One way to resist the temptations of conspiracy theory is to hold on to the fact that accidents happen. Not everything is the result of a cunning plan. To some, the attempt to assassinate Donald Trump proved the opposite: it simply seemed too convenient that it should happen when President Joe Biden was trying to resist pressure to quit. Others refused to believe it was a coincidence that the attack allowed Donald Trump to turn his belligerence into an icon of defiance. Each theory undermines the other, of course – it’s unlikely it was a plot by both Biden and Trump. But one of the most striking things about the attack is that it has put mainstream Democrats in an invidious position, yet instantly bolstered hard-line voices on left and right, and conspiracists across the board.
In the days after the shooting, one of the themes trending on UK Twitter/X was the word “staged”. An enterprising theorist with 35,000 followers listed 14 reasons why this described what had happened. These ranged from the Secret Service supposedly parting for the “photo op” to Trump’s blood – which apparently coagulated too rapidly – to his links to the world of wrestling, with its yen for fake mayhem. On Talk TV, a security expert observed that the security lapse looked “a little bit fishy”, and speculated about “collusion”, before stressing he was not a conspiracy theorist.
Back online, there was much talk of “false flags” and “inside jobs”. The far-right conspiracist Alex Jones warned that “we are in the middle of a deep state hot coup”. The BBC reported a QAnon-related account suggesting that the “order” to kill Trump “likely came from the CIA”, with the backing of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Mike Pence. This, apparently, was because Trump had taken on the “elite satanic paedophiles” – the staple demons of the QAnon world-view. The post was seen 4.7 million times.
All these theories have an idea in common: the notion that there is, somewhere in America, a core of malignant, omnipotent power, with the capacity to control events and stage or fake reality. But why has this idea proved quite so attractive, both historically and since Saturday 13 July? One reason is the desire for a clear explanation: a sense that someone, however evil, is in charge. Another lies in the vexed, febrile polarisation of US politics, with each side all too ready to detect the worst motives in the other. But it’s also because the specifics of the attack immediately triggered associations with the assassination of President John F Kennedy in November 1963: talk of lines of fire, speculation about Secret Service collusion, and an insistence that it could not have been the work of a lone gunman, contrary to official conclusions.
For decades, Kennedy conspiracy theorists have insisted that the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president alone is a comforting myth. It was, they insisted, a ruse to distract people from the dark truth about the omnipotent power that lurks in the military-industrial complex – or, today, the deep state. But what if it’s the other way around? The immense energy that has been put into trying to show Kennedy’s killing was a conspiracy rather than the work of a lone assassin suggests that it is the latter idea that is truly unbearable. If your deep story of power is predicated on a version of American exceptionalism – on the idea that the American state, however malign, is all-powerful – why would the idea that one lone loser could do that much harm be a comfort?
Perhaps today, more people would be able to resist the kind of conspiracism stirred up by Saturday’s shooting if America had dispelled the often ludicrous theories about what happened in Dallas and looked Lee Harvey Oswald full in the face. This might also have helped to deflate the notion of an all-powerful deep state which is now proving so harmful to trust in democracy. At the same time, it would have meant confronting the implications of allowing unhappy, rejected young American men ever-easier access to guns.
Instead, the potency of the Kennedy conspiracy myth has thrived – and has been embraced by the radical right. Some in the QAnon movement have convinced themselves that Kennedy’s son JFK Jr, who died in a plane crash in 1999, is alive and will return to lead them and save America. The political strategist Roger Stone has argued that Kennedy was killed by his vice-president and successor Lyndon Johnson. In the wake of the attempt to kill Trump, Sean Davis of the conservative website the Federalist tweeted, “They did it to Kennedy, and his brother, and they just tried to do it to Trump” – and asserted that “the Biden regime knew about this and either allowed it to happen… or made it happen”. Trump himself once alleged, meanwhile, that the father of his Republican rival Ted Cruz had conspired with Oswald.
It is too early to say how the shooting might intersect with Trump’s conspiracist thinking if he wins again in November. That may depend in part on what emerges about the shooter and his motives. We do know that Trump and those around him have sketched out a range of moves to concentrate power in the White House to the point of authoritarianism, from mass deportations of undocumented migrants to the politicisation of the Department of Justice and broadcast regulator the Federal Communications Commission, and to the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” – its plan for a purge of the civil service. It is possible that a narrative emerges about the shooter which provides a pretext to intensify some of this, perhaps allowing for the demonisation of a given group of Americans.
As things stand, the early political exploitation of the attack has been used to try to achieve something much subtler. In recent weeks, there has been a marked increase in attention on the worrying implications for democracy of plans such as Project 2025. Immediately after the shooting, Senator JD Vance – also now Trump’s vice-presidential running mate – tweeted: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” (This despite it emerging that Vance himself had worried to a friend in 2016 that Trump might turn out to be “America’s Hitler”.) Other senior Republicans quickly expressed a similar view. By pinning the attack on the left, they apparently hope to create a sort of wilderness of mirrors, where accusations that Trump is an autocrat-in-waiting are cancelled out by similarly severe counter-accusations.
If, however, it should emerge that the shooter, however mentally stable or unstable, had affiliations to the American right, the effect might be very different. In the aftermath of the assassination in Dallas, many on the left and in the liberal centre assumed that the blame must lie among the many far-right groups that had sprung up in the city. On the day of Kennedy’s visit, flyers could be seen across the city declaring the liberal president “WANTED FOR TREASON”. When it emerged that the likely killer was a young leftist, it seemed unthinkable – and all too convenient. Should the right be faced with a parallel paradox, it could trap at least some of its more imaginative members in a less strategically helpful wilderness of mirrors.
Either way, there is a rather obvious difference between the attack in Texas and the one in Pennsylvania: Trump survived. It is a telling sign of how much more intense American conspiracy culture has become that the attack has provoked the kind of response once reserved for successful assassinations. The failed attempts to kill Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan have not produced any lasting conspiracy theory. John Hinckley may have been inspired to shoot Ronald Reagan by the movie Taxi Driver, but there are no big movies in the style of Oliver Stone’s JFK about how he was really a patsy for a liberal conspiracy. Today, by contrast, it seems entirely possible that the memes that began to pullulate after the news broke will make more of an impression.
The primary cultural impact of the attempt on Trump’s life and its failure, however, is that instantly iconic image of him raising his fist, literally bloodied but unbowed, framed by black-clad agents, with the Stars and Stripes flapping symbolically behind him – and the footage, in which he is visibly shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, was quick to conflate this with Trump’s legal troubles, tweeting: “They try to jail him. They try to kill him. It will not work. He is indomitable.”
A Republican strategist, John Thomas, told Sky News that in that moment Trump “became America”. And as the Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has charted, there is a deep well of shame and embattledness stirring in the hearts of many Americans, for whom that image of defiance clearly resonates deeply. That much was obvious in the cheering and chanting of “USA! USA!” that Trump’s response triggered at the rally.
But once again, it is striking what gesture Trump instinctively chose. A raised fist was once associated far more strongly with the 1960s left – the young radicals who, partly because of the shock of the Kennedy assassination, broke from the bipartisan pieties of the 1950s and pursued a much more radical, aggressive, righteous form of politics. Like the post-Kennedy conspiracy theories about malign power, that rebel symbol has now been co-opted by the champion of the radical right.
Led by President Biden, the Democrats’ response has been to repudiate the claims that the assassination attempt was a conspiracy – perhaps one Biden had instigated – and to avow that political attacks like this are un-American. In his short televised address, the president insisted that “there’s no place in America for this kind of violence”. Such affirmations are vital in an already edgy political environment.
But the notion that violence is un-American doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It is a country founded in a violent revolution that remains vivid in its psychological landscape to this day. From the persecution of the Native Americans to the Civil War, from the racist massacres inflicted on black communities to the violent resistance to civil rights, from the shootings at Kent State University to the bombings by the far-left Weather Underground, from the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 to the spate of far-right mass-murders in the 2010s, America has been shaped by political violence. And that’s before we even come to the assassination and attempted assassination of politicians. Trump himself has previously appeared to encourage supporters of the Second Amendment to attack Hillary Clinton, and joked about the near-fatal hammer attack on the husband of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
So, sadly, assertions that violence is un-American only serve to draw attention to the yawning void between the country’s ideals and its realities. To combat that gap between conspiracy theory and truth, it might also be necessary to look those delusions and conceits full in the face.
This appears in the 19-25 July 2024 issue of the New Statesman magazine
[See also: The new face of the Republican Party]
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This article appears in the 17 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The American Berserk