Facts compete with conspiracy theories after WHCD attack

By Donie O’Sullivan, CNN

(CNN) — No sooner had a gunman tried to storm the ballroom of the Washington Hilton, where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was taking place Saturday night, than social media was awash with conspiracy theories about what was still unfolding in real time.

From the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore in 2024 to the LA fires last year, just about every major national breaking news story in the United States today becomes instant fodder for online conspiracy theorists who are often seeking to blame events on their perceived political opponents.

Some of the best-known journalists in the country were gathered in the Hilton ballroom on Saturday night and immediately got to work establishing the facts of what had happened.

But immediately — before anything was known about the suspect and his motives — the word “staged” started to emerge as a trend across social media platforms.

A clip of an innocuous comment White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt made to Fox News as she walked into the event quickly began circulating online.

Speeches delivered by presidents at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner have traditionally been humorous, with the commander in chief normally making jokes at the expense of the media and himself.

Saturday was due to be Trump’s first time addressing the dinner as president, and when asked by Fox News what the audience should expect, Leavitt said, “It’ll be funny, it’ll be entertaining. There will be some shots fired tonight in the room. So everyone should tune in, it’s going to be really great. I am looking forward to hearing it.”

Leavitt’s “shots fired” remark, clearly a reference to jokes and jabs in Trump’s planned speech, suddenly and absurdly prompted suspicion. One version of the clip on X was posted less than 45 minutes after the shots were fired and has been viewed more than 6 million times — with many people sharing it as though it were evidence of something.

In a press conference held late Saturday night, Trump said the attack showed the need for a secure ballroom. Trump is controversially building a ballroom on the White House complex. Some social media users began baselessly to suggest the attack had been staged for this reason.

A second Fox News clip also became the subject of viral speculation.

Like many TV news reporters on Saturday, Aishah Hasnie, one of the network’s White House correspondents, reported live by telephone from the ballroom, sharing her firsthand experience of what had taken place.

Her phone line cut out halfway through her account of how earlier in the night press secretary Leavitt’s husband, who Hasnie was seated next to at the dinner, was talking about the importance of her taking safety precautions given her high-profile cable news job.

Some people began to speculate that Fox News had deliberately cut the phone call short.

“I don’t want to be fomenting conspiracies. But I mean … this was super weird. Super weird,” Angelo Carusone wrote while sharing the clip to his 32,000 followers on BlueSky. Carusone is the CEO of Media Matters, a left-leaning media watchdog that regularly calls out misinformation shared by Republicans.

Responding to the speculation, Hasnie later posted on X, “Our calls were dropping, because there is barely any service in that ballroom. To finish the story, he was telling me to be careful with my own safety because the world is crazy. Which is what my own father and other people have also said to me recently. He was expressing his concern for my safety. I was going to say – before I lost my signal – that it was unfortunate that only a short time later, this all happened.”

At the White House press briefing on Monday, Hasnie asked Leavitt about conspiracy theories circulating online. “It’s very important to us that we get the truth and the facts about this case and any case out there as quickly as possible to dispel some of that crazy nonsense that you do see running rampant online,” Leavitt said.

Saturday’s attack came amid a recent surge in prominent former supporters questioning the official story of the circumstances around the attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024.

The Justice Department, under both President Joe Biden and Trump, found the same thing: that would-be assassin Thomas Crooks acted alone.

But Tucker Carlson and former Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene both said the the government needs to release more information about Crooks and suggested something is being covered up.

Writings of Cole Allen, the suspect in Saturday’s attack, where he expressed anti-Trump sentiments had been made public by Sunday morning.

Responding on X, Greene wrote, “I want to know why the Trump admin released Cole Allen’s manifesto immediately but they still keep a tight lid on Thomas Crooks.”

Despite her assertion, there’s no evidence the FBI has kept secret key information around Crooks, who killed one rally-goer when he fired at Trump. Afterward, a Secret Service sniper located and killed Crooks seconds after he started firing at Trump.

The FBI has long fought conspiracy theories around the Crooks shooting, including false claims that there was a foreign nexus.

Before the shooting, Crooks, according to the FBI, had searched online for the date of the Democratic National Convention and where Trump planned to speak, as well as other searches for Trump and President Joe Biden.

Former cable news host Keith Olbermann, a prolific anti-Trump voice on social media, posted to his almost one million followers on X late Sunday night, “I’m not saying it was STAGED… YOU’RE saying it was staged! You have DOUBTS? Just because Trump has lied to you every day about every thing for a decade? Just because his people are filth? Shame, cynic!”

In a separate post commenting on the lack of trust across American society writ-large, Cenk Uygur, host of the left-wing YouTube show “The Young Turks,” wrote, “It’s a sign of the times that as soon as you heard there was a shooting at WHCD, you heard speculation it might be staged. Why? Because we’ve lost all faith in our government. We know they lie to cover up the crimes of the powerful, we don’t trust anything anymore. Rightly so.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.