We Marinate in Conspiracy Today. Who’s to Blame? Partly, Donald Trump.

With respect to the attempts on his life, Donald Trump is the victim of conspiracy-mongering. But somehow, it’s a little hard to feel too bad for him.

History should bother to record the dark irony that the apparent third (or fourth, or maybe fifth) assassination attempt against Donald Trump came at the end of a month when the conspiracy theory that the first high-profile attempt was staged by Trump and his people barged its way into the news cycle. That would be the shooting in July 2024 involving gunman Thomas Crooks in Butler, Pennsylvania. If you’ve ventured down this rabbit hole, you’re familiar with some of the details: that Trump’s ear, which we were told at the time was singed by a bullet, seems miraculously and mysteriously to have grown back; that a crane just happened to be there to hoist a large flag into place just in time for the iconic “fight!” photo; and more.

This conspiracy is being peddled not on the left, but by figures on the right who’ve turned against Trump: for example, Tucker Carlson and Joe Kent, who recently resigned as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran. Butler conspiracy theories arose literally within hours of the shooting, but over these past couple of weeks they’ve really taken hold in certain corners of the right.

With conspiracy so thick in the political air, it shouldn’t surprise us then that conspiracy theories are already whipping around about Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner too. Suspicions about the shooting that interrupted the annual party at the Washington Hilton emanate mostly from the left, though some right-wing figures are raising questions too.

For the record, these theories all seem ridiculous to me. There have been conspiracy theories about presidential assassinations, certainly the successful ones,........

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