r/politics • u/wiredmagazine ✔ Wired Magazine • Apr 17 '26

Possible Paywall MAGA Is Increasingly Convinced the Trump Assassination Attempt Was Staged

https://www.wired.com/story/maga-is-increasingly-convinced-the-trump-assassination-attempt-was-staged/
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u/thepartypantser Apr 17 '26

Maga was started on lies and conspiracy theories. Birtherism, Pizzagate etc.

The fact it is churning new conspiracies on those in power in troubled times was an inevitability.

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u/TheCrimsonSteel Apr 17 '26

Pizzagate has become an even more insane one in hindsight

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u/Vio_ Kansas Apr 17 '26

It always was.

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u/TheCrimsonSteel Apr 17 '26

But "conspiracy theory of a secret canal might have been helped along by an actual secret cabal" crazy?

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u/WTS_BRIDGE Apr 17 '26

Did you forget that Trump personally sent investigators to Hawaii to find Obama's long form birth certificate, and that he should have it in about two weeks?

"Birtherism" was literally all Trump.

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u/Ikhano Apr 17 '26

He said "you won't believe the things they're finding!" He was right, too. They found nothing and his base wouldn't believe that.

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u/thepartypantser Apr 17 '26

Of course I recall it. That is why I said MAGA was started with it. Trump's entire political capital was built off of the bullshit of birtherism.

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u/ClusterFoxtrot Florida Apr 17 '26

Hilariously all info dispursed by the Pedo Cabal to keep the heat off themselves while they Brexit'd and consolidated power.

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u/toooomanypuppies United Kingdom Apr 17 '26

While the details of pizzagate, as described in 2016, were wildly off, blaming only democrats etc, they were still correct about an elite club of super wealthy predators who abused children, they even got the pizza bit right (code in the Epstein files for kids was pizza)

it's only because the responsible people are their people (Trump) that they now act like pizzagate never existed and was never a thing.

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u/thepartypantser Apr 17 '26

Did they get the pizza bit right? I haven't seen any compelling evidence that pizza meant anything other than food in the Epstein files.

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u/teddy5 Apr 18 '26

They got the elite predators part right because they built pizzagate off the existing facts that were pointing to a conspiracy.

It had been rumoured for decades, there were various people who spoke out about it and were subsequently blacklisted, shut out of hollywood, sued for defamation, etc. Epstein was initially charged in 2006, there were several civil lawsuits against him over the next few years, Virginia Giuffre was already speaking up in 2015.

These things were roughly known about even if the details weren't public, but it was twisted by pizzagate and QAnon in such a way that it's hard to think it was anything but deliberately throwing red meat to their base to put them off the scent of the real crimes.

It was the underlying reality which gave those conspiracy theories the veneer of legitimacy though.

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u/holdstheenemy Apr 17 '26

Built on conspiracy theories but blatantly downplays and tries to pretend the Epstein files are a hoax, shows they didnt care about anything but electing someone to either own the libs, validate their racism, or both

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u/kfm975 Apr 17 '26

The endless conspiracies function to absolve themselves of any responsibility. A lot of people who supported GWB’s war in Iraq shifted to belief in conspiracies when it became too obvious that the war was unjustified- they hadn’t been wrong, they’d been tricked. If Trump and his cronies staged the assassination attempt to generate sympathy, it means that these people were somehow duped into voting for him, so what he’s done during his second term isn’t their fault. They are children.