How America’s conspiracy theorists broke the US

On 25 April this year, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen was stopped by Secret Service agents while trying to rush into the White House correspondents’ dinner with a gun. He was apprehended on the scene and later charged with attempted assassination in what was the third apparent attempt on Donald Trump’s life.

Immediately, conspiracy theories proliferated wildly on social media. Thousands of posts claimed the event had been staged – a “false flag” orchestrated by Trump to gain sympathy. On X, “Today was another false flag pushing for the funding Congress refused to pass this week for the Felons Ballroom,” one user wrote. “EXPOSED: The ‘Gunshots’ at WHCD Were a Classic False Flag Op… Not ‘Leftist Violence,’ But Elite Puppetry,” wrote another. Extremism analyst Tristan Mendes measured that in the 24 hours following the attack, the word “staged” was mentioned in 1.1 million posts, and the phrase “false flag” in 227,000.

This is now an inevitable phase of any major news event. After a previous attempted shooting clipped Trump’s ear with a bullet at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania in July 2024, the same conspiracy theories also exploded online within minutes, on the left as well as the right.

A photo went viral showing Trump with an undamaged ear, which many claimed as proof the shooting was staged (the image was actually from 2022 ), while Republican Congressman Mike Collins tweeted “Joe Biden sent the orders” and popular far-right talk show host Alex Jones claimed the shooting was a failed deep state coup. “Elon [Musk] you should get to your bunker immediate,” he posted. “This is a live coup.”

A study published in the journal PNAS Nexus surveyed 2,765 Americans in the days following the 2024 Butler attack. It found that 13 per cent of respondents believed it was planned by Democrats, and 12 per cent believed it was staged by the White House. The same thing happened with the White House correspondents’ dinner shooting. A YouGov poll a week afterward, 24 per cent of respondents believed the event was staged and another 32 per cent reported being unsure.

The state of the American collective mind is at a fever pitch. Ten years of Trump and the fracturing of media and rise of social media has pushed people to some sort of psychological edge.

The US seems to have been particularly vulnerable to the spread of conspiracy theories for some time. A 2013 study found 37 per cent of Americans said they believe global warming is a hoax. Seven per cent said they believe that the Moon landing was faked. Twenty-eight per cent said they believe the world is ruled by a secretive globalist elite, and 4 per cent said they believe it is ruled by shape-shifting lizard people. Thirteen per cent said they believed then-president Barack Obama was the Antichrist.

This trend has continued. In 2019, 26 per cent of Americans said they believe the government is housing aliens in Area 51. A 2022 study by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists found that 62 per cent of respondents said they believe or were unsure about claims the Covid-19 vaccine either caused autism or contained brain-control chips. More pressingly, a recent Marist poll found 34 per cent of Americans expressed “little or no” confidence that the upcoming US midterm elections will be “fair and accurate”.

The information ecosystem is the water in which we all swim; the totality of the environment from which we derive our understanding of the world. Democracy – all human civilisation, really, but especially democracy – depends on at least some sense of shared reality.

Nations are nothing if not shared ideas, America perhaps most of all. But new factors in the digital age have greatly endangered the possibility of having that kind of shared reality – factors that exist everywhere, but have combined in the US to create a perfect storm.

Firstly, there is the catastrophic collapse of traditional media business models. In the past two decades, America has experienced what amounts to a mass journalistic extinction event. Since 2005, print newspaper circulation nationwide dropped 70 per cent, and 3,500 local newspapers have shuttered.

This is in part an inevitable outcome of the rise of the internet. But it is also part of a concerted campaign to undermine American journalism. Republicans in Congress voted in July 2025 to rescind $1bn (£740m) in funding for US public service radio and television, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was dissolved in January of this year.

From the beginning, when I was covering Trump rallies he would single out the “fake news media” as a punching bag, calling for crowds to boo us or worse. He regularly sues outlets for coverage he sees as negative.

Trump has also constantly been both a source and signal-booster of conspiracy theories and disinformation, going all the way back to the “birther” claim that Obama wasn’t born in the US. He has claimed that Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro’s secret son, and that Haitian immigrants eat dogs .

His first term saw the rise of QAnon – an agglomeration of conspiracy theories centred around a fictitious saviour-figure known as “Q” that became wildly popular and often received encouragement from Trump himself. In a way, Trump is both a cause and an ultimate symptom of the collapse of shared reality in America.

But there is a deeper, structural issue at play. Social media means people can now exist in separate, closed-loop environments, a phenomenon called the “filter bubble”. These bubbles are opaque, meaning it is nearly impossible to know what any given person’s algorithm is feeding them.

One rabbit hole I recently went down started with content from classic aircraft enthusiasts, but the algorithm soon started feeding me other things. Alarmingly quickly, I was watching plane crash footage. Within less than an hour, I was being fed 9/11 conspiracy theory videos.

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also the rise of AI, which entails two further disasters. First, it makes the spread of image-based mis- and disinformation exponentially easier; it’s no longer possible to trust any image you see. And second, it further crushes the business model of journalism by providing generated summaries that no longer send traffic to news sites.

It is easy to look at all of this and despair. But some hopeful signs have begun to emerge. There is a growing backlash against big tech and AI. A flowering of independent media outlets have been able to develop small but loyal audiences into sustainable businesses.

And despite how it sometimes feels, Trump won’t be around for ever. His disapproval rating is now at a record-smashing 62 per cent overall, and 70 per cent among 18- to 29-year-olds.

Perhaps most hopefully of all, in 2025, the number of Americans who reported getting their news from social media fell overall for the first time since 2021. The path back to shared reality will still be long, but America may finally be on it.