The Skeptics Society & Skeptic magazine

Why do people believe the assassination attempt on Donald Trump was a conspiracy?

The assassination attempt on President Donald Trump on July 13 has already spawned a bevy of conspiracy theories. The blood on his ear was that of a theatrical gel pack, which you can supposedly see in his hand as he touches his ear. Trump’s defiant response was staged, as evidenced by the fact that the Secret Service let him back up after tackling him to the ground. The Secret Service let it happen on purpose (LIHOP in conspiracy circles) by waiting for the assassin to take his shot before returning fire. The ladder for the shooter to get on the roof was planted by covert operatives. This was yet another hit ordered by Vladimir Putin. The Chinese want to make sure Trump doesn’t return to the Presidency so they can take Taiwan. The shooter was part of Antifa. Never-Trumper Republicans were behind it. It was a false flag operation.

It is early still, and there is much we do not know about Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, but the odds are long that he was a lone actor and not part of a conspiracy. The 20-year old was, in fact, described by acquaintances as a “loner” in high school who was bullied and had “a few friends” but “didn’t have a whole friend group.” He was a registered Republican but donated $15 to the Democratic Progressive Turnout Project in 2021. He had possession of his father’s legally-purchased AR-15 style rifle, and had in his car dozens of rounds of ammunition and bomb-making materials. Most revealingly, Crooks was allegedly rejected by his high school riflery club for being “comically bad” with a gun. Does this sound like the profile of a hitman that a crack team of conspirators would contract with to assassinate a former president?

To be sure, there are a number legitimate questions surrounding the Trump assassination attempt that do not involve conspiracies:

1. Why did the cop who confronted the shooter on the roof not have his gun at the ready so he could engage him instead of standing down?
2. The shooter appears to have accessed the rooftop via a large ladder, but how did that ladder get there in the first place?
3. The building on which Crooks was perched was, in fact, a staging area for local police, so how did they miss the would-be assassin climbing onto the roof?
4. Since the Secret Service sharpshooter killed the assassin within seconds of shots fired, why did he not take the shot first?
5. Why did the Secret Service allow Trump to jump back up to pump his fist and mouth “fight fight fight” to the crowd when they should have whisked him away to his bullet-proof SUV?
6. Why did the police not take seriously all the bystanders who saw the gunman on the roof and alerted them about it.

These “BlueAnon” conspiracy theories, so named for their doppleganger echo of QAnon conspiracism, are as predictable as they are irrational. The day before the assassination attempt, in fact, I was in attendance as a speaker at the annual Freedom Fest conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, along with Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who famously believes that the CIA assassinated his uncle John F. Kennedy and his father Robert F. Kennedy. The CIA has done some questionable things in foreign countries in the name of national interests there, but murdering their own president and possible future president? Why do otherwise rational people believe such seemingly irrational things?

In my book, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, I attempt to answer this question by outlining a number of cognitive and emotional factors at work, including:

Event magnitude. The larger the event the more conspiracism surrounds it, as people invest more time and energy into everything that happened surrounding the event in search of some deeper cause. The assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK, and terrorist attacks like 9/11, are so large in scope and interest that they draw our attention to examine every detail so scrupulously that everything becomes pregnant with meaning.

Proportionality bias. Large events need large causes. The Holocaust was one of the worst genocides in history and it was caused by one of the worst political regimes in history. There’s a proportionality balance there. The assassination of President Lincoln by a cabal of southern supporters in hopes of reigniting the South’s “war of independence” feels balanced. That JFK, MLK, and RFK were assassinated by lone gunmen, or that Princess Diana’s death in a car crash was the result of drunk driving and her not wearing a seatbelt, or that 9/11 was orchestrated by 19 guys with box cutters, doesn’t feel proportional, so we turn to deeper conspiratorial causes.

Anomaly hunting. Large events lead people to look for anything unusual, especially if it is unexplainable, then glomming on to that anomaly as “evidence” of a conspiracy. How did that ladder get there for the Trump shooter to climb up on the roof? Why didn’t that police officer stop the shooter when he confronted him? Why didn’t the Secret Service take out the shooter before he shot at Trump? Why was Trump allowed to jump back up to make a fist pump after being shot?

Personal incredulity. If I can’t think of an explanation for anomaly X besides a conspiracy, then that proves there is a conspiracy.

Hindsight Bias. The tendency to reconstruct the past to fit with present knowledge. Once an event has occurred, we look back and reconstruct how it happened, why it had to happen that way and not some other way, and why we should have seen it coming all along.

Patternicity and agenticity. The tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise, and to infuse those patterns with intentional agents, leads to conspiratorial cognition.

Uncertainty bias. In the early days of a major event much is unknown, and that leads people to fill in the blanks with whatever comes to mind.

Teleological thinking. The belief that everything happens for a reason and nothing of importance happens by chance.

With all of these factors at work, it was inevitable that within minutes of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump conspiricism would flood social media. While it is not completely irrational to believe in some conspiracy theories—given that conspiracies do happen and it is often better to be safe than sorry—it is very likely that the attempt to kill President Trump was not part of some nefarious cabal and instead was the act of an unhinged lone actor. Keep in mind that in U.S. history four presidents have been assassinated while in office—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy—only one of which was the result of a conspiracy (Lincoln). And another five presidents survived assassination attempts—Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan—all of which were by lone assassins. As was the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968, after a campaign rally at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy was murdered by a Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan, who testified in his trial that he killed Kennedy “with 20 years of malice aforethought.”

Thus, it is rational to apply the Conspiracism Principle first: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by randomness or incompetence.