All These Dumb False Flag Conspiracies Stem from Trump's Ear and Media’s Failure to Interrogate It
What false flag attempt are we on now? Four? Five? I’ve lost count of how many fake assassinations Trump has supposedly staged ever since I wrote in the summer of 2024 how stupid these theories sprouting up across the left are. Trump has overturned Article I of the Constitution and eliminated large swaths of the United States federal government overnight with nothing more than a deluded TruthSocial post, but apparently he needs to stage an assassination attempt that never gets close to him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to convince his GOP toadies and the squishy Dems in Congress to build him a ballroom and get Jimmy Kimmel fired? Are you folks listening to yourselves?
Many people in my mentions proclaiming this the Reichstag fire, and it is very funny to imagine an increasingly-frustrated White House staging false flag after false flag, trying to get somebody to notice.
— Nathan Goldwag (@goldwagnathan.bsky.social) April 25, 2026 at 7:50 PM
But on one detail, I do sympathize with these folks on the left who tell themselves a story about a faked assassination attempt in the gun violence capital of the world, and I think this is the well from which all these false flag conspiracies spring from. As Jim Vorel so astutely wrote in the wake of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, the preference for conspiracy infects all of us. There is one part of Trump’s story from that fateful day in Butler that does not seem to match what we know about AR-style 556 rounds and ear cartilage. Trump claimed to be shot “with a bullet” in the ear about three and a half hours after the shooting, but prior to that, reports suggested otherwise.
“Shortly after the incident occurred, multiple credentialed reporters reported via social media that Trump had been hit by glass or plexiglass shards rather than by a bullet,” wrote Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall on July 15th, 2024. “This was reported by journalists from Axios, The Bulwark, Newsmax, TMZ and others. The clearest sourcing, by Newsmax, attributed this to the Pennsylvania State Police. Another report attributed it to a source who had spoken with the Secret Service. Axios reporter Juliegrace Brufke cited it to a ‘source familiar’ but later deleted her tweet without explanation.”
As Marshall noted, initial reports in the wake of America’s daily routine of gun violence are often untrue, and the idea that the glass shards could have come from the teleprompter was disproven by photos showing them intact after the shots rang out. But shrapnel could be a lot of things, even a bullet fragment, which was part of the FBI’s hedged explanation for what hit Trump’s ear. “What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle,” said Joe Biden’s FBI at the end of its investigation.
But two days prior to this final report, during a House Judiciary Committee testimony on July 24th, then FBI Director Christopher Wray said, “There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.” Trump and the GOP subsequently freaked the fuck out, and Trump’s physician and GOP Congressman Ronny Jackson wrote, “IT WAS A BULLET – I’VE SEEN THE WOUND! PATHETIC!!!” The next day, Trump posted “No, it was, unfortunately, a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard. There was no glass, there was no shrapnel. The hospital called it a ‘bullet wound to the ear,’ and that is what it was.”
It is natural to question anything that Republicans fervently and repeatedly say is true, because that is usually how they get untrue assertions to stick in the discourse. Especially when there are no medical records released about what Ronny Jackson and Trump say medical experts have declared to be objective reality. I think it’s very likely that Trump was struck by shrapnel, either from a bullet hitting something on stage near him, or the bullet hitting something and fragmenting before impact (another trait we know about the kind of bullet used). We’ll probably never know exactly how Trump’s ear got bloodied (unless someone is holding on to that detail to sell a future book), but the people who say that Trump is obviously lying about this one part, therefore it was all a ruse and he tapped into his WWE days and bladed himself during his few seconds on the ground need to come back to reality (also when wrestlers cut themselves, they blade the top of their forehead FYI).
Many look at Trump posing after he was hit as proof it must have been staged, but if you listen to the audio of the event, you can hear on the Secret Service’s microphones that the shooter was down before Trump stood up and put his fist in the air. Trump certainly did not think he was still under fire when he proved to the world that his one talent is being a showman. There’s just no there there to this dumb conspiracy theory.
Just because one part of the story is likely a lie does not mean the rest of it is, and the notion that Trump’s team put together an assassination attempt that never leaked and killed one of their supporters just doesn’t pass the sniff test. To what ends did they take this immense risk of nearly exploding Trump’s head on live TV and destroying the one major electoral tailwind Republicans have every four years? (but not every two!) The typical story I hear from these false flag believers is that Trump did it to turn the election around and win, but he was already surging in the polls.
Biden’s last debate ever took place on June 27th, a few weeks before Trump nearly died on live TV. The Pod Save America crew famously said that the Kamala Harris folks told them that when they took over the campaign, they saw internal Biden polling following the debate that had Trump winning 400 electoral votes. An Emerson poll conducted six days before Trump’s Butler rally had him up 3 points on Biden. This “win the election” motivation powering this baseless conspiracy theory requires a reality in which we all weren’t talking about Joe Biden’s brain falling out of his head throughout the first half of 2024 as every major media report was Dems in Disarray. I was there. I was writing about it every day. I promise you, people were not thinking Trump was a longshot to win just before he was nearly shot on live TV.
Not to mention the immense unearned competence any kind of false flag theory affords team Trump. The only people who believe that Trump is capable of pulling off some high-level 5D chess are his ride or die MAGA base and the false flag conspiracy theorists. Kash Patel has fucked up two high profile active shooter investigations because he can’t stop posting (Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the mass shooter at Brown University), yet this crew of folks who accidentally invite journalists into their Signal chats the Russians and Chinese read in real time are going to keep an honest to goodness false flag operation under wraps? And they did this to try to give them a boost in an election they were winning? And they did it again nearly two years later at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to get Trump’s ballroom built? Loose Change made more sense than any of this even though we can prove jet fuel does not have to melt steel beams all the way through to collapse a building. The only thing more incoherent than this theory as to why Trump would agree to let someone nearly shoot him in the head are Trump’s Iranian war plans.
Some may ask why it’s so important whether the media drill down on whether a bullet fragment, a whole bullet, or some other object hit Trump’s ear, since it’s very obvious that something did and the people who think he bladed his ear have never watched professional wrestling in their entire lives. The rest is just details so who cares, so the cynical story goes. But then why interrogate any details that Trump asserts to be true? The saga around his ear is a microcosm for how Trump is treated by the mainstream media. The initial reflex to do journalism still exists, but Trump bullies them out of it even as informed figures at the FBI provide contradictory information, then they publish one wrap-up article and call it a day and point to that one article as proof they did not abandon this subject. The media cared way more about Hillary Clinton’s server management and badgered her for far longer about it than simply asking Trump to provide the proof he says he has for his ear injury.
The New York Times even did an audio reconstruction of the bullet trajectory, and they concluded that the first of Thomas Crooks’s eight shots did clip Trump’s ear and it was not deflected by first striking another object as the former FBI Director posited. This theory is also supported by Doug Mills’s NYT photograph of the bullet whizzing by Trump’s ear. Trump’s story that his ear was struck clean by a bullet and somehow did not explode could be true, but because he is a serial liar and refuses to provide evidence for it, people naturally doubt what he is saying. Many then take the extra and unsupported step of asserting a reality exists for which they have no evidence for and little logic to support, and now everything looks like a false flag attempt in that distorted light. I really think if the media could have ever nailed this detail down, a lot of the nonsense about Trump staging perpetual false flags could have been avoided.
We live in a country where gun violence is quite literally the background noise to our daily life. It is on the conspiracy theorists to disprove why Occam’s Razor is not Occam’s Razor again, and “Trump nearly killed himself trying to win an election he was already winning” just doesn’t cut it. The idea that this most recent assassination attempt might be a false flag designed to boost Trump’s support has serious holes in its logic considering the fact that Trump’s polls haven’t budged amidst multiple assassination attempts during his term.
Just because our elites live charmed lives does not mean they are exempt from a world filled with Luigi Mangiones and other disturbed minds taking violence into their own hands in response to our low-trust society engineered by those same elites. If you go outside in America, or anywhere in public, you may get shot. That’s just the deal you get here, and Donald Trump is not exempt from it. In fact, repeated attempts on his life fit neatly into our celebrity-obsessed society where at this same “Hinckley Hilton” 45 years ago, John Hinckley Jr. tried to kill Ronald Reagan–not for any reason any conspiracy theorist would ever come up with–but in order to impress Jodie Foster.
It’s easy to tell yourself a cohesive story that could double as a Hollywood blockbuster when the alternative explanation is just incoherent and random senseless violence, but that’s America. Refusing to accept this basic fact about our fundamentally violent and contradictory society means you will never fully understand politics here, and you are forever damned to a land of comforting conspiracies whenever the next high-profile shooting happens.