WIRED magazine has apparently decided that the best use of its editorial resources is publishing a piece so disconnected from reality that it practically begs you to question who approved it. The claim? A growing faction of MAGA supporters now believes Donald Trump staged the 2024 Butler, Pa., assassination attempt against him.
Oh, and that this supposed shift is proof the MAGA coalition is cracking at the seams.
According to WIRED, “As Trump’s hold over MAGA has waned, though, an increasing number of his supporters have begun to push the narrative that the entire incident was staged.”
Yeah. Okay. Sure.
Give me a break. We all know what happened in Butler. On July 13, 2024, a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally. Corey Comperatore, a Trump supporter seated near the president, was killed shielding his family from the bullets. The Secret Service took out the shooter.
WIRED conveniently buried the fact that the "staged shooting" narrative didn't originate anywhere near MAGA, only mentioning it in the final paragraph. I wonder how many people even bothered to read that far.
Remember, after the shooting, Democrats were furious — not because Trump was shot, but because he survived and the incident would probably help send him back to the White House. The staged-shooting conspiracy was their cope, not ours. In the immediate hours and days after the attack, it was the left-winger pushing the theory that the assassination attempt was staged to help his campaign.
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So how does WIRED get from there to blaming MAGA? That’s where Joe Kent, the former U.S. National Counterterrorism Center director who resigned from the Trump administration over the Iran war, comes in. He sat down with Tucker Carlson, and during that interview, Kent claimed — without a shred of evidence — that investigations into the Butler shooting had been shut down prematurely. A few other former Trump supporters piled on, and suddenly, a fringe idea rooted in leftist cope has been artificially transferred to the MAGA movement.
Of course, the piece then ties this alleged conspiracy surge directly to Trump's supposedly weakening grip on his base, pointing to growing criticism over Iran policy and other issues. Here's the thing about that framing — we've seen it before, endlessly.
It’s so exhausting. Every few months, some outlet publishes the same breathless article: MAGA is fracturing, supporters are turning on Trump, the coalition is splintering. The polls never back it up. But the articles keep coming because the narrative is too useful to abandon, facts be damned.
The desperation here is just sad. Democrats spent the months after the shooting furious that the shooting helped Trump politically. Unable to process that, some latched onto staged-shooting fantasies. Now, nearly two years later, a magazine is trying to launder those same fantasies back through MAGA itself — as if the movement spontaneously decided Trump faked his own assassination attempt. In the end, this feels like a long-winded attempt to give the left cover for believing this conspiracy theory in the first place.
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