A conspiracy theory has run unabated in Democratic circles following the assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump on Saturday. It posits that Trump staged the shooting for a photo op, that the wound on his ear was caused by something other than an assassin's bullet, and that he was never in mortal danger.
It's a baseless conspiracy theory disproven by reams of documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts. And it's a belief held by one-third of the Democratic electorate.
One in three registered Democrats believe it is "credible" that the shooting Saturday in Butler, Pa., was staged and not intended to kill Trump, according to a Morning Consult poll released Monday. The findings show that large swaths of the Democratic base have fallen prey to the phenomenon known as "BlueAnon," a play on the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory that once gripped portions of the Republican base and served as an obsession of the mainstream media throughout the first Trump administration.
But the Morning Consult poll shows that BlueAnon adherents among the Democratic base far outnumber their QAnon counterparts on the right. The poll showed that 34 percent of Democratic voters found it either definitely or probably credible that Trump staged Saturday's shooting, with less than half—45 percent—saying the conspiracy theory is not credible. By comparison, a widely cited 2021 poll found that only 23 percent of Republicans were QAnon believers.
The rise of BlueAnon can be attributed to prominent Democratic activists and liberal media commentators egging on the notion that Trump staged Saturday's shooting.
Democratic powerbroker Dmitri Mehlhorn, an ally of President Joe Biden who has made at least 10 visits to his White House, wasted no time fanning the flames of conspiracy in the immediate aftermath of Saturday's assassination attempt. Mehlhorn on Saturday evening sent a memo to reporters imploring them to portray the shooting as a false-flag operation straight from Vladimir Putin's playbook, designed to give Trump a good photo opportunity.
"This is a classic Russian tactic, such as when Putin killed 300 civilians in 1999 and blamed it on terrorists to ride the backlash to winning power," Mehlhorn wrote.
Mehlhorn did not address the numerous photos that captured bullets whizzing just inches away from Trump's face and blood running from the clearly visible bullet wound across his right ear as Secret Service agents escorted the former president off the stage. Nor did he mention the death of firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was shot while shielding his family from the assassin's bullets.
Mehlhorn is hardly the only liberal activist pushing the conspiracy to liberal voters. Jeff Tiedrich, a liberal social media influencer with 1.1 million followers who attended an Oct. 2022 White House influencer summit to coordinate midterm election messaging with the Biden administration, on Monday posted a Substack screed "connecting some weird dots" surrounding the shooting.
"Did the extreme right want this to happen?" Tiedrich wrote, speculating the shooting could have been connected to a plot to replace Trump atop the GOP ticket with former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Tiedrich, who did not return a request for comment, on Thursday mocked the Washington Post for describing the shooting as "Trump's near-death experience" and said there was no hard evidence that a bullet grazed the former president's ear.
"What the fuck is going on under that bandage?" Tiedrich asked. "And why is the press so disinterested in finding out?"
Liberal MSNBC commentators have adopted a subtler approach to fanning the conspiratorial flames, suggesting in recent days that Trump could not have been shot in the ear by a high-caliber rifle bullet and that the former president is hiding something by not releasing detailed medical records about his wound.
"If he was shot by a high-caliber bullet, there should probably be very little ear there," MSNBC host Michael Steele told viewers on Tuesday.
Steele's fellow MSNBC host Joy Reid on Wednesday joined him in asking questions about Trump's injuries.
"I have many questions!" Reid wrote on Threads. "Like where are the medical reports? What caused Trump’s injury and what was the injury? Sheapnel? [sic] Glass? A bullet?"
Reid doubled down on her baseless conjecture Thursday morning, posting a video to TikTok in which she said that "we still don't know for sure whether Donald Trump was hit by a bullet," glass fragments, or something else. She then suggested something nefarious was behind the Secret Service's having "allowed" Trump to pump his fist as agents led him off the rally stage.
"We don't know why, for nine full seconds, Donald Trump was allowed to stand back up during an active shooting, an active shooter situation," Reid said. "Even though they at that point had said the shooter was down, how would they have known if there were more shooters or not?"
"Yet they allowed him to stand up in the middle of that, you know, crisis and pose for a photo and fist-pump the air so he could get the iconic photo?" Reid added.
MSNBC did not return a request for comment.
Straight news reporters have also joined in on the baseless speculation. Former CNN reporter John Harwood wrote Thursday morning that an AR-15 bullet could not have pierced Trump's ear without blowing the ear to smithereens.
"On the other hand it's easy to imagine a shard of shattered glass causing the bleeding Trump suffered," Harwood said before adding that he is "not familiar with ballistics at all."
Democratic conspiracy-mongering could distract from legitimate questions about the Secret Service's response to Saturday's shooting. Agency director Kimberly Cheatle is facing GOP calls to resign from her post following revelations that, 10 minutes before Trump took the stage, Secret Service agents spotted the gunman on the roof where he carried out the attack. Cheatle said Tuesday the roof was left unprotected because it was "sloped."
"And so there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so the decision was made to secure the building, from inside," Cheatle said.