an old guy, I'm totally flabbergasted even though we've been with this technology for over a decade. It used to be really hard to share your thoughts with other people.

[00:05:13]And you had to get them past a producer.

[00:05:15]And one of the things a producer would ask is, "Hey, is this true? Is this corroborated? Is there evidence to support it?" If the answer was no, you weren't going to get on the radio.

[00:05:25]You weren't going to get on TV. You weren't going to get column inches of a valuable, you know, newspaper uh space.

[00:05:30]You you Now you can say anything to you know, anyone everyone in the whole world for free. And and and that, you know, has eradicated the sort of, you know, the function of producers and editors and and and asking, "Hey, is this true?"

[00:05:44]So yeah, we're in we're in in new world.

[00:05:47]I've got an illustration that makes this concrete. The Kennedy assassination has been the subject of endless speculation for more than half a century. So, I I reached out for Gerald Posner. He wrote the bestseller Case Closed supporting the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. In other words, not a conspiracy.

[00:06:06]And Posner told me that he believes that more than 2,000 books have been written embracing some form of JFK conspiracy.

[00:06:13]Wikipedia puts the number between 1,000 and 2,000.

[00:06:17]And the source for the higher figure is a 2007 academic study by a University of Mississippi history professor named Peter Knight.

[00:06:25]That number includes self-published titles and everything with an ISBN identifier.

[00:06:31]And more books have been published since then, so let's call it over 2,000.

[00:06:35]Now, compare that to the stolen 2020 election. How many books have been written arguing that the election was stolen? Almost none.

[00:06:43]Almost none. There's Mollie Hemingway's Rigged, Christina Bob's Stealing Your Vote, and Peter Navarro's self-published three-volume series. Beyond that, search Amazon and you mostly find parody.

[00:06:55]Blank page joke books with titles like All the Proof the 2020 election was stolen. That's not a coincidence, that's the entire point. The JFK conspiracy literature, 2,000 books over six decades, represents the old conspiracism. It built arguments. It named suspects. It marshaled evidence, however flawed.

[00:07:16]Debate has flourished about the Zapruder film, the man on the grassy knoll, Oswald's skill as a marksman, and his meeting at the Cuban consulate and the Soviet embassy in Mexico City.

[00:07:26]The stolen election claim needed none of that. It spread through tweets and rallies and TV appearances. Rigged doesn't require 300 pages. It just requires repetition or someone to say, "A lot of people are saying."

[00:07:42]Let's see what you're saying on social media. Hit me up during the course of the program. Maybe I will read your reaction. He was bleeding, which would indicate damage, but there's no scar or missing section of his ear. Okay, you know what? This is incredible and my producers don't know I have makeup on, so you might not see. You might not see.

[00:08:02]I cut my head shaving this week. It was a It was a beast. The head bleeds. It's somewhere like right here, okay? Now, you might not see it now cuz it healed, but I was bleeding profusely into the sink on Wednesday morning 5:00.

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