Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) recently reacted to the findings of a poll showing a third of Americans believe the shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner was staged.
Ever since the shooting occurred, many social media users — mostly on the left — claimed the attack was a false flag operation of sorts. The poll showed that about 30 percent of respondents believe at least one of the assassination attempts against President Donald Trump were faked.
“Assassinations + political violence are real,” Fetterman wrote in a post on X. “My party can’t be the tin foil hat brigade. I was there a table away and I promise you, this was not staged.”
Assassinations + political violence are real.
— U.S. Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) May 11, 2026
My party can’t be the tin foil hat brigade.
I was there a table away and I promise you, this was not staged. pic.twitter.com/JWcOK0jf7o
A Newguard/YouGov poll also revealed that only 38 percent of adults believe all three assassination attempts against the president were real. Researchers asked 1,000 adults whether each incident, including the July 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania rally shooting, the September 2024 golf course incident, and the April 2026 White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, “was staged.”
Attitudes about the assassination attempts fall predictably along partisan lines:
The contention that the three events may have been staged correlates strongly with party identification. Across all three events, Democrats were far more likely than Republicans to endorse the “staged” framing.
In total, 21 percent of Democrats responded that they thought all three events were staged, as did 11 percent of Independents and three percent of Republicans.
Of the 12 percent of Americans who said that all three attempts were staged, 55 percent were Democrats, 38 percent were Independents, and seven percent were Republicans.
Of the respondents who said that all three incidents were authentic, only 15 percent were Democrats. Thirty-eight percent were Independents and 47 percent were Republicans.
For the most recent event — at the April 25, 2026, White House Correspondents’ Dinner — 34 percent of Democrats and 13 percent of Republicans said it was staged, a 21-point gap.
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Researchers found that “for each attempted assassination, a majority of Americans said either that it was staged or that they were not sure — averaging 54 percent percent across all three.” However, the authors stress that “there is no evidence that any of the attempted assassinations of Trump were ‘staged,’” and emphasized that in each case, the authorities reported that the suspects acted alone and were not tied to the Trump administration.
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