"I’m seeing a bunch of posts insinuating" - I think we're well past insinuating. Straight out declaring would be more accurate now. The man has no credibility left. No one trusts him with the truth, their money or their daughters. If I was a betting man I'd say his foreign handlers are already lining up the next candidate for the world stage. You can also tell, by the way, that none of the big media channels are buying it either. All you need to do is compare their coverage now with at the coverage of the assassination attempts of previous presidents. When Reagan got shot the whole world stopped to look. It was literally everywhere. This, so called, "attempt" was a small front page story that will be gone in a couple of days. The mid terms are coming. I expect more and more panicked moves between now and November.

Because we’ve been trained by the republicans to prepare for a distraction when the current news is bad.

All of the republican news is really bad right now. They’ve flip-flopped on wars with various countries and the Epstein files a few times already. Even thrown out some UFO stuff. Nothing is working though because gas prices are high and there’s no easy and clean way out of the quagmire the GOP is currently in.

Trump's whole term in office has been difficult to follow. What's going on now? What's the truth and what isn't? Politicians lie, but trump is the best at misinformation.

The thing is that we don't know, but because of the environment his administration has created, you have to doubt everything he says and be skeptical of every event they're involved in.

The conspiratorial culture of the far right is infecting every aspect of his administration. At this point it doesn't really matter what's true and what's fabricated, so long as it can be spun into a media event to feed his ego.

I need to take a break from the Internet.

I don't know all the details, but something that struck me as odd was the fact that this was the first WHC dinner that Trump was going to, famously being too cowardly to go to the others for fear of being mocked. Why go to this one, when his approval rating is in the toilet?

Probs coz of the weird footage by some people. Guests sitting there still eating, others grabbing bottles, people smiling and chatting afterwards. People also are assuming that each attempt on his life was so bad that it felt staged (the way his ear looked after the first one, how incompetent the shooters were etc, theres lots of things flying around in comments). And then there's the lack of sympathy for Trump so most people would want any reason to keep hating him.

Whether this was staged or not is up for debate, but calling this guy a shooter is misinformation. Show me where this guy fired any shots. The officer that was shot in his bullet proof vest was hit by friendly fire, all shots fired were by law enforcement. If I'm wrong direct me to where there's creditable evidence that says otherwise.

Trump was seen as having an electoral boost after the Pennsylvania shooting.

Trump is in a deep hole with the electorate over the Epstein files, the economy, the Iran war, and support of the genocidal Israeli regime

Trump has used very blatant & underhanded tactics in the past, from the 2020 electoral certification Coup attempt, and the recent doordash PR stunt.

There will always be some amount of people who will not accept things at face value, but with Trump, experience has shown that waiting for evidence before believing what the administration is saying is a wise move.

TL;DR: a lot of sketchy crap happens in this administration and people think anything that might turn out well for Trump's voter polls is manufactured

It's a lack of trust in institutions on full display. Rather it was faked or not doesn't matter, no one would put it past the antics of this administration and no one trusts the narrative or the investigators. It doesn't matter who comes out or what they say. Once the trust is broken we're cooked and every event will turn into conspiracy time.

Mainly because he's using it as an excuse to imply he needs his stupid ballroom because of national security.

• It came on the heels of a court case that said Trump could only build his ballroom if there was a legitimate security concern (and all the right wing media had posts ready for ballroom support)
• He (Trump) had never attended before now
• The response from the SS seemed... lacklustre at best.
• Karoline Leavitt said that everyone should watch because there would be shots fired.
• He (the shooter) was entirely ineffectual.
• Right wing women are so botox'ed that no one could see them being upset; right wing men were standing behind their wives.

Personally... fake is not exactly the answer, but it's oh so convenient, and given that people were sending in tips about him before this, I suspect that if they hadn't wanted this to happen, they'd have done security normally and he'd have been removed from the premises before he shot. But maybe I'm just underestimating how bad the US government's security has become since they fired so many people.

Because the fact of the matter is, his PA 'attempt' stinks to high heaven. USSS broke numerous protocols with that incident, and you literally see people coordinating and 'directing' his fight fight fight shot.

Once is happenstance,. twice is a coincidence, and three is a pattern.

He's had three of these incidents if you include the bushes in Mar A Lago dude. And what happened here? Did we have congressional reports detailing these events, the places they took place, suspect motivations, and the data broken down for everyone to see what went wrong?

No. We didn't have anything of the sort.

We will not for this one either. Because this likely is more theatrics from a historically unpopular administration.

I trust Trump to do whatever makes him have more wealth and power and its easy to see how he would use this to claw at both.

There are a few videos out there that break down the... let's say questionable or highly suspicious series of coincidences that trail behind the shooting, as well as the kneejerk reaction from the right in response that raises some eyebrows, so I would say just go watch those. People are really latching onto flimsy evidence for this one. I haven't seen anything really convincing yet that would suggest that the government orchestrated a false flag attack, and I feel like this administration is too incompetent to be able to handle a covert operation of that nature without fumbling it badly.

I like to lean on the side of Occam's Razor and say that it's pretty likely that in a country with hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of millions of guns and a very publicly hated president, it's not that surprising that a few of those people have tried to kill him and got close enough to try. As far as security goes, yes it was a much lower security detail but the shooter was also apprehended at basically the first possible security checkpoint and Trump and the dinner guests were never in any danger. The security worked exactly as it should have.

Isn’t it weird that it leaked that this correspondents dinner was going to be all about revenge and then this happens?

Honestly, I could see someone showing up and trying to assassinate Trump for being a pedophile, but I could also see this admin faking something like this. Though, I suspect this was faked we’ll see the leaked signal chats sometime soon.

I think it's just because the PA event was so obviously faked, his handlers have proven they are willing to use a fake attempt to gain favor and he seems to be very unfavorable right now.

Just another episode of trump whatever show. Who cares. I stopped watching that series months ago. It just got too stupid

real one would have succeeded

The response was too canned and uniform. There's no fact finding, no actual concern for what happened here its all just rhetoric aimed at curtailng free speech. Add in the FBI director weighing in way too early and it all points to a setup.

There's a real possibility the guy that did the shooting is the target of an FBI entrapment scheme or something similar.

I don’t think it was fake.

I think they knew it (or something dramatic) was going to happen with plenty of warning and deliberately allowed it to play out for dramatic effect. That was unenthusiastic and unhurried securing of the leadership.

The quote I saw elsewhere that summed it up best for me is, "even if it's real, it's still fake".

The whole thing was just a bit too rubbish, like, if you were going to try shooting the President, the events as report seem like such an obviously useless way to go about it that there's got to be something else going on.

My favourite conspiracy theory is that it's their way of getting an already-sympathetic White House press corps to feel like they're part of the whole thing, that attacks on the President are also attacks on them personally - trying to create a feeling that they and Trump are all trauma survivors who are in it together.

My reason is that he read from a prepared statement shortly after the incident and that he used this as his reason to promote the unwanted ballroom that he seems so desperately to want. I could be wrong but, based on his moral character, I think it's a big fake.