Three weeks ago a gunman armed with multiple firearms burst through security lines at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to try and assassinate President Donald Trump and members of his cabinet. But according to 34 percent of Democrats, that assassination attempt was staged.
In fact, that assassination attempt was only the latest staged attempt — if you ask some Democrats.
A NewsGuard/YouGov poll found 30 percent of Americans “believe that at least one of the three attempts on President Donald Trump’s life over the last two years was staged.” When broken down by party affiliation, 34 percent of Democrats said the WHCA dinner was staged. Forty-two percent of Democrats say the Butler assassination attempt — in which Trump was visibly hit and bleeding and in which Corey Comperatore was murdered — was staged. Twenty-six percent of Democrats say the attempted assassination that took place just weeks after Butler, in which Ryan Routh tried to assassinate the president on his golf course, was also staged. Thirteen percent of Republicans said the White House Correspondents’ Dinner assassination attempt was staged, while 7 percent said both the Butler and Routh attempts were staged.
The poll surveyed 1,000 Americans between April 28 and May 4.
The assassination-denial conspiracy theories aren’t limited to everyday Democrats, however; leftist pundits are also on board. Former MSNBC host Joy Reid said that “odd things … keep happening around Trump” before referencing a “fake assassination” of Viktor Orbán that the Russians purportedly staged. “So, all of this thrown in together, you’re like, when something seems too perfect, people, they don’t — they don’t believe in it. And Donald Trump now again gets victimized by an alleged would-be assassin in front of the perfect witnesses — the press.”
The View co-host Ana Navarro suggested Trump staged the attempt because he “lies.”
“It’s odd to me that in a place that is teeming with Secret Service … this could happen,” Navarro said. “But also I think people jump to that conclusion that it is staged because Trump lies … so people do not trust and do not believe anything Trump says. His lips are moving, the likelihood is, he is lying.”
TDS-infected author Don Winslow claimed the entire weekend around the dinner was “coordinated.”
So after badgering the public day in and day out with rhetoric designed to justify and even incite the most egregious political violence possible, Democrats now want to pretend the violence that predictably follows as a result of that rhetoric is “staged.” Democrats and their allies in the propaganda press have spent years depicting Trump and his supporters as existential threats to democracy, “fascists,” “dictators,” Nazis, and enemies of the state. Now they don’t want to accept responsibility for the consequences of their rhetoric.
But it’s hard not to see the connection.
The propaganda press has run an assassination prep campaign that, as The Federalist co-founder and CEO Sean Davis explained, is fueled by language “meant to justify and even incite the most extreme measures, up to and including unconscionable violence.”
To give just a few examples, The Atlantic’s Marc Novicoff published a piece this past January entitled “How to Tell If Your President Is a Dictator.” The piece claims Trump’s second term is “literally dictatorial.” A 2023 Washington Post op-ed by Robert Kagan said, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” Kagan also said a second Trump administration would be akin to Hitler’s regime.
Democrat politicans are eagerly peddling the same assassination-prep rhetoric. Ilhan Omar called Trump “the leader of the Pedophile Protection Party” and added that “at least in Somalia they execute pedophiles not elect them.”
Just months ago, Democrats in Virginia elected Jay Jones to serve as attorney general despite text messages from 2022 showing Jones wishing to kill his Republican colleague and former state House Speaker Todd Gilbert. “Gilbert gets two bullets to the head,” Jay said in one message. “Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy,” he wrote in another, adding that Gilbert’s children are “little fascists.”
Graham Platner, the Democrat who had the Nazi tattoo and is running for Senate, suggested in 2018 that voters can’t “expect to fight fascism without a good semi-automatic rifle.” Elliot Forhan, a Democrat running for attorney general in Ohio, posted a video this past January explaining how he would “kill Donald Trump” if elected to serve as attorney general. Forhan said he would kill the president “with the requirements of due process, resulting in a sentence, duly executed, of capital punishment.”
As Eddie Scarry highlighted in these pages, the owner of a Wisconsin brewery who is now running for governor as a Democrat offered free beer when “either a brother or sister in the Resistance” gets their “marksmanship” right and Trump is successfully killed. Notably, the brewery also suggested Trump may have “faked another assassination to get a positive news cycle.”
When Democrats and corporate media leftists repeatedly tell Americans that Trump is Hitler and Republicans are fascists, they present violence to that end as justified, even acceptable — and their assassination prep has gained clear traction. In fact, Routh called Trump a “dictator” in a handwritten letter, and he asserted in a self-published book that Trump “perpetrated” the Jan. 6 unrest. The alleged shooter at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Cole Tomas Allen, reportedly left a manifesto falsely accusing Trump of being a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” He allegedly wrote, “And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” adding that he was not obligated to “yield [elected officials and judges] anything so unlawfully ordered.”
The rhetoric allegedly espoused by the WHCA dinner suspect is the same rhetoric shared by members of the Democrat Party and the corporate media. In fact the normalization and acceptance of political violence by the left has become so obvious even Politifact wrote that “Democrats and liberals are becoming more open to political violence.”
PolitiFact also noted that “younger Americans today are more open to political violence than members of other age groups” and that “the strongest Democratic rate of justifying violence was to remove Trump from office. More than 27% of Democrats said violence was justified for that purpose.” PolitiFact was citing polling by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats and NORC.
A Marquette Poll taken days after Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a leftist showed 15 percent of Democrats believed that it is “justified for Americans today to resort to violence in order to achieve political goals.” Twenty-five percent of respondents who identify as “very liberal” agreed with the statement. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 7 percent of Democrats agreed with the statement that it is justifiable “for someone in my political party to commit violence to achieve a political goal,” according to PolitiFact.
The assassination attempts — which were not “staged” — did not happen in a vacuum. Democrats and the propaganda press have spent years excusing, justifying, and even legitimizing political violence. Then when that violence becomes reality, they insist it was staged. And it’s not because they genuinely believe it was “staged,” but because acknowledging the reality of the attacks would force Democrats and the press to acknowledge that they are partially responsible for creating the conditions that have led to such violence.
So instead, leftists will gaslight the public — the bullets were fake, the blood was fake, and Comperatore actually agreed to be murdered — all while spewing the same assassination-prep language that led to the assassination attempts they deny.
