TYB
TYAnons
o7
How social media assassination conspiracies are uniting pro- and anti-Trump voters
Marianna Spring - Disinformation and social media correspondent
BBC News
22 September 2024
Wild Mother - the online alias of a woman called Desirée - lives in the mountains of Colorado, where she posts videos to 80,000 followers about holistic wellness and bringing up her little girl. She wants Donald Trump to win the presidential election.
About 70 miles north in the suburbs of Denver is Camille, a passionate supporter of racial and gender equality who lives with a gaggle of rescue dogs and has voted Democrat for the past 15 years.
The two women are poles apart politically - but they both believe assassination attempts against Mr Trump were staged.
Their views on the shooting in July and the apparent foiled plot earlier this month were shaped by different social media posts pushed to their feeds, they both say.
I travelled to Colorado - which became a hotbed of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen - for the BBC Radio 4 podcast Why Do You Hate Me? USA. I wanted to understand why these evidence-free staged assassination theories seemed to have spread so far across the political spectrum and the consequences for people like Camille and Wild Mother.
Dozens of evidence-free posts I found suggesting both incidents were staged have racked up more than 30 million views on X. Some of these posts came from anti-Trump accounts that did not seem to have a track record of sharing theories like this, while a smaller share were posted by some of the former president’s supporters.
For Democrat Camille, Trump’s team orchestrated this to boost his chances of winning the election.
Wild Mother - who already follows QAnon, the unfounded conspiracy theory which claims Donald Trump is involved in a secret war against an elite cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles - wants to believe Trump’s own team staged the attack in order to frame his supposed enemies in the "Deep State".
The Deep State is claimed to be a shadowy coalition of security and intelligence services looking to thwart certain politicians.
There is no evidence to support either of the women’s theories.
The idea that news events have been staged to manipulate the public is a classic trope in the conspiracy theory playbook. Wild Mother says she is no stranger to this alternative way of thinking.
Camille, however, says this is the first time she has ever used the word "staged" about an event in the news like this. She always believed Covid-19 was real and she was extremely opposed to false claims the 2020 election had been rigged.
But on 13 July this year, when she was sitting in front of her TV at home watching live as Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, she says she immediately thought: "Oh, that's staged."
The way Donald Trump was able to pose for a photo and raise his fist in the air was what ignited Camille’s suspicions.
She had questions about how the US Secret Service allowed the shooting to happen in the first place. The director of the service has since resigned over failings that day.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvglm0rjy2go
After Much Talk of Seeking a Third Term, Trump Tells Crowd: ‘We Actually Already Served Three’
Apr 30, 2025 1:34 PM GMT
Callum Sutherland
Time.com
At a rally in Michigan on Tuesday, April 29, held to mark the first 100 days of his second term, President Donald Trump smiled as the crowd chanted “three,” a call for the President to serve a third term.
In response, Trump said: “Well, we actually already served three, if you count. But remember, I like the victories, I like the three victories which we absolutely had. I just don't like the results of the middle term.”
Trump, who won his first election in 2016 but then lost to former President Joe Biden in 2020, appeared to once again be denying the results of the 2020 election.
In actual fact, 2020 saw Trump fall short in key battleground states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, where he was on Tuesday. During his rally, he also incorrectly stated that he won Michigan three times.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that he won the 2020 election, arguing that voter fraud occurred. Two days after election day, whilst vote counting was still ongoing, he posted on social media “STOP THE COUNT!” And once major news outlets had confirmed Biden as the 46th President, Trump again remarked: "This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election." Amid this election denial, the riots of Jan. 6, 2021, occurred.
Meanwhile, Trump’s comments at the rally come after much discussion and teasing of a possible third term, only strengthened by the fact the President’s online store is now selling “Trump 2028” merchandise.
…
https://time.com/7281485/is-trump-seeking-a-third-term-rally-comments-election-denial/
o7