David Gilbert at Wired:

In recent weeks, as criticism of President Donald Trump from his own supporters has reached a fever pitch, a new conspiracy theory has taken hold: Some of the president’s biggest supporters are now claiming, without evidence, that Trump staged the assassination attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024 and is covering it up.

It’s hardly a new conspiracy theory; people on both sides of the MAGA divide have made the claim over the years. What’s new is that prominent, “mainstream”-by-some-definition MAGA zealots are now openly promoting it—or at least, “just asking questions.”

What do you expect? When you’ve trained your followers to see a conspiracy in everything, it shouldn’t be surprising when they start seeing everything as a conspiracy.