Some of President Donald Trump’s most loyal MAGA supporters now believe the whole July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, was staged. According to new reporting by Wired, this faked shooting theory has cornered Trump in a way his political enemies never could. That is because it is coming directly from the very base that spent years defending his every move.
What makes this double take moment so remarkable is not just that loyalists believe he staged the thing. It is that they are now publicly demanding he admit it. For a president who has always leaned on MAGA as his most unshakeable political shield, that demand is a stunning reversal.
Conservative comedian and podcaster Tim Dillon, once a vocal and enthusiastic Trump supporter, raised his suspicions openly on his show last weekend. He suggested the Butler shooting was fabricated and called on Trump to come clean about it. Dillon joins a growing list of right-wing influencers who are now actively pushing back on Trump’s carefully constructed public image and personal narrative.
“Some people are going to be upset by this,” Dillon said, describing what he thinks Trump should confess to the American people. “But 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.” It is a remarkable quote from someone who was, not long ago, firmly in Trump’s corner.
The conspiracy gained real traction after former National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. Kent, who had recently resigned from the Trump administration over the Iran war, claimed without providing any evidence that investigations into the Butler shooting had been prematurely shut down. His appearance gave the theory a thin veneer of credibility that sent it racing through MAGA media circles.
Kent himself seemed to acknowledge exactly what his vague claims would trigger. “If you don’t want to address that question, then you just go silent and say you can’t ask that question,” he said on the show. “Which then creates people who come out of nowhere and they start drawing their own conclusions.” Experts say that dynamic, where silence fills in for facts, is one of the most basic engines of conspiracy theorizing.
Former Texas GOP national delegate Trisha Hope posted on X urging Trump supporters to stop dismissing serious questions about Butler. “If you cannot look at this story and use critical thinking skills and have at least some questions, you are the problem and we need you to snap out of it,” she wrote. Hope went further, pointing to Trump’s own silence on the matter as deeply suspicious.
Hope argued that since the attempt on his life, Trump has shown almost no real interest in finding out what actually happened. He never mentions it, she said, except when using it to remind supporters that he once “took a bullet” for them. That selective silence, she believes, is itself a red flag.
On Telegram, prominent QAnon promoter MJ Truth put the question directly to his 100,000 followers, asking how they felt about the official narrative surrounding the Butler assassination attempt. The overwhelming majority of replies agreed the incident had been staged, with one follower comparing it to the JFK assassination. “The truth will come out 60+ years from now when we’re all dead and nobody really cares anymore,” the follower wrote.
The conspiracy theories have also taken on darker and stranger dimensions beyond simple staging claims. Some right-wing influencers have begun speculating that Trump may actually be the antichrist, citing biblical prophecy from Revelation and Trump’s own repeated comparisons of himself to Jesus Christ. Ali Alexander, a central figure in the Stop the Steal movement, wrote on Telegram that if Trump did not receive a miracle at Butler, “it was deception or a dark sign,” pointing to Revelation 13:3 and its description of the antichrist being struck on the head.
Far-right commentator Candace Owens, who has publicly broken from Trump, went in a completely different direction on her podcast. She claimed, without any evidence, that Israeli-American Republican mega-donor Miriam Adelson was behind the assassination attempt because Trump had failed to follow through on a promise to support Israel annexing the occupied West Bank. These theories have also picked up ugly antisemitic undertones, with online communities weaving in unfounded claims about Israeli involvement in the original plot.
Wired was careful to note that immediately after the July 2024 shooting, left-wing social media accounts had pushed nearly identical staging theories. The critical difference now is who is doing the pushing. It is Trump’s own coalition, not his opposition, driving the narrative forward.
The Butler shooting was once one of Trump’s most powerful political symbols. The image of him raising a defiant fist with blood on his ear became an iconic visual of his entire 2024 presidential campaign. Now, the loyalists who cheered that image are using it as evidence against him, demanding a public confession for something that official investigations and eyewitness accounts confirm was a real and deadly attack. A bystander, Corey Comperatore, was killed. The shooter was taken down by Secret Service agents.
None of those verified facts have been enough to stop the theory from spreading inside Trump’s own base. When a political movement is built entirely on distrust of official institutions and mainstream narratives, it eventually turns that same distrust on its own leaders. That appears to be exactly what is happening now, and Trump, for the first time, finds himself cornered by the very machine he helped build.
