There are a few reasons that false or unsupported claims about the assassination attempt have found traction on the left. The most obvious is that Democrats simply don’t trust Donald Trump and his allies to be honest. That’s a function of years of well-documented dishonesties from the former president. Another is that the shooting occurred, as Lorenz notes, as some on the left were already theorizing about purported efforts to undermine President Biden and his candidacy.
To someone looking for a conspiracy, it’s easy to find evidence. Oh, the Secret Service just happened to fumble the ball? A shot just happened to wound but not seriously injure the former president? He just happened to react in a way that his supporters could rally around?
The answers are easy: the ball was fumbled, the miss was a matter of chance, the celebrated photo of Trump raising his fist is one of a series that also includes Trump looking distinctly alarmed. But “it was staged” is a more compelling way of thinking about it than “mistakes were counteracted by luck.”
A recent poll suggested that a fifth of Americans thought it was credible that the incident could have been staged, with a third of Biden supporters — and 1 in 8 Trump supporters — holding that view. Most respondents, of course, said it wasn’t a credible claim.
But those numbers provide an opportunity for one of the right’s favorite rhetorical tactics: whataboutism. At last, here was a moment the left was exploring the terrain of politically motivated fantasy. Or, as the conservative Free Beacon put it:
“The findings show that large swaths of the Democratic base have fallen prey to the phenomenon known as ‘BlueAnon,’ a play on the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory that once gripped portions of the Republican base and served as an obsession of the mainstream media throughout the first Trump administration,” Andrew Kerr wrote on Thursday. “[T]he Morning Consult poll shows that BlueAnon adherents among the Democratic base far outnumber their QAnon counterparts on the right.”
The appeal of this comparison is obvious. Unfortunately for Kerr, it’s also comparing apples with satanic oranges.
Kerr’s comparison is rooted in 2021 polling from PRRI that measured belief in core tenets of QAnon. Only 21 percent of Republican respondents agreed with one of those tenets — but the tenet was “the government, media and financial world in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.” That’s what a fifth of Republicans agreed with. It should be a point of relief that the figure was lower than the percentage of Democrats who said that the idea the shooting was staged is “credible.”
A way we might view those PRRI poll numbers as less alarming is to consider that it’s much more common to be willing to claim to adhere to an extreme form of anti-elitism than it is to actually adhere to it. Some of those respondents offered agreement because they liked the idea of indicating how distasteful they found “the government, media and financial world.” Some of the Democrats who said the shooting conspiracy theory was credible likely said that because it expressed that they wouldn’t put such a thing past Trump and his allies.
The effort to draw a partisan contrast between QAnon and the shooting conspiracy theorists is hobbled in another significant way: A different conspiratorial perspective on the shooting is rampant on the right.
This is most obvious in the repeated pronouncements that “they” shot Trump. This was the reason that wrestler Hulk Hogan gave for agreeing to speak at the Republican convention during a Fox News interview on Friday morning, that “they tried to kill” the former president. The hosts, perhaps failing to even recognize Hogan’s framing as aberrant, didn’t ask him to explain how the sole shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, constituted a “they.”
Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) has given several interviews this week in which he not only refers to the attack as originating from a “they,” but also that the ability of the shooter to target Trump “seems intentional.” Not that the attack was staged, in other words, but that it was perhaps allowed to occur.
There were other rampant claims made about the shooter on the right, too: that he was antifa, for example (as promoted by One America News’s Chanel Rion) or that he was trans (which originated on the anonymous message board 4chan). The lack of an identified motivation on Crooks’s part — and the possibility that it wasn’t ideological at all — led to various efforts to fit the shooting into preexisting belief systems, even if that fit was clumsy or imprecise.
Researcher Kate Starbird of the University of Washington describes the confused aftermath of a major news story as a period of “collective sensemaking.” Our efforts to make these things make sense center on the frames through which we view the world.
“Frames help us give meaning to evidence. They shape how we interpret evidence, how we connect different pieces of evidence, and also which evidence we focus on and which evidence we leave out,” Starbird explained in an email to The Post. “Frames basically help us decide what the problem is, what caused it, and what might remedy it” — but they “also have a moral dimension.”
“[A]mplifying specific evidence may cause people to select one frame rather than another,” Starbird wrote. “For example, noting the party identification of the suspect might invoke a frame suggesting their motivations were political.”
Crooks was a registered Republican, which is one reason the application of the partisan frame has been so fraught.
There’s one more salient point when comparing the aftermath of the shooting to QAnon. The former occurred less than a week ago, as of this writing, and was even more recent when the poll was conducted. There remain numerous unresolved questions, meaning that it is easier to shift from “I don’t know” into “therefore, I think.” That’s not the case with QAnon. It wasn’t a response to a lack of information but an embrace of overtly bad information.
It’s easy to see why “the Democrats have their own QAnon” is appealing. It fits into a well-established existing frame for people on the right (for example, “they do bad stuff, too”).
But the primary parallel between “BlueAnon” and QAnon is that they rhyme. Beyond that, it’s a stretch.
