"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The Trump assassination attempt was the same as virtually every previous presidential assassination or attempt in US history, with no conspiracy or overarching plot
The assassination attempt on former president and current candidate Donald Trump sparked conspiracy theories from almost the moment the shots rang out. And in keeping with America’s toxic political polarization, the theories tended to fall across two different narratives, depending on your political persuasion.
Claims that the shooting was staged or a hoax circulated among the political left, despite such hoaxes once being much more the domain of the far right. Trump supporters immediately decried that he had been the victim of an assassination attempt, but one that had been either made to happen or allowed to happen by the corrupt, anti-Trump deep state. In this version, Trump was meant to be taken down by multiple shooters, only to move his head at the last moment and survive, with one shooter, identified as Thomas Crooks, being killed to cover up the plot.
Conspiracy theories that a publicly televised event was a hoax or fraud, despite happening right in front of a massive audience, are fairly new. They are an outgrowth of the false claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre had been “staged” with no children dying – the same “staged false flag” that now dogs every single mass casualty incident in the US.
However, conspiracy theories about presidential assassinations or attempts being plots by evil cabals involving multiple shooters with a patsy set up to take the fall are far from new. One need look no further than the still-lucrative industry of conspiracists writing about John F. Kennedy’s assassination six decades after it took place, despite no new evidence to support any claim other than Lee Harvey Oswald having acted on his own. Even though there is no consensus on who the shooter or shooters were if not Oswald, a majority of Americans still doubt that Kennedy was taken down by a lone gunman.
Such conspiracism is natural, particularly when dealing with the most unthinkable scenario in American politics. Seeing a powerful leader nearly felled by an assassin’s bullet on live TV is the perfect fodder for conspiracy theories – after all, something did go horribly wrong, and in the early moments after the shooting, nobody knew what was happening. Presidential candidates are not supposed to get shot, and when they do, we demand to know why and how it could have happened. The story behind Trump’s assassination attempt is still murky, as the Secret Service failed in multiple ways, and the shooter left behind nothing that would indicate a motive or reason for why he tried to kill Trump. In fact, his social media and search history muddy the waters even more, as he had previously searched for where President Biden would be, indicating that he didn’t care who he shot, he just wanted to shoot someone.
With all that said, there is no evidence that the shooter did not act alone or had help from anyone. Claims that there was a second shooter, possibly perched on an adjacent water tower, were proven false by numerous videos. There has been no evidence either of foreign involvement, or of the shooter having any particular goal in mind. None of this is out of the ordinary, as in the entire history of American presidential shootings, there has never been one where more than one shooter fired at the president.
Essentially, this assassination attempt was the same as virtually every previous presidential assassination or attempt in US history, with no conspiracy or overarching plot. There is one notable exception - the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Every other one has been the act of one person, acting alone, and usually for murky or unknowable reasons. James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy were all shot and killed by lone gunmen who were all apprehended quickly, usually right away.
Likewise, Ronald Reagan was shot and badly injured in March 1981 by a gunman who was immediately arrested. In the incident that the Trump shooting has most closely been compared to, former president Theodore Roosevelt, who was running again on a third-party ticket in 1912, was shot by a gunman during a speech. That gunman was subdued by the audience, arrested, and died in a mental institution. Not a single one of these shootings involved anyone other than the shooter, who was identified and apprehended almost immediately.
Previous attempts to kill presidents that did not result in the head of state being shot have overwhelmingly been the work of lone would-be assassins, like the multiple attempts to shoot Gerald Ford in 1975. Only a few, such as a plot by Argentine anarchists to kill Herbert Hoover, or when two Puerto Rican activists attempted to murder Harry Truman, were the work of conspiracies. They failed, with the perpetrators identified or killed quickly.
The only actual conspiracy that resulted in the death or injury of a president was the Confederate sympathizer conspiracy to kill Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward. The plotters, led by John Wilkes Booth, sought to decapitate the victorious Union government by killing all three of its leaders at the same – but their plan failed to kill anyone other than Lincoln, who was shot by Booth acting alone. Johnson’s would-be killer lost his nerve, and Seward’s assassin wounded but didn’t kill Seward. The conspiracy was quickly unraveled, with most members quickly arrested and Booth himself being shot and killed by US troops 12 days after the assassination. Most of the conspirators were hanged, and only one escaped, later admitting his part in the plot.
In all the cases where a presidential plot involved more than one person, the conspiracy wasn’t carried out at the highest levels of government – like the ones theorized about Trump – but by a small group of killers who mostly failed to carry out their tasks and were exposed almost immediately. As conspiracies go, they are fairly inept ones.
In examining the details of the attempt to assassinate Trump, the need for a conspiracy disappears completely. The shooter wasn’t a trained killer who could knock off any target from any distance, which is presumably the type of person a powerful cabal would hire. Rather, Thomas Crooks was an inexperienced and ill-trained shooter who could not even make his high school rifle team. Why would a high-level conspiracy to eliminate Donald Trump rely on such an unreliable person? And if Crooks was just a patsy for an actual trained shooter acting in concert with Crooks, why did that shooter miss? If this was the evil cabal’s one and only shot at Trump, why did they not do more to take advantage of it?
Such questions usually falsify the existence of any sort of conspiracy. They are not, of course, the questions that conspiracy believers ask – preferring instead to focus on inconsistencies in stories, poor recollections by witnesses, and made-up facts.
What might be the most troubling thing about Trump’s near death, then, is how banal it was. No plot was needed, no highly-trained super soldier or small unit carried it out, and nothing about it was out of the ordinary. It was just a kid with easy access to a rifle who somehow found himself with a clear shot at Trump, and missed. With a few details changed, it could have been a school shooting or any other random mass shooting that takes place all the time in America.
Nothing about it was special or out of the ordinary, except its target.
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