Conspiracy culture: Why Americans are primed to pick up Trump shooting theories

Within hours of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, conspiracy theories began circulating, online and off .

“If you want my true opinion on it, I feel like it was all just antics. It was staged if you ask me,” Michael Bircher, 46, of Dearborn Heights, told the Free Press. “That's how I feel about it.”

Bircher is not alone. When the Free Press asked people on Belle Isle on Sunday for their reaction to the shooting, more than half of them said they didn’t believe or questioned the official version of what happened.

Researchers say that conspiracy-type thinking is common and polling shows most people believe at least one theory that runs counter to the official story of a historical event. It’s not new.

“People have pointed out that America was started with conspiracy theory,” said Brian Keeley, a philosophy professor at Pitzer College in California, who studies the subject. “If you read the Declaration of Independence, everybody remembers the beginning ... about all men being created equal and that sort of stuff, but the last 80% is a whole bunch of grievances against King George and many of them were conspiratorial.”

More: Conspiracy theories about Trump assassination attempt are a sign of the social media times

Reginald Williams, 31, of Detroit, was setting up to fish on Belle Isle with his family as he reflected on the Trump rally. He was among those who believed it was a political setup. He tied it to getting Black individuals to vote and attributed that to the candidate he still plans to vote for — former President Donald Trump.

He prefers Trump’s approach to immigration and what bathrooms transgender individuals are allowed in, as a father of multiple girls, he said. He’d seen memes on Facebook and then checked Twitter to learn the news, he said, noting it was "wild."

Adam Enders, an associate professor of political science at the University of Louisville, said he wasn’t surprised to see the theories spring up in such a polarized environment as this election cycle.

“One of the strongest correlates or causes of conspiracy theories is motivated reasoning,” he said. “People believe things that help bolster or protect preexisting world views and beliefs, even if they don't make a lot of sense to other people.”

Enders, a Michigan native, said both sides of the political aisle do it.

“We see that people who are critics of Trump, people who are Democrats, say, 'oh, this is staged. This is so that Trump can look like a tough guy,' ” he said. “And then you have Republicans and supporters of Trump on the other side saying, 'well, you know, this is actually the Secret Service not doing the job of protecting Trump. They actually want to get rid of him from the inside,' which plays into the long-standing deep state narratives.”

U.S. Rep. Corey Mills, R-Florida, alluded to that line of thinking in an interview with Fox News. Mills, a former Army sniper, blasted the work of the Secret Service team with Trump on Saturday.

“Bottom line is that this is massive negligence, to the point of me speculating on what was intentional and what wasn’t,” he said.

Law enforcement at the scene said that a gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, fired several shots from a rooftop position, grazing Trump's ear and hitting three other people at the rally, one of whom died. A police sniper then returned fire, killing Crooks. The investigation is ongoing.

Identifying conspiracy theorists and those likely to act violently because of them is not easy, Enders said. There is some correlation between higher educational attainment and being less likely to believe in conspiracy theories, but it’s a small correlation.

“It’s less robust than you would think,” he said. “It's not like, 'oh, I went to college and so therefore, I don't believe in conspiracy theories.' There's no shortage of highly educated Democrats that will believe some kind of conspiracy theory about the Trump assassination attempt and likewise for Republicans.”

Keeley said there are some group differences in the willingness to believe conspiracy theories, with people lower on the socioeconomic ladder more likely to think that way.

"People of color generally believe in conspiracy theories at a higher rate, but then again, people of color have been the victims of legitimate conspiracies at higher rates than the dominant culture," he said.

Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, the death of Princess Diana, 9/11, COVID-19, and even events like the Maui fires have all prompted conspiracies. Enders said that at one point, about 80% of the American public doubted the Warren Commission's conclusion on the John F. Kennedy assassination, that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Keeley said there’s not a lot of good evidence to measure the level of conspiracy-type thinking in the public over time, but there is some.

“What evidence we have suggests that we actually aren't at peak conspiracy theory now,” he said. “The little work that's been done, it suggests that actually it was the Red Scare during the 1950s when people were convinced that there were communists all over the place and what led to the McCarthy trials.”

One difference, Keeley said, was that back then, conspiracy theories were mostly propagated by fringe groups like the John Birch Society. Today, you have presidential candidates voicing them and media coverage amplifying them.

Stronger critical thinking can help diminish the influence of such things, but they are likely here to stay, sometimes with reason, Keeley said.

“Yes, there is a psychology about it, but I think the biggest cause is just that conspiracies do happen,” he said. “I mean, when Caesar was killed, Caesar was killed as a result of a conspiracy.”

Contact John Wisely: jwisely@freepress.com or on X @jwisely

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Conspiracy culture: Why Americans are primed to pick up Trump shooting theories