In the aftermath of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, you’d think Democrats could put aside their Trump Derangement Syndrome tendencies for a little bit and give thanks and say a prayer over the fact that the shooter wasn’t successful.
But after only the briefest pauses to express wishes for a speedy recovery, there are Democrats who wasted no time whatsoever in beginning to push conspiracy theories about how the act was allegedly staged for Trump’s benefit or that he wasn’t really hit by a bullet but instead maybe by some glass shards that flew from the teleprompter.
During last week’s Republican National Convention, longtime MSNBC host Joy Reid suggested there were some “weird” things that happened in the aftermath of the shooting, like the fact the Secret Service allowed Trump to stand up long enough for photographers to take the iconic photos of him raising his fist in the air.
“We don’t know why, for 9 full seconds, Donald Trump was allowed to stand back up during an active shooting,” Reid proclaimed in a video shared on social media.
“There could have been five shooters for all they knew,” she went on to say, and “Yet, they allowed him to stand up in the middle of that crisis and pose for a photo, and fist pump the air so he could get the iconic photo.”
She then called it a “weird situation” and one that “we’ll figure that out one day.”
Except… what’s to “figure out” exactly? Witnesses on the scene — including reporters from established media organizations — have described what they saw, and it wasn’t fake.
Because of the backlash she received, Reid now has her Twitter/X account locked down so that only “approved followers” can see what she posts.
Meanwhile, leftist social media users were posting altered photos of Trump’s right ear to suggest he’d never actually been shot. Others also shared doctored pictures of Trump and members of the Secret Service to make it appear as though they were smiling after the attempted assassination.
Fact-checking organizations have debunked these photos by pointing to actual photos taken by media photographers who were at the rally where the shooting took place.
And in yet another troubling sign of the times, a Morning Consult poll conducted a mere two days after the assassination attempt showed that “Roughly 1 in 5 voters said they find it credible that the shooting was staged and not intended to kill Trump, including a third of Biden’s supporters and 12% of those who back Trump.”
“The majority of voters (62%) said the unsubstantiated notion is not credible,” the poll also noted.
These warped opinions have no doubt been influenced in part by online influencers and high-profile Democrat movers and shakers like Dmitri Mehlhorn, an adviser to far-left megadonors who, per a story from Semafor, urged the press in a letter to consider that the shooting “was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash.”
And as the Free Beacon documented, popular leftist influencer Jeff Tiedrich wrote a Substack post with the headline “Connecting some weird dots: did the extreme right want this to happen?”
As someone who has watched media outlets far and wide devote countless hours of coverage time to conspiracy theorists on the far right and trying to portray them as mainstream, I look forward to seeing the same amount or more attention devoted to crackpots on the left.
I won’t hold my breath on it, of course, but it would be a refreshing change of pace, not to mention extremely timely.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
