Within minutes of the shots fired near the security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCD) dinner on April 25, social media had already delivered its verdict: “STAGED.” Never mind that the suspect, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen, was detained at the scene, heavily armed, after sprinting past a magnetometer and firing at least one shot. Never mind that an officer was hit in a bullet-resistant vest and that Allen left behind emails and a manifesto expressing anti-Trump grievances and an intent to target administration officials. 

The facts were still emerging, but the hashtag was already settled. Conspiracy narratives that the attack was a “false flag” or “political theater” to boost President Donald Trump’s fortunes, crack down on free speech or sell his pet “White House ballroom” project rocketed across X, Bluesky and other platforms. New and especially worrying this time is not that the far right trafficked in conspiracies, that’s too familiar, but that a portion of the anti-Trump, online left eagerly joined in. Commentators loosely grouped as “BlueAnon” framed the event as an obviously choreographed stunt, a kind of mirror-image to Make America Great Again (MAGA) conspiracy culture. 

This is precisely the wrong lesson to draw from the Trump era. If there is one thing we should have learned from far-right radio show host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Infowars and the Sandy Hook hoax narrative, it is that conspiracy thinking is not just primitive, but is also corrosive. Jones’s claims that the 2012 massacre of first-graders in Newtown was staged by “crisis actors” did not uncover hidden truths. Instead, they multiplied the suffering of grieving families and helped normalize a style of politics in which reality itself is optional. Courts have since found his claims defamatory, and juries awarded nearly $1.5 billion in damages to Sandy Hook families. Yet the style of thinking he popularized — reflexive disbelief, totalizing plots, contempt for evidence — has gone mainstream. The post-WHCD reaction shows that this mental habit now transcends ideology.

Why large-scale conspiracies fall apart

Part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that they feel savvy. To call something “staged” is to present oneself as more perceptive than the “sheeple.” Yet most large-scale conspiracy claims collapse under two basic considerations: the number of people who would need to be involved, and the mundane reality of human competence.

Significant operations, like allegedly staging an assassination attempt on a sitting president at a televised gala in a major hotel, would require elaborate choreography, advance planners, Secret Service complicity, law enforcement, hospital staff, multiple media outlets, witnesses and the supposed “patsy” himself all keeping the secret. The more people, institutions and jurisdictions involved, the more likely someone is to leak, boast or simply make a mistake.

Researchers who study real conspiracies, the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) MK-Ultra experiments, COINTELPRO and Watergate, point out that they were exposed precisely because human beings are bad at keeping large shared secrets indefinitely. Watergate unraveled not through omnipotent coordination but through a botched burglary and loose lips.

Academic psychologist and science writer Rob Brotherton, in the book Suspicious Minds, notes that conspiracist thinking overestimates how seamlessly powerful actors can coordinate and control events by mistaking bureaucratic clumsiness for cunning. In reality, governments and campaigns struggle to roll out basic policy without leaks or blunders, let alone stage-manage fake assassination attempts down to the timing of dropped phone calls and viral videos.

That’s before we get to the Trump factor. If you were designing a clever, airtight covert operation, the Trump orbit is not where you’d shop for talent. This is an administration that has stumbled through multiple real security breaches and intelligence leaks, mismanaged the wars it chose to fight and repeatedly undercut its own messaging with impulsive public statements. Believing that this same cast secretly executed a flawless staged attack at the Washington Hilton, with thousands of witnesses and international media present, is not skepticism. It’s hero-worship in reverse, an almost admiring overestimation of Trump-world’s competence, just with a negative polarity.

Simpler explanations and human psychology

Occam’s razor offers a better guide. The simplest explanation consistent with the evidence is usually the most plausible. An armed man with a documented history, travel records, weapons purchases and a manifesto acted with violent intent and was stopped by security before reaching the ballroom. No convoluted script is required.

If the “staged” narrative is so implausible, why does it erupt so fast after an event like the WHCD attack? Psychologists studying conspiracy beliefs emphasize three clusters of motives: epistemic, existential and social. Because people crave coherent explanations, large, shocking events, assassination attempts, terrorist attacks and pandemics generate information gaps and emotional overload. Conspiracy theories step into that fog by offering simple, totalizing stories. Nothing is random, and everything was planned. American science writer Michael Shermer calls this “patternicity,” the brain’s tendency to find patterns, even where none exist. If a president is nearly killed for a third time, proportionality bias whispers that the cause must be as huge and intentional as the effect. A lone, disturbed assailant with a shotgun and a manifesto feels too small.

In times of anxiety and powerlessness, conspiracy thinking offers the illusion of control. If you believe that “they” are staging events, then you can imagine that unmasking “them” is a path to safety. In this case, both Trump supporters and opponents experience deep fear. One side fears a vulnerable leader and violent enemies; the other fears an authoritarian president and unaccountable security services. A “false flag” narrative allows both to imagine that knowing the supposed plot gives them leverage over the confusing reality.

Identity, social media and the spread of “staged”

Conspiracy theories also serve identity. Believing that you and your online tribe see “the truth” while others are duped is psychologically rewarding. American political scientist Joseph Uscinski notes that conspiracist thinking often functions as a group badge: “People like us” are awake; “people like them” are asleep or complicit. Posting “STAGED” in all caps is less an argument than a tribal welcome sign. It says you and I belong to the in-group that refuses to be fooled.

Social media supercharges these dynamics. Analysts found that the word “staged” appeared in hundreds of thousands of posts on X within hours of the WHCD attack; platform algorithms then amplified posts with outrage and engagement, pushing the narrative further regardless of its truth value. As NBC put it, “Conspiracy theories and a knee-jerk skepticism of current events have become the default response for a growing number of Americans.” In other words, we are not watching isolated cranks. We are watching structural features of human psychology and the attention economy play out in real time.

The reflex to declare major traumas “inside jobs” is not new. After the 9/11 attacks, a cottage industry of “truthers” insisted that the towers were brought down by pre-planted explosives, despite extensive engineering evidence to the contrary. The Obama years saw “birtherism,” which claimed, again, without evidence, that the president’s birth certificate was forged. The birtherism hoax fueled Trump’s own political ascendancy to the presidency. Sandy Hook marked a darker turn. Jones’s insistence that murdered six-year-olds and their parents were “actors” rehearsing a script erased the boundary between political paranoia and open cruelty. Families were stalked, harassed and forced to move; some received death threats.

Debunking, distrust and the cost of conspiracism

The WHCD shooting sits squarely in this lineage. As Wired reported, both left- and right-wing accounts on X, Bluesky and Instagram immediately labeled the attack a hoax staged to prop up Trump’s sagging approval ratings or to sell his much-mocked ballroom idea. The Washington Post found that roughly one-fifth of prominent liberal influencers who posted about the shooting used conspiratorial language, effectively mirroring the MAGA ecosystem they claim to oppose.

Fact-checkers quickly dismantled the central claims. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s pre-event remark on Fox News that “there will be some shots fired tonight in the room” referred to Trump’s jokes, not gunfire. A Fox correspondent’s dropped call from the hotel was due to bad cell service, not censorship. Video evidence and contemporaneous reporting show security reacting in real time to an unexpected breach, not executing a preplanned drama.

Yet as with prior episodes, debunking reaches fewer people than the initial rush of insinuation. Corrections are boring while conspiracies are fun.

Given Trump’s long history of lies, from crowd sizes to election claims, some critics argue that a default of mistrust is justified. “Why should we believe anything these people say?” they ask, especially after multiple prior attempts on Trump’s life. That instinct is understandable, but it does not justify inventing alternate realities. The true indictment of Trumpism is precisely that it has gutted the distinction between truth and fiction. To respond by building our own Alex Jones-style ecosystem is to concede the very ground on which democratic politics depends.

The real risks and a better response

There are also hard tactical reasons to resist conspiracism. The main problem is that it is a distraction. The real danger associated with the WHCD incident is not hypothetical “staging” but the normalization of political violence, recurring security failures and a climate in which assassination attempts feel almost routine. In that way, we have returned to the 1960s, but with the corrosive amplification of social media. 

Conspiracy brain rot is also fragile. It depends on a long chain of assumptions, like total institutional discipline, perfect secrecy, motive, means and opportunity, all aligned. When even one link breaks, say, when surveillance footage, ballistics reports and independent eyewitness accounts converge on a mundane explanation, the conspiracist must either abandon the theory or spiral into ever more baroque claims.

Indulging “BlueAnon” instincts hands rhetorical weapons to the very forces critics oppose. Every baseless “false flag” accusation from the left makes it easier for right-wing figures to paint all criticism as hysterical and unhinged. It dilutes legitimate accountability efforts over policy failures, ethical violations or the mishandling of real threats into a noise of memes and insinuations. The alternative is harder but healthier; we need to prebunk rather than debunk

Dutch social psychologist Sander van der Linden’s work on misinformation shows that teaching people, in advance, about the typical tricks of conspiracist rhetoric, cherry-picking anomalies, demanding impossible standards of proof, shifting the burden of proof and so on, can inoculate them against later falsehoods. Recognizing that every breaking crisis will be followed by a wave of “nothing is real” narratives allows citizens and media alike to prepare, emotionally and cognitively, to resist them.

Contingency, reality and democratic fragility

Conspiracy theories thrive on the fantasy that history is shaped only by master plots. The messier truth is that history is very contingent. Historical twists and turns are determined by badly secured doors, flawed threat assessments, idiosyncratic pressure points and by normal, limited human beings who do not have the 20/20 vision of hindsight. Conspiracy theories are another example of the arrogance of present people judging the past, the most persistent complaint of historians about our ahistorical culture.

The attempted assassination at the WHCD is disturbing enough in its ordinary explanation, because a lone, heavily armed man, motivated by a stew of ideology and grievance, penetrated close to the president in a city already on edge from previous attempts. It points to a democracy frayed by polarization, saturated with firearms and mediated by platforms that reward the most sensational narratives.

That reality should be answered by another Grassy Knoll fiction. The last thing the anti-Trump, non-violent No-Kings movement needs is to answer Alex Jones with its own rotten Onion version of Infowars.

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.