It seems President Donald Trump is doing everything he can to move past the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, brushing off the growing wave of conspiracy theories and insisting there is nothing there.
But a resurfaced clip and a sequence of moments that are not lining up cleanly are starting to tell a different story, at least in the eyes of people watching closely.
The shooting happened Saturday night as Trump attended the event, when federal authorities say 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen charged a Secret Service checkpoint and fired one or two times before being taken into custody near a staircase leading to the ballroom. Agents returned fire but did not hit him.
On its face, the situation was contained quickly. But the reaction afterward is what is now drawing attention.
In an interview on CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” Trump dismissed theories about the shooting outright, calling those spreading them “more sick than they are con people,” before adding that there is “a lot of con in there too.” He claimed he had not even heard the theories yet and suggested he would probably see them in a few months.
He was also asked about past threats on his life, including earlier assassination attempts, but instead of addressing them directly, he pivoted into a string of sarcastic comparisons and never fully engaged the question.
Trump responded by saying, “October 7 didn’t happen, World War I didn’t happen, the Holocaust didn’t happen.”
That moment did not go unnoticed.
Online, critics quickly pointed to the gap between the seriousness of what happened and the way Trump chose to respond, while others began resurfacing older claims pushed by his orbit that were later proven false.
“Team Trump promoted the claim that China shipped in fake ballots during the 2020 election, leading supporters to search for bamboo fibers in Arizona’s ballot audit,” Bruce Crossing added.
Axios reports Trump has survived a total of three assassination attempts. One suspect, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, was shot and killed in Pennsylvania after a bullet grazed the president’s ear.
The other suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, is serving a life sentence after trying to kill the president while he played golf in West Palm Beach, Florida.
“WWII and the Holocaust definitely happened. Your ‘assassination attempts’ were staged,” commented @leahweir82 on Threads.
Then another piece surfaced.
A 2017 video from a Los Angeles ABC 7 segment began circulating, showing the suspect years earlier at a student innovation conference. In the clip, Allen is seen presenting an invention designed to help seniors.
View on Threads
But viewers quickly noticed someone else in the frame. A woman who looks like Usha Vance appears briefly in the video.
There is no confirmed connection between the two. None has been established by authorities. According to Newsweek, the conference featured in the video was held in March 2017, and Usha Vance was clerking for the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., during the same period, more than 2,500 miles away. She was also heavily pregnant at that time.
Florence Chung Wlodarski, the conference’s founder, told the publication she “can confirm that the woman in the video clip presenting is not Usha Vance, but I’d rather not reveal the real name of the person in the video, for privacy concerns.”
But the timing of that resurfaced footage, paired with what people had already noticed from the night of the shooting, pushed the conversation in a different direction.
A separate video from the dinner shows Vice President JD Vance being escorted out before the president.
“Either Vance wants to get rid of Trump (he was escorted out first), or Usha wants to get rid of Vance,” Mable Stewart commented on Facebook.
“I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but all these little things are beginning to give me a healthy dose of skepticism about ‘life,’” Nicola Lopez added on Facebook.
Trump himself added to that timeline when he later said he delayed leaving because he wanted to see what was happening, forcing agents to push harder to get him down and out of sight.
Trump told CBS News he was partially responsible for the delay.
“I wanted to see what was happening, and I wasn’t making it that easy for them,” he said. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me see, wait a minute.”
News18 reports that this forced agents to demand that the president and first lady “go down on the floor” and crawl out of sight.
Speculation that started as general skepticism began to narrow into something more specific, with some openly questioning whether the situation was simply chaotic or whether certain people were operating at a different level of awareness.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to shut that down when asked about the theories.
“Hopefully people will believe the truth rather than the lies and the conspiracies that so often do go crazy on social media,” she said.
There is still no evidence tying the suspect to the administration. Allen was arraigned on Monday in a Washington federal court on charges of attempting to assassinate Trump and two counts of firearms offenses. He remains jailed pending a detention hearing.
