Being witty, or witty in this case, is overrated. Or worse, it can be reckless. Karoline Leavitt can attest firsthand that it’s often better to keep quiet. President Donald Trump’s press secretary made a prediction Saturday night, with her typical irony armed with the usual superiority in this United States government, and it backfired.
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“It will be fun, it will be entertaining, there will be some shots tonight,” she assured in the run-up to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “Everyone should tune in, it’s going to be really great,” she added at the Hilton hotel in Washington, where the event was held, which Trump decided to attend on this occasion, unlike other dates.
Yes, she uttered the word “shots.” Leavitt used that language to praise what her boss was going to say in his speech. But Trump didn’t have time to deliver his speech because there were shots, not rhetorical ones, but real ones.
Leavitt’s bravado largely led to social media immediately being flooded with conspiracy theories and cross-accusations about the attack, as soon as the alleged gunman Cole Tomas Allen, 31, appeared.
This is already common. Influencers from both sides participated in the chaos generated on platforms like X, Facebook and TikTok, although this time, conspiracies predominated that the attack was a staging, under the unsubstantiated suggestion that it was part of an apparent plot by Trump and other associates to divert attention from poor poll results or the failure in the war with Iran.
Just a few hours after the incident, the term “staging” had appeared in more than 300,000 posts on X
Just a few hours after the incident, the term “staging” had appeared in more than 300,000 posts on X, according to data from companies dedicated to analyzing posts on those platforms.
“False flag confirmed,” ran across those networks. This flow of disinformation was partly due to Leavitt’s comment, but it was also greatly reinforced by Trump himself, who fueled the conspiracy by using the shooting as a reason to fund his costly and controversial White House ballroom project, which was halted by a court decision.
As if it were a bugle call to add more fuel to the conspiracy, dozens of X accounts of prominent right-wing figures, including current and former Trump administration officials, published what appeared to be a coordinated campaign in support of the ballroom in the moments after the incident.
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“We must have the ballroom finished to protect the president and his guests,” wrote former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, whom Trump fired weeks ago for her mismanagement of documents in the Jeffrey Epstein case, the sexual pervert who died in prison in 2019 and an old friend of the current president.
Other social media users rushed, even before knowing Allen’s identity and his manifesto in which he accused Trump of being a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor,” to link the alleged gunman to Israeli causes, again in the absence of evidence. Here they used apparently manipulated images with artificial intelligence (AI) to reinforce that theory. RT, the Russian public news channel, amplified some of these conspiracies.
“And October 7 (Hamas attack on Israeli soil) didn’t happen either, nor did World War II, nor the Holocaust,” Trump responded on CBS’s 60 Minutes program aired on Sunday when questioned about the conspiracy that the Washington shooting was a setup. “I think they are more sick than scammers, but there’s also a lot of scam in all of this,” he stressed.
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