Accusations that the assassination attempt on Saturday was staged have proliferated all over social media. Many on the left are arguing that the attack was meant to garner pity for Trump and ensure a kind of “Reichstag fire” scenario so Trump could seize power unilaterally. Many of these focused on the photos of Trump in the immediate aftermath, his fist raised in defiance, as evidence that the entire event was set up to garner sympathy and show the ex-president as unbowed. Meanwhile, on the right, rumours swirled that it was an assassination attempt by President Biden – on Sunday, Alex Jones blasted out an email with a subject line that read in part: “Desperate Deep State Will Try to Assassinate Trump Again”.
None of this is surprising – the United States has a long history of presidential assassination and assassination attempts, and a long love affair with conspiracy theories of all kinds. But the ease with which conspiracists of all political alignments have been able to assimilate Saturday’s shocking, unexpected news with their preformed opinions tells us what political conspiracy theories do for people and how they operate.
In the wake of breaking, confusing news, conspiracy theories offer the illusory promise of an explanation. Not only that, but a conspiracy theory also offers a narrative of history that is resilient, one that continues to hold up no matter what transpires. If you believe, for example, that the “deep state” is engaged in a long-running, omnipresent campaign to defeat Donald Trump, then anything that happens can be seen as further proof of that.
Presidential assassinations – and assassination attempts – are among the most destabilising, confusing and terrifying political events. Alongside major attacks like Pearl Harbor and 9/11, they can change the course of history for ever. So it’s not surprising that such events attract paranoid musings – they proliferate immediately, almost as a sort of self-defence mechanism against the shock of the new.
The United States, in particular, has had a long history of yoking conspiracy theories to political assassinations. In 1886, ex-priest Charles Paschal Telesphore Chiniquy wrote a bestseller, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, in which he claimed (among other things) to be a confidant of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had, in fact, represented Chiniquy in 1850 as a young lawyer on a minor matter, but in Chiniquy’s telling, he went on multiple private visits to the White House, where Lincoln purportedly told him that not only were the Catholics behind the civil war, but that if anything were to happen to him, it would be the Jesuits who had pulled the trigger.
More recently, they’ve been used to shape reactions in the dramatic aftermath of breaking news. Immediately in the wake of John F Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, everyone from organised crime to the KKK to Cuban exiles to the CIA was accused of being behind the attack – anyone, it seemed, was more plausible than Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone and using an antiquated rifle. Five years later, when Kennedy’s brother Robert was also killed during his presidential candidacy, once again conspiracists alleged that the killer, Sirhan Sirhan, had been brainwashed or was otherwise part of a larger conspiracy.
Similar theories surrounded Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination, even though he wasn’t a presidential candidate, and this is to say nothing of the various political assassination attempts carried out by the US government in other countries – in Congo, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Indonesia, as well as the successful coup of Salvador Allende in Chile – and the resulting conspiracy theories they engendered. As the US has long been involved in actual conspiracies (including against its own citizens, such as the FBI’s surveillance program Cointelpro, or the CIA’s experimentation on Americans, MKUultra), the problem is not necessarily in entertaining beliefs – rather, the danger is in using them as a filter against breaking news.
It’s natural to want to make sense of something that seems to come from nowhere, changing everything and throwing us off kilter – in such moments of disorientation, any kind of explanation can help reestablish some kind of sense to the world. But when news breaks, facts and motives aren’t at all clear, which is when conspiracy theories emerge as a means of filling that gap, providing a narrative that explains everything that’s happened and what it means. It’s why we turn to them again and again, and why they’re not likely to go away anytime soon.
For all the certainty these theories have offered regarding the potential impact of Saturday’s act – that it’s clinched Trump’s election, or that it’s proof that the deep state will stop at nothing to bring him down – it’s far too soon to say for sure. Presidential assassinations have certainly had large impacts on American history: had Lincoln lived past 1865, for example, his successor Andrew Johnson wouldn’t have been in a position to kill Reconstruction. But the effects of assassination attempts are harder to measure. The failed assassination of George Wallace didn’t get him any nearer to the presidency in 1972, and the two assassination attempts of President Gerald Ford didn’t save his re-election campaign in 1976.
Actual, verified information takes time; law enforcement has said they still know relatively little about the shooter or his motives. In the coming days, some aspects of this story are going to come into crystal-clear focus. Some may, as with the Kennedy assassinations, remain forever murky. Given all we know about the history of the United States’s covert operations, it’s impossible right now to rule out any possibility of some kind of conspiracy. But what remains true is that any such revelations, should they ever come, won’t come from random social media accounts, and they won’t come from Alex Jones.
Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, and Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy
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