MILWAUKEE (NewsNation) — Within minutes of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally Saturday, social media theories surfaced saying the attack was not what it appeared.
The term “staged” began trending on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Online conspiracy theorists suggested the shooting was a ploy on the part of the Trump campaign to garner more support heading into this week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Law enforcement, including the U.S. Secret Service, FBI and police in Pennsylvania, stated it was an attempted assassination attempt on the former president over the weekend, the first of its kind since an attack on Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Jennifer Coffindaffer, a retired FBI agent, told NewsNation on Monday that the FBI immediately takes an all-hands-on-deck approach to this type of investigation.
With dozens of officers and agents assigned to the investigation, a matter of a few hours of work can generate substantial leads.
“You’re going to be able to understand what you have on your hands quite quickly,” she said.
Tips become critical to an investigation of this scope, especially those collected from those who witnessed the shooting firsthand.
Within the scope of a federal investigation, Coffindaffer said that agents, clerks, and analysts working at a command center must decipher what is legitimate and what is not.
Teams are sent out to investigate tips, but very quickly, information is broken down into what should be further investigated and what shouldn’t. On Monday, an email seeking comment from the Secret Service about its investigation and on how hoax conspiracies are handled was not immediately returned.
But with the attempt on Trump’s life being the first to take place in the social media era, Coffindaffer said various platforms on which information — both legitimate and false — is shared have become a double-edged sword.
“We’re looking at all new times,” she said. “We have social media — all these different venues … and all these different forms where you have true crime individuals and people who are just very politically engaged in this country.
“This is really a recipe for, in this case, unfortunately, a very volatile circumstance, and so I think we’re seeing things take shape in social media (where people) are looking for conspiracies.”
On Monday in Milwaukee, voters attending the March on the RNC were still coming to grips with Saturday’s shooting of a former president.
Milwaukee resident Jordan Mielke called the attempt on Trump’s life “disappointing but not surprising.”
While he said dangerous rhetoric coming from the Right has fueled an emotionally charged election cycle, Mielke said what he saw was a “Republican who tried to kill the Republican nominee.”
The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, donated to a left-leaning political organization the day Biden was sworn into office but later registered as a Republican.
Mielke said he doesn’t think there are many good options in November’s election but quickly dismissed the idea of the shooting being a hoax.
“Someone got shot,” he said. “I’m all for conspiracy theories, but that just seems a little too far. Let’s talk about the UAP issue or something like that. Let’s talk about the Kennedy assassination. But I don’t think it was some Republican hoax … or that Trump did it for approvals. … I don’t know it’s kind of crazy.”
Stan Sinberg, a New York resident who pulled a wagon he called The Roving Anti-Trump Bandwagon, filled with pins and other souvenirs during Monday’s parade, called such theories “stupid.” Despite his political views, which were in clear sight based on the merchandise he was hawking from his wagon, Sinberg said that the attempt on Trump’s life was indeed real.
“Conspiracy theories shouldn’t be your go-to response,” he told NewsNation. “We should at least wait for some evidence. Is it possible it was staged? I wouldn’t put it past Trump, but there wasn’t any evidence it was staged. You wait.”
Joli Dallosto, who joined Monday’s march after traveling the short distance from suburban Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, became emotional in describing the current political landcape. Like many, Dallosto said that “no one should be shot.”
She said she watched the video and saw still images shot by a New York Times photographer of the path of the bullet and referred to the fact that Trump wasn’t killed as a “stroke of luck.”
Now, as the investigation continues, she hopes the truth comes out. As someone who followed the coverage of both the Kennedy assassination and the attempt on Reagan’s life in 1981, she said that news coverage and the way information is released has changed dramatically.
To her, it’s a signal of how much the nation has changed.
“I think there was moral character back then that we are lacking now,” she told NewsNation. “My cardinal thing is that you must tell the truth. We can deal with it — whatever it is, but we must tell the truth.”
