The horror of the Pennsylvania shooting could not have been more visible. Within seconds of the attack on the Trump rally, anyone around the world could watch the footage – the former president going in seconds from his usual demagoguery to touching his head, before being bustled to the ground by his protection officers.
The reaction of the crowd was just as visible: some screamed and scattered, while others took out their phones to film. Within minutes, there were interviews from witnesses: the man who had seen the shooter crawl along a roof, the doctor who said he tried to help a rallygoer who had been shot in the head.
For those who would look at such grisly things, the footage of blood soaking the bleachers was there, as was the body of the attacker. The photographs of a bloodstained former president Donald Trump will be remembered for decades. When tragedies happen anywhere near a presidential candidate, they happen in full view of the world.
This should be as clear and indisputable as any news story can ever be: usually we cannot see the reality of an attack with our own eyes. And yet, such is the paranoia and the polarisation of American society that within minutes of the attack, two parallel conspiracy narratives were already off and running on social media, garnering nearly as much online attention as coverage of the actual events.
Donald Trump has openly embraced the conspiratorial far-right in his third serious run for president: he walks on stage to an anthem used by the QAnon movement (which falsely claims Trump is battling a paedophilic “deep state” led by Hillary Clinton and other Democrats) and has fuelled violent conspiracies that the 2020 election was “stolen”.
It is unsurprising, then, that many of Trump’s fervent online supporters immediately and baselessly blamed the “deep state” and those supposedly behind it – Biden, Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates and more – for the attack on Trump.
There was no attempt to wait for even basic evidence, the identity of the shooter, or any kind of corroboration. Never mind that American history is riddled with the assassinations and attempted assassinations of presidents and presidential candidates. This group had the answer they wanted already.
But this was hardly the only conspiratorial narrative to jump up. Just as rapidly, sworn opponents of Trump arrived at their own false theory – the attack was surely a “false flag” designed to boost Donald Trump’s popularity. The powerful images of Trump and his bloodstained face, the American flag behind him as he raised his fist, added to this narrative.
False flag conspiracies are perhaps the most harmful of all to families of those who are victims of gun violence: claims from the far-right figure Alex Jones over the Sandy Hook school shooting further destroyed the lives of parents grieving their dead children.
The attack on Trump has claimed the life of at least one person in his audience, and baselessly claiming the attack is not real can only add to what must already be the worst day of his loved ones’ lives. Of course the pictures are good: the rallies of presidential candidates are attended by some of the world’s best press photographers. Those sent by the Associated Press and the New York Times showed how brilliant they are at their jobs, including when they are literally under fire.
There were other, straightforwardly nihilistic, attempts to stir false narratives too. With grim inevitability after any prominent shooting in the US, online “pranksters” try to get the media to falsely name someone as the shooter. In this case, it was an Italian influencer that ended up trending on Twitter/X for this, even as (before he locked his account) he was tweeting that it was nothing to do with him – which was obviously true, given the shooter had been “neutralised” long before then.
The simple facts of what happened at the Trump rally on Saturday are so obvious and visible that they will not be denied for long. The deeper truths will take longer: what motivated the shooter, how did the Secret Service not prevent the attack, what will it mean?
Conspiracies will make finding the real answers all the harder, but they are a symptom of what ails America and not their cause. The problem is that there are two Americas: there is MAGAworld, and there is the opposition to it. They live in different news bubbles, they share different values, they agree on less every year. And now, they cannot even unite to condemn a shooting at a political rally.
When not even the most shocking manifestations of political violence can unite the two Americas, it speaks of nothing good. The USA experienced a deplorable act of political violence on Saturday. Until the two Americas become one, it risks such attacks becoming ever more commonplace.