What disaster science tells us about the Trump assassination attempt
It took only minutes for conspiracy theories to start flooding social media when news broke on July 13 that a sniper had almost assassinated former president Donald Trump. Some conservatives asked whether U.S. Secret Service agents assigned to the Butler, Pennsylvania, campaign rally were actually plotting Trump’s demise. Left-leaning partisans suspected the shooting was somehow faked to garner sympathy for the candidate. According to the media monitoring site NewsGuard, appearances of the words “inside job” and “staged” surged more than 3,000 percent on the X platform immediately after the shooting.
