By Ben R. Williams
At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, April 25, shots rang out. The Secret Service evacuated President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump and other cabinet members, and the shooter only succeeded in shooting a law enforcement officer in his bullet-proof vest before being incapacitated. The officer who was shot is expected to make a full recovery and the shooter suffered a knee injury. All told, it certainly could have gone a whole lot worse.
Immediately after the incident, I began to read theories that the shooting was staged.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and while there are some odd coincidences, I’m not sure any of this evidence rises to the level of extraordinary.
For one thing, people said it was suspicious that this should happen at the first White House Correspondents’ Dinner that Trump has attended as President. Also, minutes before the shooting, Karoline Leavitt said there would be “shots fired” when Trump spoke (which I feel certain was used in the colloquial sense because outside of The Riddler, people don’t usually pepper their speech with secret clues that reveal their crimes).
Furthermore, people pointed out that when the shots were fired, Melania Trump looked shocked while Donald Trump didn’t even react. Applying Occam’s Razor here, I think it’s unlikely he was in on the shooting and much more likely that his faculties and awareness have become somewhat diminished lately, in the same sense that the Pacific Ocean is somewhat damp.
People are also arguing that since Trump got a major boost after his attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024, he might want another popularity surge given that the war in Iran is dragging his approval rating into the basement. That seems like a poor way to go about it considering it has the side effect of making the Secret Service and the FBI look woefully incompetent.
I think we should all be wary about saying any act of violence is staged. Look at Infowars founder and human lung polyp Alex Jones, who devoted hours of air time to claiming that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a “false flag” event and no children were actually killed. Jones’ actions have caused unimaginable suffering for the affected families. Thankfully, his lies and the resulting lawsuits have bankrupted him, but I’m sure it’s cold comfort.
Dabbling in conspiracy theories regarding staged shootings is an extremely slippery slope.
Having said that, I get it.
I hope you’re sitting down because I have some shocking news to reveal: Donald Trump tends to lie. He lies about anything and everything. Washington Post fact checkers documented 30,573 false or misleading claims just during his first Presidential term, an average of 21 lies per day. I’d love to tell you how many times he’s lied so far in his second term, but Jeff Bezos destroyed the Washington Post.
What are some recent lies? Well, he’s claimed multiple times that we’ve won the war in Iran, which is objectively untrue. He’s claimed that prices of groceries and gasoline are down, which is demonstrably untrue. He’s claimed that drug prices will go down by anywhere from 500% to 1,500%, which is not how math works and would require pharmaceutical companies to pay people to take their drugs. He’s claimed that the Epstein files are fake despite being photographed with Jeffrey Epstein more times than I’ve been photographed period.
And, most recently, he claimed that the guy who fired shots at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was “anti-Christian” when the shooter’s manifesto actually used Biblical passages to justify his actions.
Not only does Trump lie, but his cabinet lies on his behalf. Vice President JD “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check” Vance even admitted to lying awhile back when pressed about his claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating people’s pets, claiming that he was willing to “create stories” to make sure the media remained focused on his constituents.
When you have an administration that lies as effortlessly as breathing, it shouldn’t be a surprise when people second-guess everything you say in an attempt to find the angle. The only compelling piece of evidence that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting was staged is the Trump administration’s insistence that it wasn’t.
