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Why a Significant Amount of Democrats Think the Trump Assassination Attempt Was Staged

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  July 19, 2024 6:30 AM

For years, it was the ‘right-wing’ who were susceptible to conspiracy theories until there was a cataclysmic event that benefited Republicans. Now, "benefit" is a loose term—there's nothing good about what happened on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania. A wannabe assassin nearly killed former President Donald Trump, who was able to fire multiple shots at Trump from an unsecured rooftop less than 200 yards away. 

Trump raised his fist, face bloody, telling his supporters to “fight.” It’s an iconic image that’s now being viewed as problematic by the liberal media because it helps the former president. Then, all reason goes out the door for liberals, another example of the rot inherent in this movement. With Joe Biden careening toward being blown out in the Electoral College, Democrats are now the ones donning the tin foil hats, with around one-third of these people thinking this was a staged event (via Free Beacon): 

A conspiracy theory has run unabated in Democratic circles following the assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump on Saturday. It posits that Trump staged the shooting for a photo op, that the wound on his ear was caused by something other than an assassin's bullet, and that he was never in mortal danger. 

It's a baseless conspiracy theory disproven by reams of documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts. And it's a belief held by one-third of the Democratic electorate. 

One in three registered Democrats believe it is "credible" that the shooting Saturday in Butler, Pa., was staged and not intended to kill Trump, according to a Morning Consult poll released Monday. The findings show that large swaths of the Democratic base have fallen prey to the phenomenon known as "BlueAnon," a play on the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory that once gripped portions of the Republican base and served as an obsession of the mainstream media throughout the first Trump administration. 

But the Morning Consult poll shows that BlueAnon adherents among the Democratic base far outnumber their QAnon counterparts on the right. The poll showed that 34 percent of Democratic voters found it either definitely or probably credible that Trump staged Saturday's shooting, with less than half—45 percent—saying the conspiracy theory is not credible. By comparison, a widely cited 2021 poll found that only 23 percent of Republicans were QAnon believers. 

It's not hard to see the causes. First, 'Trump derangement syndrome' still afflicts the Left. Second, the media is peddling conspiracy theories, from Trump wasn’t shot to questioning the bandage on Trump’s ear:

 The Left is so insane with this conspiracy theory that even The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz—yes, you read that right—had to call them out:

Minutes after Saturday’s shooting at a Trump rally in Butler, Pa., 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 coordinated 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.” 

“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. 

[…] 

While BlueAnon claims bear no resemblance to the most lurid elements of QAnon — which involve false allegations of Satan worship and pedophilia 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 Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.)

In BlueAnon world, shadowy forces, including the mainstream media, are working to destroy President Biden’s candidacy and usher Trump back into power on Nov. 5. Karl Folk, a researcher studying authoritarianism and radicalization at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, said this “more conspiratorial mind-set has become more pronounced in liberal circles over the last eight months.”

And a lot of these folks are sort of soft followers of this theory, and they’re on major news networks.

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