It took mere minutes for unsubstantiated theories to take over.
“Joe Biden sent the orders” was the first thing Representative Mike Collins of Georgia posted following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump yesterday. To clarify that he was not being hyperbolic, Collins followed up by saying that Biden should be charged with “inciting an assassination.”
Collins was one of the highest-profile people to boost a conspiracy theory almost immediately after a gunman fired eight shots during a Trump rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania, yesterday afternoon—but he was far from the only one (and not even the sole member of Congress). Within moments of the shooting, some Trump supporters started speculating online about the Secret Service’s complicity. “To deny that something is fishy here is to be willfully blind,” one Instagram meme account with more than 800,000 followers posted in a caption underneath a picture of the grounds where the rally was held.
