Many Americans think Trump assassination attempts were fake, survey finds
Nearly 1 in 4 Americans think the April shooting at a White House correspondents’ dinner was staged with a clear partisan divide, according to a poll released Monday.
About 1 in 3 Democratic respondents say they believe the incident was staged, while about 1 in 8 Republicans believe it was staged, according to a poll released Monday by NewsGuard, a company that evaluates the credibility of online news sources. Respondents ages 18 to 29 were more likely than older adults to think the incident was planned, according to the report.
Last week, a federal grand jury in D.C. indicted alleged gunman Cole Tomas Allen on four counts, including the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump. Shortly after the incident at the Washington Hilton that led to his arrest, conspiracy theories began to spread online claiming that the Trump administration staged the event to drum up support for the president, the Republican Party, and his planned White House ballroom.
NewsGuard research found that 24 percent of U.S. adults believe the incident at the Washington Hilton was fake, while 45 percent believe it was legitimate. 32 percent said they were not sure. The survey of 1,000 American adults was conducted by YouGov from April 28 to May 4.
“This is striking,” said NewsGuard editor Sofia Rubinson. He said the results underscore the broader skepticism Americans feel toward the government and the press. “People on all sides of the political spectrum increasingly distrust both this administration and the media,” he said, but they are also willing to trust unverified information they see online.
The White House rejected the conspiracy theories in a statement following the broadcast. “Anyone who thinks President Trump orchestrated his own assassination attempts is a complete idiot,” spokesman Davis Ingle said.
Boston University professor Joan Donovan, who studies media manipulation, said the results are an indication of the role of showmanship in Trump’s presidency. Donovan said of the reporters’ dinner shots: “It’s incredibly Hollywood-like to imagine this being staged.” “The entire apparatus of government has been turned into a reality TV show.”
The April incident followed 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 emerged to support conspiracy theories claiming that any of the three gun-related incidents at Trump’s public events were staged. But many Americans still think so.
Regarding the Butler assassination attempt, 24 percent of those surveyed said they believed it was staged. 42 percent of Democrats said they thought the attack was staged, compared to 7 percent of Republicans.
Meanwhile, 16 percent of survey respondents said they believed the golf club assassination attempt was staged: 26 percent of Democrats and 7 percent of Republicans.
In total, 21 percent of Democrats said they believed all three events were staged, compared with 11 percent of independents and 3 percent of Republicans.
Donovan said he wasn’t surprised that Democrats were more likely to doubt the legitimacy of the events. “If you look at people on the left, you see a growing trend of conspiratorial thinking, and a lot of that has to do with people being very unsure about the trustworthiness of all of our institutions,” he said.
Jared Holt, a senior researcher at online extremism monitoring group Open Measures, said the statistics show how widespread conspiratorial thinking has become in the United States.
“These poll numbers don’t really surprise me. They’re absolutely depressing,” Holt said. “Conspiracy theories have influenced our politics to the point that they have now become an instinctive reflex for a growing segment of the population.”
Donovan said it might be natural for people to fall for conspiracy theories as they try to make sense of complex events.
“Unfortunately, when governments or institutions hide the truth about what they’re up to, or they play fast and loose with certain regulations, or they don’t impose certain laws on different people,” Donovan said. “It is much easier to believe in a conspiracy against oneself than to believe that the system is rotten.”
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