In recent weeks, as criticism of President Donald Trump from his own supporters has reached a fever pitch, a new conspiracy theory has taken hold: Some of the president’s biggest supporters are now claiming, without evidence, that Trump staged the assassination attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024 and is covering it up.
During an open-air campaign rally on July 13, 2024, Trump survived an attempted assassination when a bullet fired by a 20-year-old on a roof nearby clipped the top of his ear. Corey Comperatore, a Trump supporter sitting near the president, was shot and killed. The shooter was later killed by Secret Service agents. Conspiracy theories around the Butler assassination quickly permeated the internet, but for many Trump supporters, his survival was seen as a sign from God that he was the chosen one.
As Trump’s hold over MAGA has waned, though, an increasing number of his supporters have begun to push the narrative that the entire incident was staged.
"I think that maybe it was staged," Tim Dillon said on his show last weekend about the assassination attempt. Dillon, who was previously a staunch Trump supporter, went on to share that Trump should now come out and say, “Some people are going to be upset by this, but we staged the assassination attempt in Butler to show people how important it was to vote for me and how far I was willing to go for them.”
Some of these claims began months ago. In November, former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson promoted the idea that the FBI was somehow involved in covering up the shooting, writing on X that the “FBI lied” about the shooter's online footprint.
A day later, conservative pundit Emerald Robinson went further, posting on X that the FBI “did it.” (In the same post, Robinson claimed that the agency was responsible for everything from the January 6 attack on the Capitol to “Jeffrey Epstein's blackmail tapes” and the “Gov. Whitmer fake kidnap plot.”)
But the claims that Trump had staged the entire thing really picked up steam when former US National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent appeared on Carlson’s podcast last month, one day after he resigned from his position over the Iran war.
During the interview, Carlson and Kent discussed the failure of the Trump administration to provide more details about the Pennsylvania shooter. Kent claimed, without providing any evidence, that investigations into the shooting had been shut down before they finished.
Kent also claimed that this vacuum of information about the incident would lead to more conspiracy theories. “If you don't want to address that question, then you just go silent and say you can't ask that question,” he said. “Which then creates people who come out of nowhere and they start drawing their own conclusions.” (This is in fact, experts say, one basic dynamic behind conspiracy theorizing.)
“If you cannot look at this story and use critical thinking skills and have at least some questions, you are the problem and we need you to snap out of it,” Trisha Hope, a GOP national delegate from Texas and former Trump supporter, posted on X about Butler this week.
On Telegram, prominent QAnon promoter MJ Truth asked his 100,000 followers: “How does everyone feel about the narrative surrounding the Butler Assassination Attempt on Trump?”
The overwhelming majority of the hundreds of replies, almost all of whom remain Trump supporters, said they believed the incident had been staged and that the truth may never come out. “The truth will come out 60+ years from now when we're all dead and nobody really cares anymore … just like JFK!!!!,” one follower wrote.
Many claims about the Butler conspiracy theory have also involved discussion of the Israeli government's purported control over the US government that strongly echo classical antisemitism. In a monologue posted on his channel last week, Carlson questioned why Israel had “so much control over our government” and claimed that “one of the clues is the Butler shooting” and that the Trump’s administration’s failure to investigate the incident indicated the level of Israel’s control.
This allegation was then echoed by Candace Owens, another prominent MAGA figure, who claimed in a recent podcast that Israeli-American political donor Miriam Adelson was actually behind the attempted assassination. Owens claimed that Trump had taken $100 million from her in donations, but had not followed through on his promise to then support Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, and that this was the reason for the attempted assassination. Owens further suggested that this was also the reason Trump never really investigated the assassination properly when he became president.
Ali Alexander, the far-right activist who organized the Stop the Steal campaign in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, has a slightly different take on the assassination, claiming instead that it was further evidence that Trump is the Antichrist, something many MAGA figures have also been considering this week.
“To be clear: if Donald Trump didn’t receive a miracle, then it was deception or a dark sign,” Alexander wrote in a five-page PDF he posted to his Telegram channel on Tuesday evening. “There is biblical prophecy in Revelation 13:3 apparently about the Antichrist being struck on the head.”
The passage in question actually reads: “I saw that one of its heads seemed to have been mortally wounded, but this mortal wound was healed. Fascinated, the whole world followed after the beast.”
While the vast majority of people discussing conspiracy theories about the shooting today are Trump supporters or former Trump supporters, in the hours and days after the shooting, it was left wing so-called Blue Anon accounts pushing the claims that the shooting was staged, suggesting it was all orchestrated by the Secret Service and that Trump had used blood gel packs in an attempt to draw sympathy and votes.
