“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” the political scientist Richard Hofstadter wrote 60 years ago in his classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Yet across many eras, this discourse of “heated exaggeration, suspicion and conspiratorial fantasy” festered largely on the fringe. Then the internet made the fringe accessible to everyone, amplifying dissonance and disinformation.

In the initial hours after the shocking assassination attempt against Donald Trump on Saturday evening, meme-makers and influencers on the left and right came to fast agreement about one thing: the shooting must have been orchestrated. Some on the left described it as a false-flag operation staged to make Mr Trump look invincible and bolster his election prospects. They pointed to the way Mr Trump paused to pose for photos with his fist in the air and blood streaking down his cheek as evidence that the attack must have been choreographed by the candidate’s own image-makers.

The right’s citizen-pundits—and even some elected office-holders—reckoned that the attempt to kill Mr Trump looked like an inside job. Within minutes of the shooting, media mogul Elon Musk endorsed Mr Trump and later suggested to his 190m followers that the failure of the Secret Service to stop the shooter may have been “deliberate”. Mike Collins, a Republican congressman from Georgia, asserted that “Joe Biden sent the orders”.

Conspiracy theories about a shocking institutional failure often take hold when an alternative explanation—incompetence—is unsatisfying. Mr Trump’s attacker, identified by the FBI as a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man named Thomas Matthew Crooks, apparently managed to mount a nearby roof with an AR-15-style rifle in hand without being stopped by the police. This might be judged as a stunning failure of professional practice by the Secret Service; President Joe Biden has promised an independent review of what went wrong. In right-wing media, however, the failure to stop the shooter is presented as evidence of deliberate intrigue. Rumours spread quickly on Instagram that Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, who has been villainised by Republicans for his handling of the southern border, rebuffed the Trump campaign’s requests for better protection.

Such views are not confined to Reddit obsessives pounding their keyboards late at night; they are commonplace among ordinary MAGA Republicans. Sandra Chase, a Republican delegate from Brooklyn who is attending this week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, says she thinks the assassination attempt was an inside job and that the FBI will cover up the real crime. She and like-minded sceptics are likely to have plenty to talk about as they debate their theories in the days and weeks ahead. On Sunday, the FBI reported that Mr Crooks appears to have acted alone, a finding that was unaccompanied by the release of evidence to back it up.

Ms Chase said she belongs to a chat group that is concerned about another angle: that diversity mandates within the Secret Service forced the organisation to hire lots of ineffective women, which exacerbated the danger faced by Mr Trump. Photos from the attack that show female agents who are smaller than Mr Trump rushing to provide cover for him have been transformed into misogynistic memes across social-media platforms.

On the evidence available so far, Mr Crooks’s motives and political views are largely a mystery. News outlets reported that he was registered as a Republican but gave a $15 donation to a liberal political action committee, the Progressive Turnout Project, in January 2021. He apparently grew up in middle-class circumstances and made little impression on schoolmates.

The online far right has already invented a profile of him that fits their world view, however. Minutes after authorities released the shooter’s identity, a myriad of fake Instagram accounts appeared under his name with invented biographies that describe Mr Crooks as transgender, Jewish and a Black Lives Matter supporter. They and other influencers cited a comment Mr Biden reportedly made on a private call to donors last week: “We’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”

Disinformation experts expect such narratives will continue to spread, even as details of the shooter’s motives and background become clearer. New information is unlikely to change the minds of those who already believe that one party or the other planned the assassination attempt. “The defining feature of conspiracy theories is that they explain everything, so they’re pretty resistant to individual details,” says Jonathan Stray of the University of California, Berkeley.

How much does such widespread confusion matter? To date, American democracy has somehow lurched through its crises, despite the enduring persuasiveness of Hofstadter’s observations. This week may seem more worrisome than usual because of the violence inflicted on Mr Trump and the normalisation of discourse about such radical action online. Some angry progressives are lamenting that the bullet grazed Mr Trump’s ear, missing his skull by millimetres. Destiny, a leftist social-media commentator, told his 250,000 X followers that Mr Trump and his supporters will “reap what they sow, and I’m here to watch the harvest”. Meanwhile, on the right, a post in a Florida Proud Boys Telegram channel depicts Mr Trump with blazing red eyes above a banner headline: “THIS IS WAR!!!”■

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