Wild Mother - the online alias of a woman called Desirée - lives in the mountains of Colorado, where she posts videos to 80,000 followers about holistic wellness and bringing up her little girl. She wants Donald Trump to win the presidential election.
About 70 miles north in the suburbs of Denver is Camille, a passionate supporter of racial and gender equality who lives with a gaggle of rescue dogs and has voted Democrat for the past 15 years.
The two women are poles apart politically - but they both believe assassination attempts against Mr Trump were staged.
Their views on the shooting in July and the apparent foiled plot earlier this month were shaped by different social media posts pushed to their feeds, they both say.
I travelled to Colorado - which became a hotbed of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen - for the BBC Radio 4 podcast Why Do You Hate Me? USA. I wanted to understand why these evidence-free staged assassination theories seemed to have spread so far across the political spectrum and the consequences for people like Camille and Wild Mother.
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That’s operating under the assumption that Trump was actually shot and it wasn’t just a blood pack. His ear looked perfectly normal a few days later.
Plus there’s the fact that he was spotted by security with his rifle like 20 minutes before he started shooting.
Spotted earlier with a rangefinder, not a rifle. You also wouldn’t need a big chunk of your ear missing or something to make a little bit of blood splatter. A graze could do it, and could easily be covered up a day later by some makeup or his usual orange bodypaint.
The evidence just isn’t very convincing.
Ultimately that’s the problem, the evidence isn’t very compelling either way. Could it have happened exactly the way Trump claimed? Yes, it’s certainly possible, and Trump also isn’t likely to sign off on someone actually taking a shot at him. On the other hand that gaping hole on the secret service security perimeter is very suspicious, and Trump is exactly the kind of person to fake an assassination plot to drum up support. Lastly the bleeding ear (which Trump hammed up considerably in the following days) could be explained either by a very small graze or a blood pack.
It’s just a very weird situation with lots of upsides for Trump but one possibly very bad downside if things go wrong. Trump is a natural born grifter so it’s very easy and tempting to assume anything shady and beneficial to him that he could have had a hand in, he did.
While yes, it is theoretically possible some blood pack was the culprit, I’d think that’d have shown up in some photos by now. He was surrounded by people recording him after all.
I also don’t find the security hole to be very suspicious. I think overall people give the Secret Service far more credit than they deserve. It’s not some foolproof organization with unlimited resources and no history of big fuckups. It’s a moderately staffed organization with a whole bunch of different duties that stretch their resources, and that is prone to occasional failures and people not taking the job sufficiently seriously. I recall a bunch of them getting drunk and hiring prostitutes while overseas a number of years ago?
Really I don’t find it that weird at all, the simplest explanation seems to fit all the evidence perfectly well. People just don’t like boring answers when there are exciting alternatives.
Ok but this feels like ascribing a level of competence to trump and his team that feels unrealistic. Without evidence in favor of it I’m hesitant to consider conspiracy especially considering where conspiratorial thinking has led a lot of people
I don’t subscribe to the fake attempt for the first one but Trump did appear on the WWE (was it still WWF then?) and he did have Hulk.Hogan at the convention. If anyone knows how to use fake blood or how to cause a scratch that bleeds profusely for the crowd, it’s those guys.