IN RECENT WEEKS both MAGA and left-wing influencers have found something they agree on: President Donald Trump, they say, is staging his own assassination attempts.
Within minutes of the Secret Service detaining an alleged attacker at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25, social media was flooded with baseless claims the attack was “STAGED.”
In the days since, these claims have led some prominent pundits and creators to reassess the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, with many alleging, without evidence, that it was also staged.
“This was not a real assassination attempt, and I am also ready to say that it was not 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 that has been viewed almost 900,000 times. “Yeah, two real people died, but no one tried to kill Donald Trump.”
Bluesky, X, and TikTok are filled with comments related to Butler and the WHCD, with an endless feed of posts and videos claiming that the Correspondents’ Dinner incident is further proof that the Butler assassination was staged. Novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who in recent weeks has posted extensively about whether or not Butler was staged, wrote on X last week, “We can see now, placing Butler PA & the WH correspondents incident side by side, that the same scenario was planned in each instance.”
