Nearly half of self-identified Democrats told pollsters they believe the July 2024 assassination attempt on President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, the one that left him bleeding on a rally stage with the world watching, was staged. Not exaggerated. Not misunderstood. Staged.
The finding comes from a YouGov survey of 1,000 American adults conducted from April 28 to May 4, as the Daily Caller reported. Forty-two percent of Democratic respondents said they believed the Butler shooting, carried out by would-be assassin Thomas Crooks, was fake. Only 7 percent of Republicans said the same.
That gap alone is striking. But the poll went further, asking about two additional attempts on Trump's life: Ryan Routh's September 2024 incident at Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach and the recent attempt by suspect Cole Allen at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in April. Among Democrats, 26 percent called the Routh incident staged, and 34 percent said the same of the WHCA dinner attempt, the attack that pushed Trump past a grim milestone of three assassination attempts against a sitting president.
The numbers get worse. Nearly a quarter of Democrats told the pollsters that all three attempts were hoaxes. Not one. Not two. All three.
The results were jarring enough that the polling outfit itself double-checked. The Washington Examiner reported that NewsGuard, which commissioned the YouGov survey, was so surprised by the findings that it asked YouGov to go back and recheck the data. YouGov confirmed the results.
"After we received these results from YouGov, we were so surprised by the survey findings that we asked YouGov to go back and recheck the data. They did so and confirmed their findings," NewsGuard said in an editorial note.
When the people running the poll can't believe what they're seeing, it's worth paying attention to what the numbers are actually saying about the state of the Democratic electorate.
The problem extends beyond the flat "staged" response. When pollsters combined respondents who called the events staged with those who said they were "not sure," majorities of Democrats questioned the reality of all three incidents: 53 percent for Butler, 56 percent for the WHCA dinner, and 52 percent for the golf course attempt. More than half of Democrats, in other words, either denied or couldn't bring themselves to affirm that real people tried to kill the president of the United States.
Independents showed their own skepticism, though at far lower levels. Twenty-one percent said the Butler shooting was staged. Twenty-three percent said the same of the WHCA dinner attempt. Fourteen percent doubted the golf course incident.
Among Republicans, the numbers were in the single digits for Butler and the golf course, 7 percent each, and 13 percent for the WHCA dinner attempt. The partisan gap is not subtle. It is a canyon.
This pattern of disbelief doesn't exist in a vacuum. It reflects a broader problem within the Democratic Party, a willingness to retreat into conspiracy rather than reckon with uncomfortable facts. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries recently struggled to explain why voters view Democrats so negatively. The poll numbers suggest at least part of the answer: a sizable chunk of the party's base has detached from verifiable reality when it comes to anything involving Donald Trump.
NewsGuard's own analysis noted how quickly the staged-shooting narrative spread after Butler. "Minutes after Secret Service escorted a bleeding Trump off the stage, social media lit up with claims that the shooting was staged," the organization observed. Thomas Crooks fired real rounds. A rallygoer died. Trump was struck. Yet the conspiracy theory took root instantly and, according to this poll, has only hardened with time.
Vince Coglianese, posting on X on May 11, put the finding bluntly:
"42 percent of Democrats believe the Butler, PA assassination attempt on President Trump was staged. This isn't a small group. Massive numbers of Democrat voters are living in a complete state of delusion."
It's a sharp statement. But when nearly half of one party's voters deny a documented, filmed, investigated assassination attempt, the word "delusion" starts to look like understatement.
The poll also surfaced alongside older data that adds context. A resurfaced survey from 2025 found that people with graduate degrees were nearly twice as likely to believe that "violence is often necessary to create social change" compared to those with basic college degrees or those who bypassed higher education altogether. Another 2025 poll found that an increasing number of young Americans believe political violence can be justified. And a separate survey showed that 55 percent of self-identified "left of center" Americans believed a Trump assassin would be "somewhat justified."
Read those numbers together. A majority of left-leaning Americans said an assassin targeting the president would be at least somewhat justified, and now 42 percent of Democrats say the real attempts didn't even happen. The logical knot is remarkable: some appear to condone political violence in theory while denying it occurred in practice.
This is not an isolated data point. It fits a pattern of Democratic leadership struggling to confront what their own base actually believes. Senator John Fetterman has warned his fellow Democrats that they cannot define themselves simply as the opposite of Trump. That warning looks more urgent by the week. When a party's identity is built almost entirely on opposition to one man, the incentive to deny anything that might generate sympathy for him, even an assassination attempt, becomes powerful.
The YouGov survey polled 1,000 Americans. Its exact margin of error and full methodology were not detailed in available reporting. Those are fair questions for anyone evaluating the precision of the topline numbers. But even with standard polling margins, the scale of the finding is hard to dismiss. This is not a fringe pocket. It is four in ten Democrats.
And the trend lines are moving in the wrong direction. The WHCA dinner attempt by Cole Allen was the most recent of the three incidents, and 34 percent of Democrats called it staged, a number that could climb as the conspiracy ecosystem processes it further. Allen's attempt occurred in April. The poll closed May 4. The narrative had barely a few weeks to marinate, and already a third of Democrats rejected it.
Meanwhile, voters in places like West Virginia are abandoning the Democratic Party by the thousands. The reasons are varied, but it's hard to imagine that the party's growing reputation for conspiratorial thinking and reflexive denial helps the cause.
Three assassination attempts on a sitting president. Three real suspects, Crooks, Routh, Allen, identified by name. Investigations conducted. A victim killed at Butler. And 42 percent of Democrats say the first one was a hoax.
No prominent Democratic leader has stepped forward to confront this finding or urge the party's base to accept documented facts. Jeffries has been too busy trading personal insults to address the rot underneath. The silence is its own kind of answer.
A political movement that cannot distinguish between what it wishes were true and what actually happened is a movement that has lost its footing. When the pollster has to ask the data firm to double-check because the results seem too disconnected from reality, the problem isn't the poll. It's the people answering it.
