Wild conspiracies crop up accusing Trump of faking shooting
By Taylor Lorenz
Minutes after the Trump rally shooting, liberals began flooding social media platforms with conspiracy theories.
They claimed the blood on former president Donald Trump’s ear was from a theatrical gel pack; that the shooting was a “false flag”, perhaps co-ordinated by the Secret Service in collaboration with the Trump campaign; that the scene of a bloodied Trump raising his fist under an American flag was “#staged”.
From left: Shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks, the rally at Butler, Pennsylvania, and a wounded Donald Trump. Credit: AP / Marija Ercegovac
“When did the Secret Service start allowing the president under duress to tell them to ‘wait’, then stand up to be seen by the crowd fist-pumping?” one user posted on X. “Can you blame me for thinking this is fake?”
The shooting threw into overdrive a phenomenon dubbed “BlueAnon” – a play on the right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon – that refers to liberal conspiracy theories online. As more Americans lose trust in mainstream institutions and turn to partisan commentators and influencers for information, experts say they are seeing a big uptick in the manufacture and spread of BlueAnon conspiracy theories, a sign that the communal warping of reality is spreading well beyond the right.
“The good-versus-evil paradigm of QAnon has really taken hold of the anti-Trump movement and you’re seeing two sides that feel like they are fighting a battle between good and evil,” said Mike Rothschild, author of The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult and Conspiracy Theory of Everything. “It’s coming from major leftist and liberal ‘resistance’ influencers who believe that Trump is so devious that he’d fake his own assassination attempt in order to help his campaign.”
That theory was boosted by at least one influential Democrat: Dmitri Mehlhorn, a political adviser to Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, encouraged supporters in an email to consider the “possibility – which feels horrific and alien and absurd in America, but is quite common globally … that this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash”.
He added: “NOT ONE NEWSPAPER OR OPINION LEADER IN AMERICA IS WILLING TO OPENLY CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY THAT TRUMP AND PUTIN STAGED THIS ON PURPOSE. Ask the question, people.”
Mehlhorn later apologised, saying he now regrets the email, and that he “drafted and sent it without consulting team members or allies”. In a text to The Washington Post, Mehlhorn wrote: “We must unite in condemnation of such violence in every instance, without reservation. Any other topic is a distraction.”
While BlueAnon claims bear no resemblance to the most lurid elements of QAnon – which involve false allegations of Satan worship and paedophilia among liberal elites – they do echo the QAnon theory that a secret deep-state cabal is working to take down Trump. (The QAnon conspiracy has been repeatedly debunked, but many adherents took part in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.)
In BlueAnon world, shadowy forces, including the mainstream media, are working to destroy President Joe Biden’s candidacy and usher Trump back into power on November 5. Karl Folk, a researcher studying authoritarianism and radicalisation at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, said this “more conspiratorial mindset has become more pronounced in liberal circles over the last eight months”.
Initially coined by conservative social media users in 2021 to mock news coverage they saw as overblown, such as the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, the term “BlueAnon” has since been used by people across the political spectrum to describe particularly outlandish conspiracies and denialism from Biden supporters. The term took on new meaning and prominence last month after Biden’s disastrous performance during a prime-time debate with Trump on CNN sparked a battle over Biden’s fitness for office, including calls from many Democrats for the 81-year-old president to step aside.
Social media users with a history of supporting Biden falsely claimed that the president had been secretly drugged before the debate. (Biden has blamed his poor performance on jetlag and a bad cold.) They floated the conspiracy theory that actor George Clooney, an ardent Biden supporter, penned a New York Times opinion piece calling on the president to drop out as part of an elaborate revenge plot inspired by Biden’s support for Israel. (The Clooney Foundation for Justice did not immediately respond.) And they claimed without evidence that America’s ABC News doctored Biden’s audio to make him sound infirm during an interview on July 5 – an interview the White House had hoped would restore faith in Biden’s vigour. (ABC News declined to comment.)
Last week, liberal author and professor Seth Abramson posted to Threads and his nearly 900,000 followers on X that he believes tough media coverage of Biden’s struggles is “not organic” and “the closest thing to an internal coup America has seen since what Trump tried to do at [the Justice Department] in 2020”.
While Elon Musk’s X remains a primary hub for conspiracy theories and misinformation, experts said Meta’s text-centric platform Threads has emerged as a hotbed of BlueAnon conspiratorial content. Though Meta has taken steps to actively discourage political discussion on the platform, which launched a year ago to take on Twitter, Threads has emerged as a haven for Democrats who abandoned Twitter after Musk bought the platform, changed its name to X and restored the accounts of many far-right influencers.
Chicago photographer Chad Leverenz, a Biden supporter, was among those who argued on Threads after the debate that Biden should not be the Democratic nominee. He was hit immediately by a wave of attacks, he said.
“It was, ‘It’s the elites’, ‘Don’t believe the polls’ and ‘It’s a conspiracy because the deep state doesn’t want Biden to be president any more,’ ” Leverenz said. “It was Trumpism. I realised, ‘Oh, my God, it’s infected everything.’ ”
Meta declined to comment.
Rothschild said this left-wing strand of conspiratorial thinking arises when people are unwilling to accept developments that challenge their world-view or are struggling to navigate a complex and fast-moving media climate. The hyperpartisan environment online and low public trust in the media can make that leap easier, he said – “the same things that we’ve seen in the MAGA movement for years”.
“What you’re seeing now is both political parties in the US showing signs of heightened conspiracism,” said Imran Ahmed, founder and chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. “Conspiracy theories provide an easy story people can tell themselves that gives them a reason not to engage with reality as it is.”
On Sunday, right-wing social media accounts were pressing their own conspiracy theories about the Trump rally shooting.
On X, Trump’s Truth Social and the pro-Trump message board Patriots.win, the shooting was portrayed without evidence as a failed execution attempt by shadowy Democrats or an “inside job” by the “deep state” to protect its grip on Washington. Some right-wing posters with millions of online followers shared theories that the Secret Service’s failure to stop the attack was preplanned, or that the agency had been weakened or distracted by diversity initiatives. Musk himself questioned whether the error was “deliberate”.
Right-wing influencers and provocateurs, including Trump’s long-time confidant Roger Stone, shared names and photos alleging that the shooter was in fact an anti-Trump protester, an “antifa extremist” or even an Italian soccer journalist. They also widely shared a video from an online troll who said he fired the bullets because he hates Republicans, and that he got away with the attack. Conservative conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich also alleged that the shooting was part of an FBI plot to inspire “copycat attacks”.
Left-wing accounts focused mainly on the conspiracy theory that the shooting had been staged. Dozens of influencers posted to that effect in the hours before news emerged that two people were dead – a rallygoer as well as the suspected shooter – and others injured.
But some prominent anti-Trump accounts suggested that the deaths were part of the show. “I can totally see Trump ‘sacrificing’ one of his cult followers to make his ‘assassination attempt’ look more realistic and believable,” the pro-Democrat influencer @LakotaMan1 wrote to his more than half-million X followers, in a later-deleted tweet. He also posted a photo of Trump after the shooting with the caption: “Fake blood. An upside[down] American flag. I ain’t buying it. Too perfect.”
As more details emerged about the tragedy, at least one Biden supporter seemed to recognise what was happening and tried to backtrack. “My knee-jerk reaction that the Trump rally shooting was staged appears to be a bad miscalculation,” wrote a woman whose Threads profile identifies her as a “strong Dem”. “Trump has completely broken down any possible trust or belief in him as a person that I immediately questioned the authenticity of this occurrence. I was wrong.”
But other users with a history of posting pro-Biden messages seemed unconvinced.
“Trust your instincts,” one user replied. “There are no limits to what Trump … will do to secure the November election.”
The Washington Post
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