On April 25, at the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) annual dinner at the Washington Hilton hotel, 31-year-old suspect Cole Tomas Allen rushed through security, armed with guns and knives, and fired shots during the event. President Donald Trump was quickly escorted out, along with other attendees at the gala. The suspect was immediately apprehended and brought into police custody.
Not long after, many news outlets were flooded with reports from journalists who were already at the event. But with the reports also came skepticism and conspiracy theories. Here’s a deep dive into the speculation surrounding this catastrophe.
To start, this is not the first time some have wondered if these attacks were staged. The assassination attempt on Trump on July 13, 2024, garnered a lot of speculation due to the investigation around the gunman and the shooting being “shut down.” Initially, it was the political left that expressed skepticism about the failed attempt. But more recently, there has been a trend in right-wing public figures revisiting the circumstances around the 2024 shooting with suspicion. Initially, Joe Kent, former director of NCTC, suggested that some in the Trump Administration may have been “in on it.“
Conservative commentator Candace Owens alleged on her podcast that the FBI is “corrupt,” and the government had involvement in the failed assassination. The former supporter of the president also criticized the government for not being transparent in their investigation. Marjorie Taylor Greene took to X conspiracizing a cover-up, Tucker Carlson accused the FBI of lying, and Tim Dillon, a comedian and former Trump supporter, called for Trump to admit that the assassination attempt was staged.
Almost coincidentally, these allegations were coming to a boiling point when the most recent assassination attempt happened. That, in part, explains why people were so quick to call it a staged event. There are many reasons why people think the Trump administration would plan an assassination. Some think the most recent attempt was made to distract Americans from the Iran war, which has a low approval rate among citizens, or perhaps to distract from Trump’s own sinking approval rating.
Another suspicion surrounds the White House ballroom. In the fall of 2025, the East Wing of the White House was shut down and demolished to make space for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom. This prompted backlash, as millions of taxpayer dollars would be spent in the process. Not long after the Saturday shooting, Trump took to social media and the press to further endorse the construction of the “Military Top Secret Ballroom,” using the Saturday shooting as an example of why it’s necessary. This fuels the theory that the shooting was staged to get Congress and the public to approve of the construction of the ballroom.
In a 60 Minutes interview, when Trump was asked about the conspiracies, he expressed that the theories came much faster than expected, not before likening the theories to those of 9/11, WWII, and the Holocaust. Regardless of whether these conspiracies hold any weight, the speed at which they have emerged and the fact that they exist on both political sides make one wonder whether anything will come from them.