Assassination conspiracy theories? Blame Trump

[marmar]

Assassination conspiracy theories? Blame Trump
False flag stories reveal a deeper truth about Trump’s failing presidency

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published May 13, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) Let’s be clear up front: There is no evidence that Donald Trump has staged any of the three high-profile attempts on his life in the past two years.

I’ll likely get some angry reader feedback to that assertion because a lot of people believe at least one of the would-be assassinations — and quite possibly all three — were false flag operations. A new survey from NewsGuard shows that 54% of Americans are open to the theory that at least one of the attacks was staged, with only 38% saying definitively they believe all three were real. When asked about each separate assault — the 2024 shooting that grazed Trump’s ear at a Pennsylvania campaign stop, the arrest of the armed man at the president’s West Palm Beach golf course later that year and the recent incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — fewer than half said these events were authentic.

No one deserves more blame for this state of affairs than Trump himself, and not just because he’s spent a decade lying and sowing his own conspiracy theories, giving permission to both his allies and his opponents to take a looser approach to the truth. Once in a while, a conspiracy theory may be wrong but still manages to channel authentic frustrations. This particular one is false, but its underlying assumptions about the president — that he’s a liar, and that he’s manipulative, corrupt and politically desperate — are all too real.

There’s an obvious explanation for why this conspiracy theory is so popular: Trump would fake such a thing if he thought he could get away with it. Anyone who doubts that has been asleep for the past decade, which have been marked by one Trump conspiracy after another. In 2019 he tried to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into lying about his political opponent, Joe Biden, which led to his first impeachment trial. A year later Trump was part of an elaborate scheme to steal the 2020 election, resulting in a second impeachment trial and multiple indictments at the federal level and in Georgia. He is currently embracing shadowy cryptocurrency schemes that are generating massive profits. He’s also openly bullying his Justice Department into not releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files, suggesting that what’s hidden implicates him even more than the eye-popping stuff that has already emerged about his longtime relationship with the deceased sexual predator. ........................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/05/13/assassination-conspiracy-theories-blame-trump/