Trump assassination attempts were not fake
by Editorial Board · The Washington TimesOPINION:
Just when you thought Trump derangement syndrome on the unhinged left and among Democrats more generally could not get worse, along comes more evidence that TDS is a virus every bit as malignant as COVID-19.
How else can one explain a poll conducted by YouGov and released Monday that found that 24% of those surveyed — including fully one-third of Democrats — believe the April 25 gunman’s attack at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was somehow staged or faked.
Never mind that Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, arrested in connection with the incident, is charged with four felonies, including the shooting of a Secret Service agent, whose life was saved by body armor.
Furthermore, to believe that the entire episode was staged by President Trump to gin up sympathy for him and/or his political agenda also requires believing that Mr. Allen was a participant (or at least a patsy) in the scheme.
The latter seems highly unlikely, given that by all accounts, Mr. Allen was a brilliant mechanical engineer and computer scientist with a promising career, one he apparently has thrown away for an Andy Warhol-style “15 minutes of fame” — or, in this case, infamy.
Still, 24% of all of those polled — 1 in 3 Democrats and, shockingly, about 1 in 8 Republicans — somehow believe the episode was staged. (Forty-five percent said it was real, while 32% said they weren’t sure.)
Despite his not-guilty pleas in federal court Monday to four felony charges, Mr. Allen also would have had to be willing to risk being fatally shot by the president’s protective detail or, at a minimum, be prepared to spend the rest of his life in prison.
That all has to somehow be explained away to maintain the thoroughly implausible notion that the attack was faked.
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The poll of 1,000 Americans ages 18 to 29, conducted April 28 to May 4, found nearly identical results when respondents were asked about the first Trump assassination attempt at a July 13, 2024, outdoor campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
It requires even larger tinfoil hats for 24% of the poll’s respondents to insist that Butler was somehow staged or faked, given that Mr. Trump came within a few centimeters of having his head blown off, JFK-style. (Forty-seven percent said it was a real attempt to kill the president; 29% were unsure.)
The president is nothing if not a showman, but he is not suicidal. “Anyone who thinks President Trump staged his own assassination attempts is a complete moron,” spokesman Davis Ingle said when asked about the poll’s findings.
The conspiracy theorists among those polled can’t explain away the collateral killing of Butler rally attendee Corey Comperatore or the serious injuries two others sustained at the hands of the 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Crooks, if Butler had been staged.
Crooks, who was killed by Secret Service countersnipers, is obviously unavailable to confess to being the willing and witting central participant in a presidential sympathy scheme.
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With respect to the second of the three attempts on the president’s life, this one at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sept. 15, 2024, the poll found that only 16% thought it was staged. (Forty-eight percent said it was real, and 36% were unsure.)
It is not clear why Ryan Wesley Routh’s attempt on Mr. Trump’s life — a scant two months and two days after Crooks’ — was viewed by far fewer poll respondents that way. It could be because Routh, now 60, was convicted and is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Taken together, only 38% of those polled think all three assassination attempts were authentic, even though no evidence suggests that any of them were faked.
Yet the total lack of proof hasn’t deterred those with severe TDS, which afflicts leftist Democrats almost exclusively.
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As of this writing, however, the only high-profile Democrat to have denounced the poll’s findings is Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who refuses to march in lockstep with the extremists in his party.
“Assassinations + political violence are real. My party can’t be the tinfoil hat brigade. I was there a table away, and I promise you, this was not staged,” Mr. Fetterman wrote Monday afternoon on the social media platform X.
A sensible view like that will not go over well with “the tinfoil hat brigade,” so the freshman senator would do well to watch his back.