The Washington Post had to face a disturbing poll about conspiracy theories on Monday: "Many Americans think Trump assassination attempts were fake, survey finds."
Reporter Liam Scott reported the disappointing findings:
About 1 in 4 Americans think the April shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner was staged, with a marked partisan divide, according to a survey published Monday.
Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans, according to a survey published Monday by NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of online news outlets....
The NewsGuard survey found that 24 percent of U.S. adults believe the incident at the Washington Hilton was fake, compared with 45 percent who believed it was legitimate. An additional 32 percent said they were unsure. The survey of 1,000 American adults was conducted by YouGov from April 28 to May 4.
On the Butler shooting of Trump, 24 percent of respondents said “Staged” – 42 percent of Democrats, seven percent of Republicans. The interrupted attempt to shoot Trump on the golf course was considered “staged” by 16 percent of those polled: 26 percent of Democrats, again seven percent of Republicans.
There was one conservative response, from the Trump White House: “Anyone who thinks President Trump staged his own assassination attempts is a complete moron,” spokesman Davis Ingle said.
Then, Scott turned to the leftist experts, who of course were not identified as leftists. Let's blame Trump for being a showman!
Joan Donovan, a Boston University professor who researches media manipulation, said the results are an indicator of the role of showmanship in Trump’s presidency. “It just seems incredibly Hollywood to imagine that this is staged,” Donovan said of the correspondents’ dinner shooting. “The entire apparatus of the government has been turned into a reality TV show.”
….Donovan said she wasn’t surprised that Democrats were more likely to doubt the legitimacy of the incidents. “If you look among folks on the left, there is a rising tide of conspiratorial thinking, and a lot of it has to do with people being very unsure about the reliability of all of our institutions,” she said.
Then came leftist Jared Holt, who was last heard telling NPR "extremism correspondent" Odette Yousef that the attempted Trump assassin Cole Allen wasn't really extremist. He seemingly wasn't asked to comment on the much higher Democrat conspiracy-theorist numbers:
“Those poll numbers don’t terribly shock me. They’re definitely bleak,” Holt said. “Conspiracy theorizing has infected our body politic now to the point where it has become a gut reflex for a seemingly growing portion of the population.”
Scott tweeted out the last quote, again from Donovan, again implying Trump was the problem:
“Unfortunately, when governments or institutions are hiding the truth about what they’re up to or they’re playing fast and loose with certain regulations or they’re not imposing certain laws on different people,” Donovan said, “it is much easier to believe in a conspiracy against oneself than it is to believe that the system has become rotted.”
