Ed Cumming
23 September 2024 9:22pm
No sooner had the news of a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump come out than people were queuing up to say that it was fake.
Ryan Routh, 58, was arrested at a golf course in Florida on September 15, after a Secret Service agent guarding the former President spotted him in the bushes. He had a loaded rifle. Suspicious behavior, or so you might have thought in the normal run of things.
But this is no ordinary election and Donald Trump is a candidate who invites disbelief on all sides. Less than a week after the golf course incident, the BBC ran a story featuring two women with wildly different political beliefs, both of whom believe Trump staged the second assassination attempt.
Desiree, an online influencer who goes by the name ‘Wild Mother’, said that she believes Trump staged the attempt to frame his opponents in the Deep State. Camille, on the other hand, a committed Democrat, said she thought Trump had staged the event – as he had, she claimed, set up the first attempt in Pennsylvania on July 13 – to boost his chances in the presidential election.
There is no evidence for either claim, but Trump seems to have the power to make observers on all sides bypass their critical reasoning. Camille and Desiree are representative of a wide swath of thinking, in which it is becoming commonplace to disbelieve the official explanation when it comes to the Republican nominee.
Walk into just about any Brooklyn brunch or north London dinner party and you will hear versions of the same thinking: Trump must have staged one or both of these attempts.
This thinking, from the kinds of notionally liberal-centrist thinkers who would never describe themselves as conspiracy-minded, has been building all summer. After the Pennsylvania shooting in July, Dimitri Mehlhorn, an adviser to the billionaire Linkedin founder (and Democratic donor) Reid Hoffman, wrote an email saying that one “possibility – which feels horrific and alien and absurd in America, but is quite common globally – is that this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash”.
Later he apologized for the comments, but he was not alone in his line of thinking. Shadi Bartsch, a classicist at the University of Chicago, posted that she was “now a conspiracy theorist, I guess,” adding that the sight of Trump’s bloodless hand convinced her to “no longer believe the main narrative”.
These were taken as examples of the so-called ‘BlueAnon’, in which Democrats have taken on evidence-free beliefs about political activities, aping the followers of QAnon, the website on which far-right conspiracy theories are common currency.
Posts on social media claiming the attack was staged gained tens of thousands of ‘likes’. They claimed everything from dodgy camera angles to apparent Secret Service inactivity to the amount of blood on Trump’s ear as evidence that there was something dodgy about the story. No matter that two men – the would-be assassin and a spectator – were dead. For Trump’s ideological opponents, it was unthinkable that the assassination attempt could have been real.
“With political candidates, there’s usually what we refer to as ‘politically motivated reasoning,’ which is reasoning with a goal,” says Professor Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology at Cambridge. “If you’re motivated, you start out with the answer and search for evidence that fits the answer you want to be true. If you don’t like Trump, if you think he’s unsuitable, you reinterpret or distort information that suits that narrative. In this case, you reinterpret the event as Trump staging his own assassination, because part of your worldview is that he deceives people on a regular basis.”
While this phenomenon affects people of all political persuasions, he adds, Trump is an unusually potent case. “What’s interesting about Trump specifically is that one of the underlying motives of conspiracy theories is existential. People don’t like to think about existential threats, so they come up with conspiracy theories instead. But for a lot of people Trump represents an existential threat: the end of democracy, start of fascism, anti-science, threat to women’s rights. I think people see him as the apocalypse candidate, and that leads people down the conspiracy path.”
Trump’s uniquely divisive style of politics might explain, in part, why outlandish theories around his assassination attempts are creeping into mainstream discourse, something to be shared over the pudding at bien-pensant dinner parties, rather than confined to the grimier corners of the internet.
For Joseph Uscinski, a professor of political science at the University of Miami and author of a book on American conspiracy theories, the latest speculation is a reminder that nobody on either side thinks they believe a conspiracy theory. “A conspiracy theory is whatever the other guy believes,” he says. “It’s always things we disagree with. The other side is always the conspiracy theorist. It leaves us blind to our own conspiracy theories.
“People take a lot of things on credit and don’t scrutinize them because they match how they view the world. When I first started studying this subject 15 years ago, a colleague said to me ‘this thing about Obama faking his birth certificate is completely stupid, but there’s something to that explosives in the Twin Towers thing’. The irony is they couldn’t see that these were both stupid ideas.”
While conspiracy theories have been a part of American life dating to before the Kennedy assassination, they have proliferated with the internet and social media. The misinformation around the Southport murders in July was a reminder that a story can become fact online before the official channels have had a chance to counter it.
“People who are interested in conspiracy theories can find them almost immediately and they can spread rapidly,” says Karen Douglas, a professor of psychology at the University of Kent who specializes in conspiracy theories. “Once conspiracy theories are out there, they are difficult to quell, especially when some of the facts are still unknown. Even after that, once people believe in a conspiracy theory, it is often difficult to convince them otherwise.
“I’ve seen conspiracy theories about the assassination attempt accusing Trump and his associates of staging the event (left-wing),” she adds. “At the same time, I have seen conspiracy theories that the ‘deep state’ orchestrated the event to take out Trump and take away people’s gun rights (right-wing).”
One comfort, Uscinski says, is that these beliefs are rarely acted upon. Ryan Routh appears to have come closer than most to acting.
In court papers filed on Monday, prosecutors said that he had left behind a note saying he planned to kill Trump. Authorities also found six mobile phones and a list of places where the presidential nominee was likely to be. “This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you,” Routh wrote, according to prosecutors. “I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster.”
Given the millions who believe in some conspiracy theory or another, however, cases like Rouths are mercifully rare.
“If conspiracy theories always led to violence, the streets would be running red with blood, but they’re not,” Uscinski adds. “After Jeffrey Epstein died we had people on the right thinking Hillary Clinton had killed him and people on the left thinking Trump had killed him. It was like a choose-your-own adventure.”
Besides, governments are not infallible. “To think there’s something funny going on isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” he says. “Democracy requires a certain amount of skepticism. It’s not like anybody says you should trust the government all the time. We should be somewhat cynical and distrustful.”
The post How Trump assassination conspiracy theories went mainstream appeared first on The Telegraph.
