Some Trump voters are convinced the shooting at last month’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner was fake, according to a recent focus group.
“It doesn’t make sense that somebody should be able to get that close this many times in that way to the president of the United States,” one focus group member told Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark.
There is no evidence that the attack was fake, and police arrested suspect Cole Tomas Allen on the scene, a California man who allegedly wrote a manifesto about targeting members of the Trump administration and brought multiple weapons to the Washington Hilton.
Still, focus group members, comprised of repeat Trump voters now dissatisfied with the presidency, largely said they couldn’t believe the official story about what is now the third apparent assassination attempt against the president in the last three years. Some even suggested the president or his allies were behind the attack.
In particular, they said they were skeptical about how quickly Trump and his supporters began arguing that the shooting underscored the need for the president’s White House ballroom. In Trump’s case, he began making the pitch the night of the shooting, and the GOP soon followed, proposing to use $400 million in government funds to support ballroom construction, a project the president previously said would be privately funded.
“I feel like it was a ploy to get his ballroom that he wants, and that’s his reason,” another focus group participant reportedly added.
The widespread, unfounded beliefs about the Correspondents’ Dinner shooting are a reminder of the fiendishly complicated information environment we now live in, where conspiracies are rampant, the press is on the back foot, AI image-making is highly sophisticated, and trust in institutions is low.
The president has at times been a driver, victim, and beneficiary of this muddled information environment.
He regularly makes AI-altered images and factually inaccurate claims, and he and his administration have cracked down on the press, launching lawsuits against top outlets and attempting to boot the regular press corps from White House briefings and the halls of the Pentagon.
The Trump administration has also touted pseudoscientific claims, slammed established climate science, and appointed skeptics of vaccines to key posts.
Meanwhile, a notable pocket of the president’s base, in the thrall of the QAnon conspiracy, at one point believed Trump would return to power and root out an alleged elite pedophile ring.
That did not turn out to be the case, though the president’s long, genuine association with the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein fueled conspiracy theories of a different kind, both about underlying misconduct and the Trump administration’s later handling of the Epstein files. (Trump has strongly denied any Epstein-related wrongdoing.)
