We both think he staged shooting plots

Wild Mother – the online alias of a woman called Desirée – lives in the mountains of Colorado, where she posts videos to 80,000 followers about holistic wellness and bringing up her little girl. She wants Donald Trump to win the presidential election.

About 70 miles north in the suburbs of Denver is Camille, a passionate supporter of racial and gender equality who lives with a gaggle of rescue dogs and has voted Democrat for the past 15 years.

The two women are poles apart politically – but they both believe assassination attempts against Mr Trump were staged.

Their views on the shooting in July and the apparent foiled plot earlier this month were shaped by different social media posts pushed to their feeds, they both say.

I travelled to Colorado – which became a hotbed of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen – for the BBC Radio 4 podcast Why Do You Hate Me? USA. I wanted to understand why these evidence-free staged assassination theories seemed to have spread so far across the political spectrum and the consequences for people like Camille and Wild Mother.

Dozens of evidence-free posts I found suggesting both incidents were staged have racked up more than 30 million views on X. Some of these posts came from anti-Trump accounts that did not seem to have a track record of sharing theories like this, while a smaller share were posted by some of the former president’s supporters.

For Democrat Camille, Trump’s team orchestrated this to boost his chances of winning the election.

Wild Mother – who already follows QAnon, the unfounded conspiracy theory which claims Donald Trump is involved in a secret war against an elite cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles – wants to believe Trump’s own team staged the attack in order to frame his supposed enemies in the “Deep State”.

The Deep State is claimed to be a shadowy coalition of security and intelligence services looking to thwart certain politicians.

There is no evidence to support either of the women’s theories.

The idea that news events have been staged to manipulate the public is a classic trope in the conspiracy theory playbook. Wild Mother says she is no stranger to this alternative way of thinking.

Camille, however, says this is the first time she has ever used the word “staged” about an event in the news like this. She always believed Covid-19 was real and she was extremely opposed to false claims the 2020 election had been rigged.

But on 13 July this year, when she was sitting in front of her TV at home watching live as Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, she says she immediately thought: “Oh, that’s staged.”

The way Donald Trump was able to pose for a photo and raise his fist in the air was what ignited Camille’s suspicions.

She had questions about how the US Secret Service allowed the shooting to happen in the first place. The director of the service has since resigned over failings that day.

The shooter was a 20-year-old called Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by Secret Service snipers. His motives remain unknown – which left many questions wide open. And so Camille’s thoughts continued to spiral.

Already sceptical that something did not add up, Camille turned to X for more answers. In the years before the shooting, she had already started spending more and more time on the social media site, formerly known as Twitter. She had taken an interest in pro-Democrat anti-Trump accounts and followed some of them.

“I would admit to you that I spend too much time on social media now, and it, in my mind, is kind of a problem,” she tells me.

Recent changes to how X’s “For You” feed works meant she started seeing more posts from accounts she does not follow, but that pushed ideas in line with her political views. Lots of these accounts had also purchased blue ticks on the site, which give their posts more prominence.

So when the first assassination attempt happened, unfounded conspiracy theories suggesting it had been staged were not only recommended directly to her feed – but were all the more convincing as they came from other profiles with the same political views she holds about Donald Trump.

Most of the social media companies say they have guidelines to protect users and reduce harmful content. X did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Why Do You Hate Me? USA – Episode one

Marianna Spring travels from Colorado to Baltimore and New York to uncover how social media is shaping the Presidential race. It’s social media’s world and the election is just living in it.

Listen on BBC Sounds.

Wild Mother had also turned to social media to find her tribe – having been called “a weirdo, an alien, a diamond in the rough” offline – and has built a following of thousands.

As we stand chatting in a waterfall in the small town she calls home, she explains how she began sharing her views on natural medicine and motherhood in 2021.

Then she started posting unproven theories about what was happening behind the headlines – such as on the Princess of Wales’ health or the Baltimore bridge collapse earlier this year – and saw her views and likes rack up.

She says she has been immersed in what she calls this “alternative idea about reality” from a young age and believes we have been lied to about what really happened when John F Kennedy was assassinated in the 1960s, when 9/11 happened in 2001, and during the Covid-19 pandemic.

She started to like Trump when she began spending more time online during the pandemic and became exposed to the QAnon movement, which she believes could be linking all these events. As a mum, she was especially concerned about allegations around child abuse and trafficking its supporters often talk about.

“I would never in my life even imagine some of the stuff that I’ve had to hear is going on right now, under our noses. And it blows my mind. We have to be able to protect our most innocent,” Wild Mother says.

QAnon supporters were among the crowd that stormed the US Capitol building on 6 January, 2021, in a violent protest against Joe Biden’s election victory. Now Wild Mother wants to believe the idea she has seen on social media that they might have been involved somehow in staging Trump’s shooting in July – in order to frame the Deep State.

But Wild Mother says, according to the posts she has seen online, “good guys in the military”, known as White Hats, had been doing covert operations to counter the Deep State. And one theory that popped up on her feed claimed the July assassination attempt was staged by them to show the public the threat Trump is under.

Wild Mother doesn’t claim to know for sure if the QAnon theory is true – but she does know what she wants to believe.

“I think our country needs rescuing from our government right now. It’s a horrible mess. A horrible mess,” she says.

Once Wild Mother started to question whether a news event could have been staged, it seemed as though any of them could be.

“It’s like going to a magic show as a kid and then that you find out for the first time that the magician is pulling one over on you. Now, every time you go to a magic show, you know what they’re doing,” she tells me.

As both Camille and Wild Mother came to rely more on social media, the beliefs they picked up contributed to a fracturing of their relationships in the real world.

Camille finds it hard to have conversations with some of her close family who support Trump, while Wild Mother says it played a part in her separating from her now ex-husband, who she says strongly opposed conspiracy theories.

“Does it make it difficult? Yes. Did it create a wedge? Was it possibly one of the things that ended my marriage? Maybe,” Wild Mother says.

Meanwhile, Camille also found herself embroiled in arguments on X which left her with her guard up in the real world, too. “It’s a little scary because I feel like every time I leave the house, it’s a potential for conflict,” she says.

This atmosphere of suspicion and conflict doesn’t just have consequences for these women’s personal lives – but for society too.

Officials, election workers – and politicians around the USA have found themselves subject to hate and threats as a consequence of this wider belief that almost anything and everything – including elections – is being rigged and staged.

For Wild Mother, people are “walking a really fine line” between seeking justice and harmful behaviour.

“It’s not writing your senators and calling them racist names. But if you were somebody who truly did your research and found that there was an issue, do I agree that you should use your voice? Absolutely,” she says.

“I think that we all have ways of doing that. For them, it just so happens to be harassing people.”

While Wild Mother and Camille say they have never threatened anyone themselves – and strike me as empathetic, kind people – the mistrust fostered in part by their social media feeds has eroded their faith in society and its institutions.

Camille, who was so opposed conspiracy theories, now finds herself using the language of them.

She appears to be one of many recruited into this way of thinking – by July’s assassination attempt and the social media algorithms drawing people deeper into an online world detached from reality.