A disturbing conspiracy theory is trending online Read more: 👇👇

On his Truth Social, Trump posted after the shooting that the incident ‘would never have happened’ with the ballroom, and Republican senators moved quickly to introduce legislation to fast-track its construction.

Whether using a security incident to argue for a pre-existing political priority constitutes opportunism or legitimate reasoning is a fair political debate. It is not evidence of staging.

The speed with which conspiracy theories attached themselves to this event is not surprising. It is the third time in less than two years that Trump has been the subject of an apparent assassination attempt, and public trust in institutions is low.

As dramatic events occur with clean outcomes — suspect alive, no mass casualties, president unharmed — in environments that carry inherent political stakes, the conditions for conspiratorial thinking are present.

But the fact that an event is dramatic, politically significant, or imperfectly explained does not make it staged.

The documented facts of Saturday night — a written manifesto, a legally purchased weapon, a man who traveled by train from California, a Secret Service agent who will recover because he was wearing a vest — are not consistent with fabrication.

They are consistent with a genuine and deeply serious security breach at one of Washington’s most high-profile annual events.

Fact checkers have rated the claim about Leavitt’s remarks as a correct attribution with added context — meaning she said the words, but not in the way the conspiracy posts imply. Everything else circulating falls below even that standard.