BlueAnon Rears Its Head: One-Third of Dems Believe Conspiracy Theory That Trump Staged Assassination Attempt
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
A conspiracy theory has run unabated in Democratic circles following the assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump on Saturday. It posits that Trump staged the shooting for a photo op, that the wound on his ear was caused by something other than an assassin's bullet, and that he was never in mortal danger.
It's a baseless conspiracy theory disproven by reams of documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts. And it's a belief held by one-third of the Democratic electorate.
One in three registered Democrats believe it is "credible" that the shooting Saturday in Butler, Pa., was staged and not intended to kill Trump, according to a Morning Consult poll released Monday. The findings show that large swaths of the Democratic base have fallen prey to the phenomenon known as "BlueAnon," a play on the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory that once gripped portions of the Republican base and served as an obsession of the mainstream media throughout the first Trump administration.
But the Morning Consult poll shows that BlueAnon adherents among the Democratic base far outnumber their QAnon counterparts on the right. The poll showed that 34 percent of Democratic voters found it either definitely or probably credible that Trump staged Saturday's shooting, with less than half—45 percent—saying the conspiracy theory is not credible. By comparison, a widely cited 2021 poll found that only 23 percent of Republicans were QAnon believers.
The rise of BlueAnon can be attributed to prominent Democratic activists and liberal media commentators egging on the notion that Trump staged Saturday's shooting.
Democratic powerbroker Dmitri Mehlhorn , an ally of President Joe Biden who has made at least 10 visits to his White House, wasted no time fanning the flames of conspiracy in the immediate aftermath of Saturday's assassination attempt. Mehlhorn on Saturday evening sent a memo to reporters imploring them to portray the shooting as a false-flag operation straight from Vladimir Putin's playbook, designed to give Trump a good photo opportunity.
"This is a classic Russian tactic, such as when Putin killed 300 civilians in 1999 and blamed it on terrorists to ride the backlash to winning power," Mehlhorn wrote.
Mehlhorn did not address the numerous photos that captured bullets whizzing just inches away from Trump's face and blood running from the clearly visible bullet wound across his right ear as Secret Service agents escorted the former president off the stage. Nor did he mention the death of firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was shot while shielding his family from the assassin's bullets.
Mehlhorn is hardly the only liberal activist pushing the conspiracy to liberal voters. Jeff Tiedrich, a liberal social media influencer with 1.1 million followers who attended an Oct. 2022 White House influencer summit to coordinate midterm election messaging with the Biden administration, on Monday posted a Substack screed "connecting some weird dots" surrounding the shooting.
"Did the extreme right want this to happen?" Tiedrich wrote , speculating the shooting could have been connected to a plot to replace Trump atop the GOP ticket with former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Tiedrich, who did not return a request for comment, on Thursday mocked the Washington Post for describing the shooting as "Trump's near-death experience" and said there was no hard evidence that a bullet grazed the former president's ear.
"What the fuck is going on under that bandage?" Tiedrich asked . "And why is the press so disinterested in finding out?"
Liberal MSNBC commentators have adopted a subtler approach to fanning the conspiratorial flames, suggesting in recent days that Trump could not have been shot in the ear by a high-caliber rifle bullet and that the former president is hiding something by not releasing detailed medical records about his wound.
"If he was shot by a high-caliber bullet, there should probably be very little ear there," MSNBC host Michael Steele told viewers on Tuesday.
Steele's fellow MSNBC host Joy Reid on Wednesday joined him in asking questions about Trump's injuries.
"I have many questions!" Reid wrote on Threads. "Like where are the medical reports? What caused Trump’s injury and what was the injury? Sheapnel? [sic] Glass? A bullet?"
Reid doubled down on her baseless conjecture Thursday morning, posting a video to TikTok in which she said that "we still don't know for sure whether Donald Trump was hit by a bullet," glass fragments, or something else. She then suggested something nefarious was behind the Secret Service's having "allowed" Trump to pump his fist as agents led him off the rally stage.
"We don't know why, for nine full seconds, Donald Trump was allowed to stand back up during an active shooting, an active shooter situation," Reid said. "Even though they at that point had said the shooter was down, how would they have known if there were more shooters or not?"
"Yet they allowed him to stand up in the middle of that, you know, crisis and pose for a photo and fist-pump the air so he could get the iconic photo?" Reid added.
MSNBC did not return a request for comment.
Straight news reporters have also joined in on the baseless speculation. Former CNN reporter John Harwood wrote Thursday morning that an AR-15 bullet could not have pierced Trump's ear without blowing the ear to smithereens.
"On the other hand it's easy to imagine a shard of shattered glass causing the bleeding Trump suffered," Harwood said before adding that he is "not familiar with ballistics at all."
Democratic conspiracy-mongering could distract from legitimate questions about the Secret Service's response to Saturday's shooting. Agency director Kimberly Cheatle is facing GOP calls to resign from her post following revelations that, 10 minutes before Trump took the stage, Secret Service agents spotted the gunman on the roof where he carried out the attack. Cheatle said Tuesday the roof was left unprotected because it was "sloped."
"And so there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so the decision was made to secure the building, from inside," Cheatle said.
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Democrats have a real problem with reality.
That's funny
The truth sometimes is funny
I actually think it is closer to two thirds.[✘]
Is believing that trump staged his own shooting any crazier than thinking Joe is fit to be president?
This guy is the political advisor for a billionaire democratic mega donor:
So what?
You have no issue with bidwn allies asking the press to promote a conspiracy theory
Blue Anon - lol, funny. This is definitely not worse than Sandy Hook though. There are nosey, overly suspicious murder podcast addicts on both sides.
Conspiracy theories!
This is all hilarious.
Republican leaders are conspiracy fans ! TRUMP IS TOO !
comparing some nutjobs on social media to the GOP establishment is too much !
Trump's Long History With Conspiracy Theories - FactCheck.org
Here, we summarize some of the conspiracy theories that Trump has either explicitly pushed or subtly elevated both before and during his time in the White House — many of which we’ve covered at length before.
False Birther ConspiracyPresident Barack Obama was born in Hawaii — a fact confirmed in multiple ways, including when our staffers physically saw and photographed t he original birth certificate in 2008.
Still, a conspiracy theory claiming the first Black president was not born in the U.S. persisted long after the 2008 campaign. Trump himself continued to repeatedly promote the claim years after it was definitively debunked.
The future president peddled the false claim in interviews in 2011, for example, as well as in a 2012 tweet in which he claimed to have an “extremely credible source” telling him that the birth certificate was a “fraud.” It was not a fraud.
For more, see “ Donald, You’re Fired! “
ISIS and ObamaIn 2016, months before the presidential election, Trump falsely suggested that Obama had supported ISIS terrorists. He was also wrong when he claimed that a conservative website’s story — which misinterpreted an intelligence memo — proved him “right.”
For more, see “ Trump’s ISIS Conspiracy Theory .”
Ted Cruz’s Father and JFK’s AssassinationVying for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, Trump in a May 2016 national interview baselessly linked the father of his competitor, Sen. Ted Cruz, to the man who assassinated President John F. Kennedy.
“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being, you know, shot,” Trump said. “I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What — what is this right, prior to his being shot. And nobody even brings it up.”
The claim was premised on a thinly sourced story in the tabloid National Enquirer about a picture taken months before the assassination. A photo expert told the Enquirer that a man standing next to Oswald has “more similarity than dissimilarity” with a passport photo of Cruz’s father. But that same expert told us it is “stupid” to claim, as Trump did, that Cruz’s father “was with Lee Harvey Oswald” prior to Kennedy’s assassination .
For more, see “ Trump’s Tall Tabloid Tale .”
Questioning Cruz’s EligibilityTrump made a dim reprisal of his “birther” message in 2016. This time it was aimed at Cruz.
Trump claimed in January 2016 that Illinois was “very seriously” looking at the senator’s eligibility to run for president and “may not even let him run.” But, as we’ve written , that misrepresents the process. Illinois was following standard procedures involving ballot challenges.
Cruz, who was born in Canada to a mother who was an American citizen, was one of several candidates facing objections in Illinois .
The objection, which had been filed by a licensed attorney who makes his living as a pharmacist and was publicized on the conservative website WND.com , was rejected.
As we wrote in 2015, Cruz is a citizen by birth because his mother was a U.S. citizen when he was born.
For more, see “ Trump Overstates Cruz Challenges .”
Celebration in New Jersey on 9/11In 2015, Trump claimed that he “watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering. So something’s going on. We’ve got to find out what it is.”
The next day, he claimed, “It did happen. I saw it. It was on television. I saw it. There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down.”
But multiple efforts to verify his story turned up zero evidence that “thousands of people” in New Jersey cheered the attacks on 9/11. Trump later claimed to have evidence, citing a Sept. 18, 2001, Washington Post story and demanding an apology. But that story didn’t support his claim, either.
For more, see “ Trump, Carson on 9/11 ‘Celebrations ,'” and “ Trump’s Revised 9/11 Claim .”
Scarborough SmearTrump repeatedly has amplified a debunked theory linking MSNBC host Joe Scarborough to the death of one of his staffers in 2001, when he was a Republican congressman. The medical examiner found that the death was accidental, due to a heart problem that caused the aide to fall and hit her head on a desk.
In 2017, Trump asked on Twitter whether Scarborough, a Trump critic, should be fired “ based on the ‘unsolved mystery’ that took place in Florida years ago” and said, “Investigate!”
In May, Trump again returned to the subject — more than once — asking for a reopening of the “ Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so.”
The president’s tweet prompted a response from the late staffer’s widower, who wrote to Twitter’s CEO asking for the tweets to be taken down, saying that such misinformation tarnishes her memory.
“ These conspiracy theorists, including most recently the President of the United States, continue to spread their bile and misinformation on your platform disparaging the memory of my wife and our marriage,” he wrote.
For more, see “ Trump’s Evidence-Free Attempt to Link Scarborough to Aide’s Death .”
Misrepresenting COVID-19 DeathsTrump boosted a falsehood that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had “quietly” reduced the COVID-19 death toll to just 6% of what had previously been reported.
Trump retweeted the claim from an account that promotes QAnon on Aug. 30 and then reiterated the claim in an interview that aired Sept. 1.
But, as we explained before , there was no change in the number of deaths reported by the CDC. Rather, that was a serious misrepresentation of a CDC chart detailing the other conditions that were present in patients who died with COVID-19.
For more, see “ CDC Did Not ‘Admit Only 6%’ of Recorded Deaths from COVID-19 .”
Biden and SEAL Team 6As we noted earlier, Trump retweeted a conspiracy theory with the completely baseless suggestion that Biden had members of SEAL Team 6 killed to cover up a purportedly failed assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011.
We found no corroboration supporting the theory’s outrageous claims, which were promoted three weeks before the 2020 election at a conservative political conference held at Trump National Doral in Florida.
Yet conspiracy theorists took Trump’s amplification to be confirmation. One popular post said that Trump “confirms” the “intel” that Biden “directly participated in a plot to have #SEALTeam6 MURDERED, then arranged a massive cash deal as part of a cover up.”
For more, see “ Conspiracy Theory Baselessly Claims Biden Had Navy SEALs Killed .”
The ‘ANTIFA provocateur’When a 75-year-old man, Martin Gugino, was hospitalized after being pushed by police during a protest in June, Trump suggested the man may have been an “ANTIFA provocateur” trying to “black out” police equipment. Antifa is an umbrella term for far-left anti-fascists, not a specific organization.
Trump’s tweet appeared to be based on an unreliable website’s story about the encounter.
A criminal justice researcher who assessed the video of the encounter told us there was nothing suggesting Gugino was trying to block police communication and that the object in his hands “looks nothing like a hand-held frequency scanner .” Gugino’s lawyer told us he was holding his cell phone.
For more, see “ Trump Tweets Baseless Claims About Injured Buffalo Protester .”
Biden and ‘the Dark Shadows’In an August interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Trump cast suspicion on Biden by saying he is controlled by “people that you’ve never heard of. People that are in the dark shadows.”
Ingraham asked, “What does that mean? That sounds like conspiracy theory. Dark shadows, what is that?”
Trump responded by referring to “ people that you haven’t heard of” who are “ controlling the streets.” He then told a story about a plane that was “almost completely loaded with thugs wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms with gear” and later said they “were on the plane to do big damage.”
He declined to elaborate to Ingraham, saying “ it’s under investigation right now,” but that the plane was heading to Washington, D.C., during the Republican National Convention. There were indeed protests and some arrests — but not “big damage” — during the convention’s final night, when Trump delivered an address in front of the White House.
Some outlets pointed out that his story was similar to, albeit more sensational than, an account offered by Rep. Devin Nunes, who told Breitbart about flying on a plane from Salt Lake City on which he “saw maybe two dozen [Black Lives Matter] people” heading to D.C.
A day after Trump’s interview with Ingraham, though, he changed the direction of the plane, saying “the looters, the anarchists, the rioters” had boarded a plane “going from Washington to wherever.”
The White House later said in a statement that Trump’s remarks were referring to an investigation into the financing of protests around the country.
For more, see “ FactChecking Trump’s Fox News Interview .”
Scalia’s DeathAbout seven months before the 2016 election, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead in his bed on a hunting trip in Texas. Scalia, 79, suffered from coronary artery disease, obesity and diabetes, among other ailments. There were no signs of foul play.
But an early report from John Poindexter, the owner of the ranch where Scalia died, led to conspiratorial speculation that the justice may have been killed. He told a local newspaper that Scalia was found with “a pillow over his head.”
Speculation began to grow that Scalia may have been murdered, and conservative commentator Michael Savage was among those making that suggestion.
As a guest on Savage’s radio show, Trump — who was a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination then — said that he didn’t know the details, “But they say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow.”
Poindexter clarified the next day that Scalia “had a pillow over his head, not over his face as some have been saying.” He told CNN, “The pillow was against the headboard and over his head when he was discovered. He looked like someone who had had a restful night’s sleep. There was no evidence of anything else.”
Vince FosterDuring the 2016 election, Trump rekindled an old conspiracy theory about his opponent, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, when he said he thought the death of Vince Foster was “fishy.”
In reality, Foster, who had worked with Clinton as a lawyer in Arkansas and was a deputy in the White House counsel’s office during the Clinton administration, killed himself in a Northern Virginia park in 1993. Before his death, he had told his sister he was depressed and seeking help.
Five investigations — two by law enforcement, two congressional inquiries and an investigation led by independent counsel Ken Starr — concluded that Foster died by suicide.
Still, though, Foster is one in a string of people who have died and become part of what is often referred to as the Clinton body count conspiracy theory, a long-circulating theory which baselessly alleges that the Clintons have killed many people to cover up alleged crimes.
In a 2016 Washington Post interview , Trump called Foster’s death “ very fishy,” even while saying, “I don’t know enough to really discuss it.”
“He had intimate knowledge of what was going on,” Trump said of Foster, without offering any evidence to contradict the findings of multiple investigations. “He knew everything that was going on and then all of a sudden he committed suicide.”
Epstein and the ClintonsAfter the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in federal prison in 2019, a medical examiner reported that Epstein committed suicide by hanging himself. But many conspiracy theories homed in on Epstein’s connections to former President Bill Clinton and suggested Epstein was actually killed as part of a cover-up. Other theories argued that Trump, who also had ties to Epstein, was behind it.
Trump for his part retweeted a post suggesting that the Clintons were somehow responsible for Epstein’s death. The tweet used the hashtag “ #clintonbodycount.”
The president later defended his action, emphasizing that it was a “retweet” and that it came from a “highly respected, conservative pundit” and “big Trump fan.” But he also said he had “no idea” if the Clintons were involved.
For more, see “ The Epstein Connections Fueling Conspiracy Theories .”
DNC ServerTrump repeatedly shared the false assertion that Ukraine, or a “Ukrainian company,” had the server of the Democratic National Committee — part of a conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election.
He told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a July 2019 phone call : “The server, they say Ukraine has it.” He repeated the claim in a November 2019 “Fox & Friends” interview , saying, “ A lot of it had to do they say with Ukraine. …They have the server, right? From the DNC, Democratic National Committee.”
But there’s absolutely no evidence of that.
T he DNC actually hired CrowdStrike, a U.S.-based cybersecurity firm, to investigate Russia’s hacking of its computer network in 2016, and CrowdStrike said it has “never taken physical possession of any” of the 140 servers the DNC said had to be decommissioned during the process. The company did its analysis by making an exact copy of everything on the DNC’s hard drives through a process called “imaging.”
In September 2019, Tom Bossert, the administration’s former homeland security adviser, said he had explained the facts to the president. He responded to Trump’s claims in the Zelensky call by saying, “I t’s not only a conspiracy theory, it is completely debunked.”
For more, see “ Trump Repeats False Ukraine Claims .”
HydroxychloroquineTrump has hailed the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for COVID-19, although numerous studies have failed to find it to be effective for treating the disease and t he FDA announced in June that it had revoked its emergency use authorization.
A month after the FDA’s announcement, though, Trump waded into conspiracy theories about the drug. He promoted a dubious video making the false claim that hydroxychloroquine was a “cure” for COVID-19, and, in a flurry of tweets about the video, Trump retweeted a post that said the drug “is being suppressed to keep deaths high so the economy can be shut down ahead of the election.”
There is no evidence to support the idea that anyone is conspiring to “suppress” hydroxychloroquine in order to harm the economy for political gain. Rather, there is substantial evidence suggesting that the drug is not effective for treating COVID-19.
For more, see “ In Viral Video, Doctor Falsely Touts Hydroxychloroquine as COVID-19 ‘Cure.'”
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Russian collusion hoax, Ukraine hoax, and now the Trump assassination attempt was a false flag.
Democrats have left Trump in the dust when it comes to hoaxes.
Trump might state them; Democrats follow through on them with investigations and impeachments.
Americans love to laugh and hate downer people.
Hulk Hogan, who seems brain damaged, is the feature speaker right now. You cant make this stuff up.
Dwight Eisenhower is doing the old spin in the grave thing right now.
How so? Professional wrestling has never been one of my things, but Hulk was extremely popular. Is he damaged but Eva Longoria a perfect speaker at Biden’s 2020 convention?
"professional" wrestling is a con that the audience agrees to take part in. perfect metaphor for the current republican party.
Yes, entertainment, like movies,TVs, plays, etc.
So if the republican party is the con the people agree to take part in
That would make the Democrat party the con the people DONT agree to take part in .
Ying and yang thing, got it.
No, that is a false equivalence. It's FALSE!
Try shaking your keyboard upside to get rid of the crumbs causing you Caps Lock key to stick.
wish i had some cheese to give you to go with that whine .
Trump is just mumbling into the mic now.
i think some are having apoplexies because of the last couple weeks , some are on the verges of full blown kaniptions . i saw one once , was not nice , the exes hair split , the skin melted off her head and i swear i smelt brimstone and sulfur .
thanx for the update , im not watching because im not voting for the prick .
now george , in order to mumble , first the idea has to stop ricocheting around inside that dark and empty space between his ears . right now its bouncing around @ about 300 hits a sec . any faster and he would light up like an old pinball machine that says TILT.
I am watching. Wondering, what is he on?
Im sure you will get one of those little italian party favors .
( looks at mine and it says , comes in sizes large , medium ,Caucasian , and men from oklahoma with an *
* due to the coarse and sandpaper texture of donkeys anuses , this product is made of the finest 8 mm rubber created .
**testimonial: Okie : i had a real problem with others products like this , i would use them and well the left nut would go uh , the right nut would go uh , and the product would explode , with this product , the left and right still go uh , but so to does the product , then both nuts explode .
I had no idea. Did you write Trump's speech?
Many call it a stage.
Who will deliver the nomination speech in Chicago?
Pelosi has told House Democrats that Biden may soon be persuaded to exit race
Is that what Fox News is saying today?
That’s what Pelosi is saying, because Biden is incompetent and has No business being president, when he drops out what excuses are you going to use?
I don’t know. That headline is from the Washington Post.
I believe they are going to bring out Robert Dinero so he can cry again.
An audition to replace Biden?
So you know what brain damaged looks like.
It would work if you give into that kind of stupidity.