A new national poll landed this week with findings striking enough that the organization that commissioned it did something unusual: it went back to the pollsters and asked them to recheck the numbers. They did. The numbers held. What those numbers show is a portrait of an American public in which a majority of respondents, across all three of the assassination attempts against President Donald Trump over the past two years, either believe the events were staged or are not sure whether they were real. Not a fringe minority. The majority position.
The poll arrives against a backdrop of three incidents that, by any measure of physical evidence, law enforcement documentation, and courtroom record, actually happened. A gunman opened fire at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, wounding Trump and killing a bystander. A second suspect was apprehended near Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, in September 2024. And on the evening of April 25, 2026, a 31-year-old man from Torrance, California named Cole Tomas Allen armed himself with a shotgun and a pistol, booked a room at the Washington Hilton, and attempted to charge past a security checkpoint at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner while President Trump, the First Lady, Vice President JD Vance, and members of the Cabinet were inside. Buckshot from Allen’s weapon struck a Secret Service agent’s bullet-resistant vest, a fact confirmed by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro. Allen has since been charged with attempted assassination of the president and pleaded not guilty.
Despite all of this, a substantial share of the country is not convinced. And the partisan breakdown of who doubts what, and why, reveals something considerably more complicated than a simple story about political tribalism.
The Poll: Methodology and Scope
NewsGuard commissioned the study with YouGov, polling a nationally representative sample of 1,000 Americans aged 18 and older. YouGov matched respondents to national benchmarks drawn from U.S. Census data and weighted results to ensure representativeness by gender, age, race, region, education, and 2024 presidential vote. The survey ran from April 28 to May 4, 2026.
Respondents were asked to evaluate three statements, one for each incident, and respond “true,” “false,” or “not sure.” After completing the survey, participants were shown accurate information debunking each false claim, a step NewsGuard included to ensure the survey did not inadvertently amplify misinformation.
The results were striking enough that NewsGuard’s editorial team noted in a published editor’s note: “After we received these results from YouGov, we were so surprised by the survey findings that we asked YouGov to go back and recheck the data.” YouGov confirmed the findings were accurate.
Core Findings: Doubt Is the Majority Position
Thirty percent of Americans think at least one of the three incidents was staged. But that headline figure actually understates the breadth of skepticism in the data.
For each attempted assassination individually, a majority of Americans said either that it was staged or that they were unsure, averaging 54 percent across all three events. Only 38 percent of Americans believe all three assassination attempts were authentic.
Read that again: fewer than four in ten Americans are prepared to say, without reservation, that all three of the documented attempts on the president’s life were genuine. In a country that has been through Congressional testimony, court filings, video evidence, and a formal criminal prosecution for the most recent incident, that figure is a meaningful data point about the state of public epistemology – the collective capacity to agree on the basic facts of a documented event.
The breakdown by incident is also telling. The April 2026 Correspondents’ Dinner shooting drew the most skepticism, with 56 percent of respondents saying it was staged or that they were unsure. The Butler, Pennsylvania rally shooting and the West Palm Beach golf club incident each generated nearly identical levels of doubt, at 53 percent and 52 percent respectively who either believed them staged or were unsure.
The Partisan Picture: Not What You Might Expect
The most counterintuitive finding in the poll is the partisan distribution of doubt. The reflexive assumption would be that Democrats accept the official account of events involving a Republican president and that Republicans defend it. The data does not fully support that framing.
Broken down by party affiliation, 34 percent of Democrats said they believed the Correspondents’ Dinner incident was staged, compared with 23 percent of independents and 13 percent of Republicans. For the Butler shooting, roughly one in three Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about one in eight Republicans.
The most striking number: the new poll found that doubts are far more concentrated among younger Americans and Democrats, and Americans aged 18 to 29 were the most likely of any generation to believe all three events were staged.
What explains elevated conspiracy belief among Democrats? Sofia Rubinson, a senior editor at NewsGuard who tracks false claims that spread online, offered one interpretation. Republicans are “increasingly more likely to believe this ‘staged’ narrative,” she noted, while acknowledging that a possible explanation is a “splintering” within Trump’s movement over issues like the administration’s handling of the Epstein files and the war with Iran. “A lot of the traditional MAGA base,” she said, is “maybe growing increasingly discontent with the Trump administration and more prone to believing these types of conspiracies.”
What Rubinson is describing is not a story about one side rejecting reality. It is a story about distrust as a default posture, one that cuts across the political spectrum according to whatever political grievance is most activated at a given moment.
The Social Media Engine
Claims posted on X within the week after the Correspondents’ Dinner shooting garnered over 90 million views. That volume of reach, in the hours and days following an event for which hundreds of credentialed journalists were present as firsthand witnesses, illustrates how quickly an alternative factual universe can take root.
Despite a steady stream of facts from reputable media outlets, unfounded conspiracy theories from both the left and the right proliferated, chief among them that the shooting was staged. On social media, specific claims circulated that the incident was arranged to distract from the administration’s declining approval ratings or to build political momentum for Trump’s contested White House ballroom construction project.
Emily Vraga, a professor at the University of Minnesota who studies political misinformation, noted that sometimes more information is not necessarily better, particularly in a polarized environment where people can select the facts they prefer and construct their own narratives. “We just can’t process that much information,” she said.
The Institutional Trust Context
Rubinson observed that conspiracy theorists “are citing or relying on” very little evidence. “It’s really just this belief and this distrust that the government is acting honestly and is giving us accurate information,” she said.
That connects directly to a broader, longer-running collapse in institutional confidence that predates Trump’s presidency by decades. According to Pew Research Center, just 17 percent of Americans now say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time.” While trust in government has been low for decades, the current measure is one of the lowest in the nearly seven decades since the question was first asked.
That 17 percent figure is lower than it was just one year earlier, when it stood at 22 percent. To put the trajectory in perspective: in 1958, when Pew first began tracking the question, 73 percent of Americans expressed high trust in the federal government.
The erosion is not uniform across party lines, and the pattern carries direct relevance to the assassination-attempt poll. According to Gallup’s September 2025 Governance poll, Americans’ trust in various federal institutions remains near five-decade lows. Forty-five percent of U.S. adults have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the federal government to handle international problems, and just 38 percent trust it to handle domestic issues. Trust across the three branches of government ranges from 32 percent for the legislative branch to 49 percent for the judicial branch.
Gallup’s analysis found that trust has not so much vanished as become contingent on which party controls the government. Previously, trust was rooted in government institutions themselves and often rose above partisan divides. Today, institutions are trusted only when controlled by one’s preferred political party.
When institutional trust works that way, as a partisan variable rather than a civic baseline, the capacity of any official account to persuade across party lines – regardless of the volume of supporting evidence – is fundamentally weakened. That is the context in which these poll numbers make sense.
The White House Response
A spokesperson for the White House bluntly dismissed the baseless comments on social media and elsewhere that the assassination attempts against Trump had been staged. Trump himself addressed the conspiracy theories during an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes the day after the Correspondents’ Dinner shooting. “I think they’re more sick than they are con people,” he said of those pushing such theories. “But there’s a lot of con in there too.”
Age as a Variable
The generational dimension of the findings deserves its own attention. Only 13 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 said all three attempts were legitimate, the lowest of any age cohort. The gap was most pronounced for the April 2026 Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, with young adults the most likely of any generation to believe all three events were staged.
This runs against a common assumption, namely that younger, more educated cohorts are more resistant to misinformation. What the data suggests is that younger Americans may combine high social media exposure with high institutional skepticism, and that combination does not produce better-calibrated beliefs about specific events. The architecture of social media platforms rewards emotional resonance and novelty over evidentiary weight, and conspiracy claims tend to be more emotionally engaging than official accounts.
The data also reinforces that the problem is not a simple partisan one. When 21 percent of Democrats, 11 percent of independents, and 3 percent of Republicans say they believe all three attempts were not real, that is a broad crisis of shared factual grounding – one that spans ideological lines rather than running neatly along them.
What to Do With All of This
The poll released in May 2026 is not primarily a story about conspiracy theories. It is a story about how thoroughly the shared factual floor of American public life has cracked. Fewer than four in ten Americans are willing to affirm, without qualification, that all three documented attempts on the sitting president’s life were genuine. That figure crosses party lines, age groups, and media environments. It is not explained by any single political grievance.
What makes this harder to sit with is that there is no simple fix on offer. More evidence did not close the gap after Butler or West Palm Beach. A live event with hundreds of credentialed witnesses did not close it after the Correspondents’ Dinner. When people’s trust in institutions has eroded to the point where official accounts are treated as just one more competing narrative, the volume of evidence is almost beside the point. The question the poll leaves hanging is not whether some Americans will reject documented reality. It is how many, and what, if anything, changes that.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.