By Donie O’Sullivan, CNN
(CNN) — No sooner had a gunman tried to storm the ballroom of the Washington Hilton, where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was taking place Saturday night, than social media was awash with conspiracy theories about what was still unfolding in real time.
From the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore in 2024 to the LA fires last year, just about every major national breaking news story in the United States today becomes instant fodder for online conspiracy theorists who are often seeking to blame events on their perceived political opponents.
Some of the best-known journalists in the country were gathered in the Hilton ballroom on Saturday night and immediately got to work establishing the facts of what had happened.
But immediately — before anything was known about the suspect and his motives — the word “staged” started to emerge as a trend across social media platforms.
A clip of an innocuous comment White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt made to Fox News as she walked into the event quickly began circulating online.
Speeches delivered by presidents at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner have traditionally been humorous, with the commander in chief normally making jokes at the expense of the media and himself.
Saturday was due to be Trump’s first time addressing the dinner as president, and when asked by Fox News what the audience should expect, Leavitt said, “It’ll be funny, it’ll be entertaining. There will be some shots fired tonight in the room. So everyone should tune in, it’s going to be really great. I am looking forward to hearing it.”
Leavitt’s “shots fired” remark, clearly a reference to jokes and jabs in Trump’s planned speech, suddenly and absurdly prompted suspicion. One version of the clip on X was posted less than 45 minutes after the shots were fired and has been viewed more than 6 million times — with many people sharing it as though it were evidence of something.
In a press conference held late Saturday night, Trump said the attack showed the need for a secure ballroom. Trump is controversially building a ballroom on the White House complex. Some social media users began baselessly to suggest the attack had been staged for this reason.
A second Fox News clip also became the subject of viral speculation.
Like many TV news reporters on Saturday, Aishah Hasnie, one of the network’s White House correspondents, reported live by telephone from the ballroom, sharing her firsthand experience of what had taken place.
Her phone line cut out halfway through her account of how earlier in the night press secretary Leavitt’s husband, who Hasnie was seated next to at the dinner, was talking about the importance of her taking safety precautions given her high-profile cable news job.
Some people began to speculate that Fox News had deliberately cut the phone call short.
“I don’t want to be fomenting conspiracies. But I mean … this was super weird. Super weird,” Angelo Carusone wrote while sharing the clip to his 32,000 followers on BlueSky. Carusone is the CEO of Media Matters, a left-leaning media watchdog that regularly calls out misinformation shared by Republicans.
Responding to the speculation, Hasnie later posted on X, “Our calls were dropping, because there is barely any service in that ballroom. To finish the story, he was telling me to be careful with my own safety because the world