The Trump assassination attempt was a window into America’s fractured reality

Almost as soon as photographs emerged of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, conspiracy theories wondering whether the shooting could have been fake boomeranged around the internet.

The fevered thinking went like this: The images of Trump pumping his fist and apparently saying “fight” were too conveniently media-ready. The term “staged” promptly trended on X, with multiple viral tweets getting over 100,000 likes. Redditors debated whether it was uncouth to be suspicious that Trump was trying to drum up sympathy votes.

Adding fuel to the fire, eyewitnesses, online observers, as well as some media outlets, reported incorrect information about what had happened, some of it potentially incendiary. The New York Post claimed early on that the shooter was “a Chinese man,” which only served to exacerbate burgeoning conspiracy theory narratives. One far-right activist floated the conspiracy theory that the Secret Service was involved in setting up the assassination, as part of the “deep state intel community.”

Additionally, as we’ve often seen before, people latched onto misidentified “suspects,” including an Italian YouTuber who vlogs about soccer and a Twitter troll who posted a “joke” video claiming to be the shooter soon after he was identified. It was passed around the site for hours despite his assertion that it was a joke. The conspiracy theories came from all corners of the ideological spectrum: the left, the right, and the politically inscrutable.

Many were eager to project their prior partisan assumptions onto emerging information about the shooter. He was a registered Republican, so surely the shooting wasn’t politically motivated — but he had also reportedly made a one-off donation to a Democratic PAC, Act Blue, on the day of Biden’s 2021 inauguration, which would indicate the opposite. Even as the initial “faked” theme faded, members of the public reached for a narrative that would allow them to blame one side or the other.

Fortunately, the conversation shifted within hours as bystander accounts and more information about the shooter were reported in mainstream outlets. Per Google Trends, there was less than a 1 percent interest in searches for “Trump shooting staged,” “Trump shooting fake,” and “Trump shooting conspiracies” over the past 24 hours.

It was a thankfully brief, but remarkable, cultural moment, one that revealed how years of extremist conspiracy theories and the growth of conspiratorial imagining have managed to distort our thinking at casual levels.

Social media has both intensified moments of crisis like this and fomented misinformation about what’s actually happening.

One media analyst determined that up to 45 percent of all accounts across Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter that tweeted hashtags about the “staged” shooting were bot accounts made purely to fuel confusion and doubt. Modern social platforms algorithmically amplify this kind of hysteria and skepticism. Essentially, they become sites of real-time collective doubt, and then the very nature of social media reinforces that doubt.

In this case, the idea that the shooting could have been staged didn’t seem like a stretch for the many people on social media who pointed to what they saw as telltale signifiers: Trump’s quick recovery, the relative lack of bleeding, the perception that all of this was too conveniently timed.

Right-leaning extremists like Alex Jones have spent the decades since 9/11 normalizing the concept of “false flag operations” — that is, faked events orchestrated by nefarious actors to advance a political objective. In the social media era, it has become alarmingly common to suggest that a major event didn’t happen at all or, if it did, it was all a setup. These are ideas that would have seemed fringe a few decades ago, but in our conspiracy-theory-brained age, they seem nearly ubiquitous.

Even if you don’t adhere to a specific conspiracy theory, you might pick up the language of distorted thinking along the way: Take the casual use of “false flag” or “astroturfing,” for example, or the use of “the deep state,” as though there really is such a thing.

It’s also understandable if people aren’t entirely certain right now about what is real. The third decade of the 21st century has so far been punctuated by moments of collective shock or trauma, including the pandemic, numerous climate-related disasters and emergencies, and the death of George Floyd. In particular, the era of Covid and the associated rise of the anti-science and anti-vax movements has only exacerbated paranoid thinking. Moreover, as the country continues to become increasingly politically polarized, ideas that would’ve once seemed far-fetched to the average person gain appeal and spread.

All of our collective traumas can induce feelings of derealization, or the sense that the world around us is fundamentally out of balance with our own experiences or perceptions. Especially after a major shock like a political assassination attempt, when people’s reactions are unfiltered and emotions go unchecked, the world might feel more divorced from reality than usual.

One positive sign that things aren’t totally dire is that the conversation seemed to shift away from the “staged” theories quickly as the public gained confirmed facts about the shooting. True, some prominent figures have continued to fan the flames of gossip, such as Matt Walsh hinting at a government cover-up — but so far, those speculations seem to be staying mainly on the fringe. There are also those who still seem to be entertaining the idea that the shooting was staged, as well as a few other minor conspiracy tropes, but we’re still largely in the wait-and-see stage. Frankly, the fact that we still have a wait-and-see phase is heartening.

For now, it seems the public’s collective ability to take a breather instead of immediately devolving into chaos is a boon, although it’s still the early days of the aftermath.

This weekend’s divided response only reinforces the epistemic crisis in which we now live, in which multiple versions of “truth” compete with each other and obfuscate reality. Bad-faith takes — with no basis in fact — have already begun to dominate the Republican response to the situation, as prominent political leaders argue that rhetoric from Democrats somehow played a role in the shooting. With that ideological divide widening and partisan viewpoints holding sway, navigating these murky waters requires caution.

This moment is a reminder to avoid reaching for the most extreme read on a situation before you have all the facts. After all, with so many questions still lingering about the shooter’s motivations and the stakes so high, there’s a lot riding on our collective ability to stay rational. If there were ever a time to slow-walk to judgment, it’s now.