Trump’s own supporters are now saying the assassination attempt was staged. They want him to admit it. This is MAGA eating itself alive.
Wired just published a piece that should stop every political observer in their tracks. The conspiracy theory that the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting was staged is no longer coming from the left. It’s coming from inside the house. Trump’s own base is turning the conspiracy machine he built against him.
Tim Dillon, one of the most popular conservative podcasters in the country and a vocal Trump supporter, told his audience last weekend: “I think that maybe it was staged.”
Then he went further, saying Trump should come out and publicly admit it, telling Americans: “We staged the assassination attempt in Butler to show people how important it was to vote for me and how far I was willing to go for them.”
A day later, conservative pundit Emerald Robinson posted on X that the FBI “did it.”
On Telegram, prominent QAnon promoter MJ Truth asked his 100,000 followers how they felt about the Butler shooting narrative.
The overwhelming majority, nearly all of them current Trump supporters, said they believed the incident was staged and that the truth would never come out. “The truth will come out 60+ years from now when we’re all dead and nobody really cares anymore,” one follower wrote. “Just like JFK.”
Tucker Carlson has been floating for months that the FBI lied about the shooter’s online activity as part of a cover-up. Former National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent went on Carlson’s show and claimed the investigation was “prematurely shut down.”
He provided no evidence. He didn’t need to. The audience was already there.
And it gets darker. Some of these same influencers are now openly calling Trump the antichrist. Not as a joke. As biblical prophecy. They cite the Iran war.
They cite his posts comparing himself to Jesus Christ. They cite the AI image he posted of himself as Christ healing a man, which he deleted and claimed was actually him “as a doctor.” The conspiratorial framework these people built to worship Trump is now being used to condemn him.
This is the machine working exactly as designed, just pointed in the wrong direction. For years, Trump fed his base a diet of deep-state plots, false flags, and hidden truths.
He told them not to trust institutions. Not to trust the media. Not to trust the government. Not to trust anyone but him. And now, as gas hits $6, as the war drags on, as allies abandon him and the Pope calls him out by name, the base is applying the same paranoid logic to Trump himself.
Corey Comperatore is dead. He was a retired fire chief who died shielding his family from real bullets fired by a real shooter. Two other people were critically injured. The FBI investigated it as an assassination attempt.
It happened in front of thousands of witnesses and dozens of cameras. None of that matters to a movement that was taught to reject evidence and embrace suspicion.
Trump built a base that doesn’t believe in reality. Now that base doesn’t believe in him either.