If Trump thought the White House Correspondents’ dinner shooting would help his polling, he was wrong.
This recent episode in the Trump shootings saga provoked either indifference or distrust of the official story. One in four Americans believe the shooting was fake, and one in three said they were unsure, according to a NewsGuard/YouGov survey. Only 38% of Americans believe that all three alleged assassination attempts on Trump were genuine.
Was it all a ploy to drum up support for the White House ballroom project? Absurd as that sounds, many believe so. It didn’t help Trump’s case that, less than two minutes into his post-shooting speech, still wearing his tux, he himself promoted the idea:
And I didn’t want to say this, but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House. It’s actually a larger room and it’s much more secure. It’s got, it’s drone proof. It’s bulletproof glass. We need the ballroom.
Dozens of MAGA “influencers” then posted in unison some variant of “THIS IS WHY WE NEED TRUMP’S BALLROOM.”
Meanwhile, the word “staged” exploded on social media, with 300,000 mentions on X alone. The top comment on a CNN Instagram reel of the shooting reads, “The whole thing seems incredibly staged, oscars worthy.” Another, with nearly 7,000 likes: “Not a single fucking person online thinks this was real. That’s where the US is as a country now.”
Before the dinner, referring to the president’s speech, White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt made an eerily accurate prediction: “There will be some shots fired tonight in the room.” Afterwards, she blamed the “left-wing cult of hatred” for the violence: “We should not live in a country where such constant fear of political violence permeates our society every single day.” Two weeks prior, Trump had threatened to annihilate all men, women, and children in Iran, saying a “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
It’s no surprise that people don’t trust the government. Trump and the media constantly lie, from the betrayed Epstein file promises, to the claims of a crushing victory in Iran.
It is a dangerous situation for a regime to lose its legitimacy on the brink of an economic catastrophe.