FACT-CHECK: No, the attempt on Trump’s life was not staged — and this theory says something chilling about us

The First Few Hours: 4chan, Telegram, and Unverified X Accounts

The staged event theory emerged on 4chan within forty minutes of the attack, even before the victims’ names were known. The first posts recycled a well-established conspiracy theory aesthetic: cropped screenshots, red arrows pointing to “inconsistencies,” and comparisons with images from other events taken out of context. The content migrated to Telegram within a few hours, then to X, where accounts with large followings—some exceeding 500,000 followers—reshared it without verification.

TF1 Info identified three French-language X accounts that shared the theory more than 200,000 times in total between July 13 and 20, 2024. None of these accounts cites a primary source. All link to other accounts, which in turn link to yet other accounts. It’s a pyramid of baseless assertions—each level borrows its certainty from the one below it, without ever touching the ground.

There is something dizzying about this mechanism. The theory doesn’t need to be true to be convincing. It needs to be shareable. And it is, because it offers what reality cannot: the certainty that someone is in control, that nothing happens by chance, that chaos has a creator. The lie is more reassuring than the disorderly truth.

The Role of Certain Elected Officials and MAGA Figures

The spread of the theory isn’t limited to anonymous accounts. Several figures close to the MAGA ecosystem have been amplifying watered-down versions of the theory since July 14. Without going so far as to explicitly claim the event was staged, they pose “questions” about “inconsistencies” and encourage people to “dig deeper”—language that sows doubt while maintaining a plausible distance of denial.

Laura Loomer, a figure in the American far right and close to Trump, published a series of posts on July 14 questioning the Secret Service’s “handling” of the event—posts that racked up millions of impressions before being partially restricted by X. Roger Stone, who was convicted and then pardoned by Trump, insinuated on July 15 that “questions deserve to be asked” without posing a single specific one. The rhetoric of insinuation is a weapon: it cannot be refuted because it asserts nothing.

The Psychology of Patterns: Seeing Order in Chaos

The human brain is a pattern-detection machine. This ability has enabled us to survive—to recognize the silhouette of a predator in tall grass, to perceive hostility in an unfamiliar face. But this same ability produces massive false positives in an environment saturated with images and narratives. We see intent where there are mere accidents. We look for a plan where there is entropy.

Dr. Rob Brotherton, a psychologist at Goldsmiths University (London) and author of Suspicious Minds (2015), documents this mechanism: the more emotionally charged an event is, the more the brain seeks a cause proportional to its impact. A lone man with a rifle who fails to kill a former president—and wounds him in the ear—seems disproportionately mundane as the cause of an event of such magnitude. So the brain looks for something else. It finds a conspiracy.

This is not a criticism of the people who believed this theory. It is a description of who we all are. I could have believed it, under the right circumstances. The question is not “how can anyone be so stupid”—that question is fruitless and false. The real question is: What social, media, and political conditions create an environment where this normal psychological mechanism turns into an epidemic of misinformation?

Institutional distrust: the fertile ground cultivated over years

The “conspiracy theory” does not thrive in a vacuum. It thrives in an environment where trust in institutions—the media, the government, federal agencies, experts—has been methodically eroded over the years. Trump himself labeled the mainstream media “enemies of the people” during 272 rallies recorded between 2016 and 2024. He has questioned the findings of the FBI, the CIA, public health agencies, and election officials.

This effort to undermine trust is bearing irreversible fruit. A YouGov poll published on July 22, 2024, reveals that 28% of Republican Americans believe the assassination attempt was “probably” or “certainly” staged. This is not a marginal minority. Just under a third. These people are not all stupid or malicious. They are the product of an information ecosystem that has turned systematic doubt into a civic virtue.

Corey Comperatore No Longer Exists for Conspiracy Theorists

Corey Comperatore was 50 years old on July 13, 2024. He had been leading the Buffalo Township volunteer fire department for years. His 25-year-old daughter, Allyson, described in a statement released on July 16 how he threw himself over her and her mother when he heard the gunshot. He died from that gunshot wound. His body was brought home with full honors. His fellow firefighters formed a 12-kilometer honor guard.

For conspiracy theorists, Corey exists only as an extra, as a prop in a fiction—or does not exist at all. This erasure is one of the most brutal ways disinformation affects the dead. It robs them of their death a second time. It turns their sacrifice into a backdrop. Corey Comperatore’s family publicly asked on July 18, 2024, for the theories surrounding the event to stop. They were ignored by the very same accounts that claim to defend “the truth.”

I want to focus on Corey for a moment. Not to turn him into a symbol—he was a man, not a symbol. But because the “staged event” theory inflicts a specific injustice upon him: it assumes he was in on it, that he was an actor, or that he didn’t really exist. His daughters might be reading these posts. This thought weighs heavily on my chest in a way I can’t articulate except by naming it directly.

Political derealization: when nothing can be proven anymore

The “staged event” theory creates a fundamental epistemological problem: if an attack filmed from dozens of angles, with dozens of witnesses, and documented by the FBI, medical services, and media outlets around the world can be a staged event—then no event can be real. Any contrary reality becomes a potential fabrication. Any evidence to the contrary becomes proof of the conspiracy’s sophistication.

This is what philosophers call a non-falsifiable theory: it cannot be refuted, because it absorbs every refutation as confirmation. The FBI says there’s no conspiracy? Proof that the FBI is part of the conspiracy. Doctors confirm the injury is real? The doctors have been bribed. Witnesses describe chaos? The witnesses are actors. In this universe, reality is impossible by definition. This is no longer skepticism. It is institutionalized collective psychosis.

X, Meta, YouTube: Three Different Responses, All Inadequate

X, under Elon Musk, opted for a hands-off approach to moderating most conspiracy-theory content related to the attack. The most viral posts—some reaching 40 million impressions—remained online without warning labels for more than 72 hours. Meta applied restrictions more quickly on Facebook and Instagram, removing posts identified as misinformation by its third-party fact-checking teams. YouTube added context panels beneath conspiracy-theory videos, without removing them.

None of these responses stopped the spread. Content moderated on one platform migrates to others in less than two hours. Studies by the Reuters Institute published in October 2024 show that 67% of people exposed to disinformation about the attack received it via private messages—WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal—spaces where moderation is structurally impossible. Disinformation has adapted to moderation. It now thrives in the blind spots.

We discuss platforms as if they were the main problem. They are merely the conduit. The problem is us—our need to share before verifying, our satisfaction when information confirms what we already believe, our laziness in the face of complexity. Platforms amplify what we feed them. And we feed them a lot.

Is fact-checking still useful?

This is a sincere question, not a rhetorical one. TF1 Info, PolitiFact, Le Monde, AFP Factuel, Libération—a dozen fact-checking organizations published comprehensive debunkings of the “staged event” theory within 48 hours. These articles garnered several million views. They convinced those who were ready to be convinced. And they probably didn’t change a single belief among those who weren’t already convinced.

Social psychology research on the “backfire effect”—the tendency to reinforce one’s beliefs when they are refuted—is now more nuanced: this effect is not universal. Some people, when exposed to a precise and respectful refutation, do in fact change their minds. Fact-checking has real, measurable value, even if it is only partial. But this value presupposes an audience that is not yet trapped in the closed, self-referential information loop that accounts for the 28% in the YouGov poll. For those people, the facts come too late. The damage has already been done.

When Fiction Becomes More Comforting Than the Facts

A country where nearly a third of the electorate believes that an assassination attempt on its own candidate was a hoax orchestrated by its opponents is a country in a state of democratic emergency. Not because these people are crazy—they aren’t. But because it reveals a level of mutual distrust, an epistemological breakdown, and informational fragmentation that makes democratic debate fundamentally impossible.

How can you negotiate with someone who doesn’t share the same basic reality as you? How can you reach an agreement on economic, climate, or immigration policy when you can’t even agree on what happened on July 13, 2024, at 6:11 p.m. in Butler, Pennsylvania, in front of thousands of witnesses? Democracy rests on a foundation of shared reality. That foundation is cracking. This didn’t start yesterday. It’s been happening for years. And the attack in Butler isn’t the cause—it’s the symptom.

I am not American. But what is happening there does not stay there. The same mechanisms are at work here, in France, in Europe. The same Telegram channels. The same narrative structures. The same economy of outrage and doubt. We watch the United States as we would watch a wildfire advancing toward our homes, telling ourselves that perhaps the wind will change. The wind does not change on its own.

And yet, resistance exists

And yet. 72% of American Republicans did not believe the “staged event” theory. Communities of volunteer fact-checkers on Reddit, Discord, and X worked day and night to debunk false images, verify the real ones, and call out the lies. Local journalists in Butler, Pennsylvania—people who knew Corey Comperatore, who lived in that town—documented the event with a level of precision that makes the conspiracy theory untenable for anyone willing to read the facts.

And yet, the victims’ loved ones have spoken out. Publicly, painfully, with a dignity that stands in stark contrast to the indecency of those who deny their grief. Resisting disinformation isn’t spectacular. It’s slow, exhausting, and it isn’t measured in millions of impressions. It’s measured in people who ask one more question before sharing, in editors who fact-check before publishing, in readers who seek out the primary source rather than a screenshot. It’s not much. It’s all we have.

Fact-Check Classification

VERDICT: COMPLETELY FALSE. The assassination attempt on Donald Trump on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania, was not staged. Every claim put forward by conspiracy theorists has been refuted by verifiable evidence: medical reports, the FBI investigation, testimonies from hundreds of people present, ballistics analyses, and formal identification of the shooter. The injury was real. Corey Comperatore’s death was real. The injuries sustained by David Dutch and James Copenhaver were real.

But there is a spectrum of falsehood that this verdict alone does not capture. There is falsehood arising from good-faith error. There is falsehood arising from credulity. And there is falsehood deliberately fabricated and disseminated by actors who know exactly what they are doing. The majority of those who shared this theory fall into the second category. A minority—the creators of the original content, the high-follower accounts that amplified it—belong to the third. This distinction does not absolve anyone, but it changes the appropriate response.

The fact-check says FALSE. But the real truth of this article isn’t FALSE. It is: why? Why did millions of people need this to be false? What pain, what mistrust, what breach of the social contract led them there? I don’t have a specific answer to this question. I’m sure it’s the right question.

What we must demand from the media and platforms

Fact-checking isn’t enough. We need clear rules on how quickly viral disinformation content must be labeled—not 72 hours later, but within an hour. Platforms must accept the idea that freedom of expression does not include the right to unlimited algorithmic amplification for falsified content. We need stable, public funding for fact-checking organizations—not conditional grants that raise suspicions of bias.

And yet. And yet, no technical or regulatory infrastructure can replace what is fundamentally missing: a culture of shared epistemology—taught in schools, practiced in families, and demanded in public debate. Knowing how to distinguish a primary source from a screenshot. Knowing that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Knowing that complexity is not manipulation. These things cannot be imposed by decree. They are passed down. Slowly. One conversation at a time.

On July 13, 2024, at 6:11 p.m., Corey Comperatore threw himself in front of his daughters. He was 50 years old. He didn’t know that, ten months later, some people would deny the reality of that act from the comfort of their couches, in their pajamas, with the complacent certainty of those who have never had to throw themselves in front of anything.

The assassination attempt on Donald Trump was not staged. But the spread of this theory is very real—and it tells us something we cannot afford to ignore. It tells us that we live in societies where a significant portion of the population prefers a coherent fiction to a chaotic reality. Where trust in institutions is so low that an attack filmed from a hundred angles becomes a source of doubt. Where the dead can be denied if their deaths serve the wrong narrative.

And yet, the facts hold up. They hold up because people persist in verifying them, naming them, and repeating them despite their exhaustion. This isn’t heroism. It’s work. Work that increasingly resembles holding up a wall with bare hands as the tide rises.

The question that will remain after reading this article is not: Was the theory true? It was false. The question is: What within you could have led you to believe it was true? That question cannot be answered with sources. It must be answered alone, at night, with honesty.

Corey Comperatore died in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024. He was not an actor.

Signed, Maxime Marquette, columnist