Donald Trump Was Shot. Then the Conspiracy Theories Spread.

Four minutes after the first report of a shooting at a rally for Donald J. Trump on Saturday, an anonymous account on X posted, “Joe Biden’s antifa shot President Trump.” Within half an hour, another account on X with links to the QAnon conspiracy theory claimed without proof that the attack against Mr. Trump had most likely been ordered by the Central Intelligence Agency. Shortly after that, the far-right activist Laura Loomer posted on X about some recent remarks that President Biden made about Mr. Trump and then wrote, “They tried to kill Trump.” She did not provide evidence. An hour later, with official details of the assassination attempt still scant, the narrative that President Biden and his allies had engineered the attack on Mr. Trump was being amplified by Republican lawmakers, Russian sympathizers and even a Brazilian political scion. By the time 24 hours had elapsed, posts about the unverified claim had been viewed and shared millions of times. The idea that President Biden was behind the shooting of Mr. Trump was perhaps the most dominant conspiracy theory to emerge after the attack in Butler, Pa., on Saturday. The unproven conjecture surfaced almost instantly, hardened into a narrative and then catapulted between platforms large and small, even as information about the incident was limited. It was a striking example of the speed, scale and stickiness of rumors on social media, which often calcify into accepted truth far more efficiently than efforts to debunk or pleas for restraint. That the subject this time was Mr. Trump, who frequently claims to be victimized by powerful forces while demonizing his enemies, only helped fuel the conspiracy theory. Its acceleration was also enabled by years of distrust stemming from tales of shadowy cabals of elites — which Mr. Trump has called “the deep state” — engaged in nefarious plots. “The result was a perfect storm of righteous fury, blame-casting and conspiratorialism, at a moment when absolutely everyone was paying attention,” said Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, who studies online ecosystems. Baseless claims of a left-sanctioned hit job on Mr. Trump were only part of “a massive online spread of false claims” about the shooting, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit research group. References to false assassination narratives amassed more than 100 million views in 24 hours on X alone, the group said on Monday. That far exceeded the 35.1 million views for content related to false flag rumors and other conspiracy theories after a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022. Other unsubstantiated theories about the shooting were fueled in part by left-wing accounts, including that Mr. Trump had deliberately staged the shooting to improve his election chances, slashing his ear with a hidden razor, popping a concealed blood capsule or otherwise fabricating a fake gunshot wound. Fingers were also pointed at other imagined culprits, including the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, Jews, trans people and Ukrainians. But the unverified story line that President Biden and the Democrats were responsible stood out. According to the data firm PeakMetrics, the largest portion of discussion about the shooting on X and Telegram in the first seven hours — about 17 percent — involved expressions of solidarity and prayers for Mr. Trump. The next largest chunk, about 5 percent, accused Democrats of instigating the violence. On July 12 and July 13 — the day of the shooting — there were 83,000 mentions on X of the phrase “inside job,” a 3,228 percent increase compared to the 48-hour period immediately prior, according to NewsGuard, which monitors online misinformation. In a statement, a Biden campaign official said that after “this horrifying attack, anyone — especially elected officials with national platforms — politicizing this tragedy, spreading disinformation, and seeking to further divide Americans isn’t just unacceptable — it’s an abdication of leadership.” The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. Adam Berinsky, a political science professor and misinformation expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the rapid spread of conspiracy theories online reflected widespread political division. “It says a lot about our current political moment that the politicization at the extremes is the natural default,” he said. The timeline of the conspiracy theory focused on Mr. Biden and the Democrats’ culpability was documented by think tanks, private companies that monitor misinformation and research groups, including Advance Democracy, the Anti-Defamation League, the Atlantic Council and Cyabra. The first signs of that unproven idea emerged minutes after gunshots sounded at Mr. Trump’s rally on Saturday. Many of the conservative voices who lodged the accusations against the president and other Democrats have long histories of violent rhetoric themselves. Ms. Greene repeatedly called for executing Democrats before she was elected to Congress. Mr. Collins has endorsed violence toward immigrants. Several, including Ms. Greene and Mr. Vance, are scheduled to speak at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week. Outside the convention on Monday, Senator Steve Daines, a Republican of Montana, said the speculation online was “not helpful,” adding that “I see no evidence of” Mr. Biden or other Democrats inciting violence. The conspiracy theories have since continued evolving. One strain focused on accusations that Mr. Biden’s team had rejected earlier requests to bolster Mr. Trump’s protective detail, which have been denied by a Secret Service spokesman. Video clips of Candace Owens, a conservative political commentator, declaring that the shooter “was allowed to scale that roof” have also drawn hundreds of thousands of likes on TikTok and Instagram. Similar claims surfaced on the video platform Rumble. By Monday, some social media accounts were hawking merchandise promoting the conspiracy theories. T-shirts with images of a bloodied Mr. Trump raising his fist, with the words “Not Today Deep State,” were on sale on Truth Social. On TikTok, baseball caps with “STAGED,” using the same image of Mr. Trump, were also on offer for $25. Tiffany Hsu reports on misinformation and disinformation and its origins, movement and consequences. She has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about Tiffany Hsu Sheera Frenkel is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp. More about Sheera Frenkel Ken Bensinger covers right wing media and national political campaigns for The Times. More about Ken Bensinger Democratic Party, U.S. Secret Service, Republican Party, President Joe Biden, Donald Trump Our Coverage of the Trump Rally Shooting — The Investigation: F.B.I. officials said the 20-year-old gunman who tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump appears to have acted alone, but investigators remain unsure of his motives. — Secret Service Under Scrutiny: President Biden called for an “independent review” of security measures before and after the shooting, while directing the Secret Service to review all of its security measures for the Republican National Convention. — Tearing America Further Apart: The assassination attempt comes at a time when the United States is already polarized along ideological and cultural lines and is split, it often seems, into two realities. — Our Photographer’s Account: Doug Mills, a veteran photographer for The New York Times, was only feet away from Trump when the shooting started. He described what happened. — The Force of the Photos: In video footage of the shooting, everything was pandemonium. It was still images that made Trump an incarnation of defiance, our critic writes.