The Trump Staged Shooting Conspiracies Need to Stop

0:00Irreverent news talk, opinion, satire. It's Newsweek radio. I'm Jesse Edwards heading over to iTunes briefly. A very nice comment left by Tim in SC. I'm guessing that's South Carolina. He says, quote, I really enjoy this podcast. It's the highlight of my drive home from work. I listen to news from all perspectives. This show particularly appeals to me as a no political party voter that's not a fan of either major party. And I like that it's presented in an entertaining style. Oh, yes, that's actually very kind. Thank you so much, Tim in SC. It's comments like these that keep me going. And you can always reach out to me direct.

0:33J.Edwards at Newsweek.com. Let's get straight to the top trending headlines at Newsweek. The number one, at least in the opinion section right now, is mine. It's my op-ed. It's right there on the top of the page. At least it is at the time of this recording. And boy, did I kick the hornet's nest with this one. It's called the Trump staged shooting conspiracies need to stop. It's one of those kind of ambiguous headlines that doesn't necessarily tell you exactly the angle. So you could mistake it for either a pro or anti conspiracy piece just based on the headline alone. And here's how it goes. a lone gunman stormed the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner and was quickly detained after injuring a Secret Service agent, and almost immediately people on both sides of the conspiracy spectrum claimed that this was another staged assassination attempt, all orchestrated by President Trump, this time to divert attention from embarrassing headlines tied to his failure to negotiate with Iran.

1:26This same bipartisan conspiracy culture also believes that Trump and his allies orchestrated the previous assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. An attack that killed one person in the crowd, seriously injured two others, and resulted in the immediate killing of the would-be assassin after Trump himself was struck in the ear by a fragment. This isn't fringe anymore. We all have friends and family who talk about this like it's a fact. And it's become one of those rare issues that genuinely qualifies as a both-sides problem. People are jumping to conclusions based on headlines alone. Not even trying to understand, but rushing to explain.

2:02And listen, if you are one of these people, I would kindly ask you to consider the logistics involved in staging a fake assassination attempt on a sitting president, even at the most basic level. Because you're talking about coordinating a live attack in a crowded, uncontrolled environment with real bullets, real people, and zero margin for error. You are talking about secret service agents, local law enforcement, medical teams, all the witnesses and bystanders, and the media all somehow playing along or being unknowingly folded into a plan where one unpredictable variable turns the situation into an absolute bloodbath.

2:43and you think that this White House under Donald Trump has the level of cunning required to pull that off not once but twice and then cover it up and keep it covered up. At some point, the theory stops being about connecting the dots and starts requiring you to believe in a level of precision, secrecy, and luck that simply does not exist in the real world. Let's assume just for a moment that the gunman is a plant, an actor, whatever version makes it easier to believe the little movie playing in your head that you've mistaken for reality. He still has to move like a threat in front of the agents, trained to neutralize threats instantly.

3:25So now your theory depends on everybody that's in the chain getting it exactly right in a situation built on split second decisions. I mean, it's either that or the entire secret service would need to be in on the scam. It doesn't pass the out loud test even for a second. There are simply too many variables. A lone wolf attack by somebody who is not thinking clearly. Even if he does see himself as some kind of revolutionary, his cheese would have slid all the way off of his cracker if he thought he could just run right past the Secret Service. That was a suicide mission that failed in every way possible.

4:03And believing these assassination attempts are staged is much bigger than politics. It's cultural brain rot. And I would suggest that if you are subscribing to these kinds of ideas without questioning your own thinking, there is not much difference between believing Trump stages shootings to manipulate headlines and what Alex Jones said about the Sandy Hook shooting, which ultimately led to massive legal consequences. That didn't start with Alex Jones declaring that it was staged right out of the gate? It all started with what if. There's nothing wrong with asking what if. We do it all the time.

4:38It's part of how we learn. The problem is that his what if turned into a fact in his mind, and eventually in the minds of many of his followers. And now he faces more than a billion dollars in damages because he and his audience targeted and harassed the victims of an already unimaginable tragedy. And then there's Erica Kirk, who was at the correspondence dinner when the shots rang out. She was visibly upset, leaving the venue in tears. And within minutes, social media was full of people mocking her and laughing at her pain. Look, I do not care what your politics are. I'm not a fan of Erica Kirk.

5:21I wasn't a fan of her husband either. This is a woman who watched her husband get assassinated in front of the world. So when she finds herself in a moment of unexpected live gunfire and chaos, she dares to react like a human being. And I fail to find the humor in that whatsoever. You don't have to like her. You don't have to agree with her politics. You don't have to support anything she's ever said or done. But she doesn't deserve this kind of disgusting ridicule. There's something deeply broken in the way people respond to moments like this now. in a situation where real fear and real emotion are turned into content for clicks.

6:05Shame on anyone who thinks that this is acceptable human behavior. Everybody has invasive and irrational thoughts. That's normal. Your brain throws out possibilities all the time. Most of them wrong. Some of them ridiculous. The problem isn't the thought itself. It's what we do with those thoughts after we entertain them. There's a line between thinking something and believing it. and a lot of people don't even realize when they've crossed over. And look, I've been guilty of it myself here on this show over the years, but you know what? I'm getting better at avoiding it. Just like a lot of us are as we do that little thing called growing up.

6:42So before you share something and before you decide that something must be true, and before you turn somebody else's vulnerable moment into content for your channel, just stop and ask yourself what you actually know and what you only feel. and it's fine to talk about both as long as you can tell the difference and explain the context like an adult because if you can't tell the difference anymore you're not thinking it's group think and you're feeding it with collective confirmation bias that is my latest at newsweek called the trump staged shooting conspiracies need to stop be sure to head over to newsweek.com to like subscribe and comment you can scroll down to the comment sections now might as well right And, oh, God, yeah, the kids love comment sections at Newsweek.

7:27It's where all the fun is happening. And, yes, a lot of the conspiracy theorists have come out of the woodwork to defend their ideas. Tucker Q. Hannity says stolen election conspiracies need to stop. No argument there. User 99 says the problem with this argument comes from the mountain of disinformation coming from Trump himself. Most distrust him and for good reason. And I can agree with that to a point. Except for the part where it says the problem with this argument comes from the mountain of disinformation coming from Trump himself. And my reply to that is it's exactly something like this that plays right into his hands when something off script like this does occur.

8:01Yes, he plants disinformation constantly and misinformation. And he flat out lies about things when he doesn't even need to. Which is exactly why when something weird like this actually happens, people have such a hard time believing it. User Freedom Rider says, Since it gets harder to believe what comes out of this administration based on the myriad of countless untruths, why should one believe their version of this attempt? And my reply to him is at the core of this entire argument. And that is that Trump and company does not have the coordination or skill required to pull off a deception of this magnitude.

8:37because if they did, they wouldn't need this level of deception to begin with. And that's where this entire argument of the conspiracy crowd falls flat on its face. Because many of them, myself included, constantly point out on a daily basis how incompetent this boob is, along with all of the other people he's appointed around him. I still hold that to be an absolute truth, because that's my perception of the situation. So I'm suggesting if you truly believe that like I do, there is no way imaginable that they would be so sophisticated to pull this off not only once but twice, to put it under wraps and to keep it under wraps.

9:18It just doesn't make any sense. And if that doesn't get through to you on this argument specifically, I don't know if anything ever would.