On the night of April 25, 2026, shots were fired near the main security screening area of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Washington Hilton, the first such dinner Donald Trump attended as president. Trump, the first lady and Vice President JD Vance were evacuated. The suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, whose writings expressed anti-Trump views, was charged with attempting to assassinate the president.

Within minutes, posts calling it staged or a false flag spread across X, Bluesky and Instagram. “Staged” appeared in more than 300,000 posts on X by midday Sunday, and a Washington Post analysis found about one in five posts by left-leaning influencers called it a hoax. Some users claimed it was set up to build support for Trump’s planned White House ballroom.

The “evidence” didn’t hold. A clip of Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt saying shots would be fired that night, viewed more than 6 million times on X, was a joke about Trump’s speech. A Fox News reporter’s live call that cut off had dropped because of bad reception in the ballroom. A man seen holding a card near Trump turned out to be the mentalist Oz Pearlman, mid-trick. Russian state media amplified some of the theories, then removed some reports.

At her Monday briefing, Leavitt said the administration wanted to get facts out quickly to dispel the crazy nonsense. Similar false-flag claims followed the 2024 attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania. No evidence supports either.