Within hours of the gunfire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night—and initial, erroneous reports that the shooter had been killed—the usual swirl of misinformation and rumor was swirling in a particular direction. The event was staged, people said.More than 300,000 posts containing the word staged were shared on X before midday on Sunday, according to an analysis cited by The New York Times. Some of those were probably saying that, actually, the event was not staged, but still: People with substantial social-media followings (including some celebrities) were raising questions. They drew attention to a clip of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt from just before the dinner, laughing as she previewed her boss’s speech: “There will be some shots fired tonight in the room.” Others, in the style of pop-music stan accounts, grabbed photos of President Trump and other members of the administration, taken just before the shooting, in which one might find evidence of knowing smirks or other telling body language. Some of these posts were viewed millions of times.The conspiracy theorists also latched on to a video pulled from Fox News’s live broadcast, in which the reporter Aishah Hasnie, calling from inside the Hilton hotel that hosted the event, told the anchor that she had been speaking with Trump right before the shooting started. “You need to be very safe,” she said he’d told her. “And he was very serious when he said that to me, and he kind of looked around the room and he said there are some—” Then the call dropped. Hasnie clarified in a post on X that cell service had been spotty in the ballroom, but her explanation, delivered at 1:30 in the morning, was not as widely viewed as posts suggesting that Fox had cut her feed before she could reveal what Trump had gone on to say. (“There are some … people in here who are going to fake an attempt on my life but with live ammunition”?)A potential motive for a staged assassination attempt was quickly floated too. Less than two weeks earlier, a federal judge had ruled that Trump could not justify his plan to build a ballroom by saying it was necessary for security reasons. Now he had a perfect counterpoint: “This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House,” he posted on Truth Social,… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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