MAGA Increasingly Believes Trump Assassination Attempt Was Fake

As Donald Trump’s MAGA base sours on him, some of them now think the 2024 assassination attempt on him in Butler, Pennsylvania, was staged.

Wired reports that this conspiracy theory started to take hold after Joe Kent, who resigned from the Trump administration over the Iran war, went on conservative pundit Tucker Carlson’s show and asserted without evidence that investigations into the shooting were halted before they were finished.

“If you don’t want to address that question, then you just go silent and say you can’t ask that question,” Kent, formerly the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said. “Which then creates people who come out of nowhere and they start drawing their own conclusions.”

Kent noted that this would fuel conspiracy theories, and ever since his interview, that is exactly what seems to be happening within MAGA. Trisha Hope, who served as a delegate from Texas during the 2024 Republican National Convention, posted on X last week that “If you cannot look at this story, and use critical thinking skills and have at least some questions, you are the problem and we need you to snap out of it.” 

“Since the attempt on his life, Trump has show [sic] no interest in investigating what really happened. He never mentions it, it’s as if it never happened, except when he tells us, he took a bullet for us,” Hope said in a long post.

Comedian Tim Dillon, who interviewed JD Vance on his podcast during Trump’s presidential campaign, said last week that he thinks “maybe it was staged,” adding that Trump should now say publicly that “some people are going to be upset by this, but we staged the assassination attempt in Butler to show people how important it was to vote for me and how far I was willing to go for them.”

Candace Owens, a far-right conspiracy theorist who has abandoned Trump, claimed on her podcast last week that Miriam Adelson, a billionaire pro-Israel Republican donor, was actually behind the assassination attempt because Trump hadn’t followed through on a promise to allow Israel to annex the occupied West Bank.  

Ali Alexander, who pushed the Stop the Steal campaign around the conspiracy that Trump had the 2020 election stolen from him, wrote on Telegram Tuesday that the attempt on Trump’s life was proof he is in the Antichrist, echoing a different right-wing conspiracy theory pushed by Tucker Carlson and others.   

“To be clear: if Donald Trump didn’t receive a miracle, then it was deception or a dark sign,” Alexander wrote. “There is biblical prophecy in Revelation 13:3 apparently about the Antichrist being struck on the head.”

Cracks are beginning to show up in Trump’s support base following his decision to break a major campaign promise and start a war with Iran, attack the Catholic Church, and imply that he’s Jesus Christ. All of this could be the beginning of the end of his political career and control of the Republican Party.