The Secret Service just detained a gunman named Cole Allen after shots were fired at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, April 25, 2026. But within hours, the real story online wasn’t about the arrest — it was whether the whole thing was a setup to give a struggling president a poll boost.
The moment the first reports hit social media, conspiracy theories exploded. According to NYT, by midday Sunday, the word “staged” had appeared in over 300,000 posts on X alone. Some of those posts pushed the idea that the attack was a manufactured distraction from sinking approval numbers or the unpopular war with Iran. Others flat-out denied anything had happened. A smaller number of users tried to debunk the rumors, but their corrections got far less attention.
