In the early hours of Sunday, I awoke to check the time on my phone and learned that there had been a shooting – apparently, an assassination attempt – at this year’s White House correspondents’ dinner, an event held annually to honor the journalists who cover presidential politics.

I stayed awake just long enough to read that the attack had been thwarted and that no one had been killed, and then I went back to sleep.

By morning, my social media accounts and email inbox was filled with entries that began with some version of the phrase, “I’m not a conspiracy theorist but … ” Even as they distanced themselves from crackpot takes on current history, some Americans were suggesting that the assault had been orchestrated to distract us from the war in Iran, the struggling economy, the Epstein files.

Several news sites reported that the word “staged” had appeared in more than 300,000 posts on Tiwtter/X.

This new attack, people were claiming, was no more credible than the 2024 shooting from which Donald Trump emerged with a wounded – and almost miraculously undamaged – ear.

And, many across the nation wondered, didn’t it seemed suspicious that the president seemed so unruffled by this new eruption of violence that he pivoted almost immediately to explaining why this event demonstrated the urgent need for the ultra-high-security White House ballroom that he has been so passionately planning to construct?

Within a few hours, we learned that the shooter had been caught and identified as........

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