Many Americans think Trump assassination attempts were fake, survey finds

About 1 in 4 Americans think the April shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner was staged, with a marked partisan divide, according to a survey published Monday.

Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans, according to a survey published Monday by NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of online news outlets. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 were also more likely than older people to think the incident was staged, according to the report.

Last week, a federal grand jury in D.C. indicted the alleged gunman, charging Cole Tomas Allen with four felonies, including the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump. Soon after the incident that led to his arrest at the Washington Hilton, conspiracy theories began to spread online that falsely claim the Trump administration staged the incident in an effort to manufacture support for the president, the Republican Party and his planned White House ballroom.

The NewsGuard survey found that 24 percent of U.S. adults believe the incident at the Washington Hilton was fake, compared with 45 percent who believed it was legitimate. An additional 32 percent said they were unsure. The survey of 1,000 American adults was conducted by YouGov from April 28 to May 4.

“It’s very striking,” said Sofia Rubinson, an editor at NewsGuard. The results underscore broader skepticism that Americans feel toward the government and the press, she said. “Increasingly, people on all sides of the political spectrum are distrustful of both this administration and also the media,” she said, but willing to trust unverified information they see online.

The White House has rejected the conspiracy theories about the correspondents’ dinner. “Anyone who thinks President Trump staged his own assassination attempts is a complete moron,” spokesman Davis Ingle told The Washington Post in an April statement.

Joan Donovan, a Boston University professor who researches media manipulation, said the results are an indicator of the role of showmanship in Trump’s presidency. “It just seems incredibly Hollywood to imagine that this is staged,” Donovan said of the correspondents’ dinner shooting. “The entire apparatus of the government has been turned into a reality TV show.”

The April incident came after two assassination attempts on Trump in 2024: one at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the second at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.

No evidence has surfaced to support the conspiracy theories claiming that any of the three gun-related incidents at Trump’s public events was staged. But many Americans still think each was.

Regarding the Butler assassination attempt, 24 percent of respondents said they believed it was staged. Forty-two percent of Democratic respondents said they thought the shooting was staged, compared with 7 percent of Republicans.

Meanwhile, 16 percent of respondents said they believed the golf club assassination attempt was staged: 26 percent of Democrats and 7 percent of Republicans.

In total, 21 percent of Democratic respondents said they believed all three events were staged, compared with 11 percent of independents and 3 percent of Republicans.

Donovan said she wasn’t surprised that Democrats were more likely to doubt the legitimacy of the incidents. “If you look among folks on the left, there is a rising tide of conspiratorial thinking, and a lot of it has to do with people being very unsure about the reliability of all of our institutions,” she said.

Jared Holt, a senior researcher at the online extremism tracking group Open Measures, said the statistics show how conspiratorial thinking is becoming more common in the United States.

“Those poll numbers don’t terribly shock me. They’re definitely bleak,” Holt said. “Conspiracy theorizing has infected our body politic now to the point where it has become a gut reflex for a seemingly growing portion of the population.”

It can be natural of people to fall for conspiracy theories when they’re trying to make sense of complicated events, Donovan said.

“Unfortunately, when governments or institutions are hiding the truth about what they’re up to or they’re playing fast and loose with certain regulations or they’re not imposing certain laws on different people,” Donovan said, “it is much easier to believe in a conspiracy against oneself than it is to believe that the system has become rotted.”