A new YouGov poll commissioned by NewsGuard just dropped, and the results are exactly as deranged as you'd expect: 42% of Democrats believe the July 2024 assassination attempt on President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania — the one where a bullet literally grazed his ear on live television in front of millions of people — was staged. Fake. A performance. A prop show for the cameras.

You read that correctly. Four out of ten Democrats looked at a man bleeding from a gunshot wound, a dead rally-goer, and a 20-year-old shooter with a rifle on a rooftop, and thought, "Nah, that's not real."

Let's walk through what these people are claiming didn't happen. On July 13, 2024, Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The bullet came within inches of killing the President of the United States. It grazed his ear. Blood ran down his face. He stood up, pumped his fist, and said "Fight." And a man named Corey Comperatore — a firefighter, a father, a guy who showed up to a political rally because he loved his country — threw himself over his family and died.

But sure. Staged.

The poll surveyed 1,000 Americans between April 28 and May 4, 2026, and the party breakdown tells you everything you need to know about where the real conspiracy theorists live. Among Republicans, just 7% thought Butler was staged. Independents came in at 21%. Democrats? Forty-two percent. Six times the Republican number. These are the same people who spent four years screaming that questioning election integrity was a "threat to democracy" and an attack on "our institutions."

And it wasn't just Butler. The poll asked about all three assassination attempts on President Trump over the past two years. For the September 2024 attempt — when Ryan Routh camped out at Trump's West Palm Beach golf course with a rifle and was stopped by Secret Service — 26% of Democrats called that staged too. For the April 2026 White House Correspondents' Dinner attempt, 34% of Democrats said fake.

Across all three attempts, 54% of Americans said either they believed at least one was staged or they "weren't sure." Only 38% said all three were authentic. Let that sink in. A majority of this country either believes or can't rule out that multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president were theater.

But it's the 42% number from Democrats on Butler that should make your blood boil. Corey Comperatore is dead. His wife is a widow. His daughters don't have a father. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's a casket in the ground.

As the Daily Caller reported, the poll — conducted by YouGov, one of the most widely cited polling firms in the country — shows that the "conspiracy theory" problem in American politics isn't where the media keeps telling you it is. They spent years building a narrative that MAGA voters are the tinfoil-hat crowd, the QAnon weirdos, the people who believe things without evidence. Meanwhile, 42% of their own base thinks a man faked getting shot in the head on live television.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has pointed out for years that Democrats live in an information bubble so sealed off from reality that they can convince themselves of almost anything. This poll is Exhibit A. When you marinate in a media ecosystem that told you for three years that Russian collusion was real, that the Hunter Biden laptop was fake, and that the border was secure — yeah, eventually you'll believe a bullet was a prop.

Here's the thing that really grinds my gears. If 42% of Republicans said a Democratic president's assassination attempt was staged, it would be the lead story on every network for a month. There would be congressional hearings. There would be a Netflix documentary. "Experts" would be on CNN explaining how this proves right-wing radicalization is the greatest threat to the republic.

But when Democrats do it? Crickets. A YouGov poll drops showing nearly half of one major party thinks a confirmed, documented, on-camera assassination attempt was fake — and the mainstream media treats it like a curiosity, not an indictment.

Thirty percent of all Americans think at least one attempt on President Trump's life was staged. That's not a fringe. That's a movement. And it's being fed by the same media outlets that call us the misinformation problem.

Corey Comperatore didn't die for a stunt. He died because a lunatic with a rifle decided to kill the president and missed by two inches. Anyone who calls that "staged" owes his family an apology they'll never have the decency to give.