Nearly One in Three Americans Believe At Least One Trump Assassination Attempt Was Staged

Despite video recordings of the shooter, audio of gunfire, and live reports from hundreds of journalists inside the Washington Hilton last month, nearly 25 percent of Americans say they believe that the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was staged, according to a new poll. When researchers sought further information on the conspiracy theory, they discovered that nearly one-third of Americans believe that at least one of the assassination attempts against President Trump was staged. The attack at the Correspondents’ Dinner began shortly after Mr. Trump entered the room to great fanfare. As the shots rang out, he appeared to be relatively calm, a reaction that appears to be driving some of the skepticism. Mr. Trump’s insistence that the East Wing ballroom would have prevented the attack is adding to the conjecture that the aborted assault was a fake assassination attempt, as users on social media submit that the president ordered a false flag operation in order to get taxpayers to foot the bill for his elaborate White House event space. In the wake of the conspiracy theories, NewsGuard commissioned a poll from YouGov to ask 1,000 Americans about their opinions on the three attacks on Mr. Trump’s life — the Correspondents’ Dinner last month; the shooting at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Mr. Trump was still running for office; and an attempted assassination in Florida before the 2024 election, which saw a man camping out at one of the president’s golf clubs in order to take a shot at him. According to the sample of Americans surveyed, nearly one-third — 30 percent — of respondents said they believed at least one of those three assassination attempts — two of which occurred during live coverage in front of large crowds — had been faked. The poll shows that 24 percent of Americans believe that the Correspondents’ Dinner attack was staged, while 32 percent said they were unsure. A plurality — 45 percent — said the attack was genuine and did take place as described. Pollsters also found that the same percentage of Americans — 24 percent — said the shooting at Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, was fake. Again, only a plurality said the shooting was real. “After the attempt on Trump’s life at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April 2026, NewsGuard found that many of the same viral accounts that pushed the earlier staged-shootings conspiracies were advancing the same claim. Social media users claimed the incident was staged to distract from the Iran war or from Trump’s unfavorable polling numbers,” NewsGuard wrote in its memo on the poll results. The groups most likely to believe that one or all of the events were staged are young people and Democrats. Among Americans between the ages of 18 and 29, 32 percent believe the Correspondents’ Dinner was staged, 26 percent believe the Butler assassination attempt was fake, and 19 percent believe the golf club attempt by Routh was not real. Of the other age demographics tested, none outpaced those under age 30 in the belief that one of the events was a false flag. One-fifth of Democrats said they believe that all three of the events were staged, according to the poll. The survey found that 21 percent of Democrats, 11 percent of independents, and three percent of Republicans think the assassination attempts were fake. The most stunning number may be the sheer size of the Democratic cohort which believes the Butler shooting was staged by Mr. Trump. Despite seeing it with their own eyes, the poll found that a plurality of 42 percent said the first assassination attempt was not genuine. “The left-wing conspiracy theory that staged shootings are part of Trump’s playbook has been persistent since the first attempt on Trump’s life at the Pennsylvania rally on July 13, 2024,” NewsGuard wrote in its analysis. “Minutes after Secret Service escorted a bleeding Trump off the stage, social media lit up with claims that the shooting was staged, arguing, for example, that Trump faked the shooting with a ‘blood pill’ and that photojournalists at the scene had been tipped off.”

Nearly One in Three Americans Believe At Least One Trump Assassination Attempt Was Staged

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